Two Ladies: Margaret and Catwoman

beedle-dee-deedle-dee-dee ♬

Margaret. Last night I was having a conversation with a reader and he asked me if I thought that Margaret, that long-delayed Kenneth Lonergan film about a traumatized young Manhattanite (Anna Paquin) was going to have any impact on the Oscar Race. I told him I'd been answering that question annually for the past five years. Each year the question feels weirder and weirder. If you're new to movie fanaticism, here's a good rundown of the timeline and the things that went wrong in getting the movie into theaters. 

Here's Matt Damon and Anna Paquin on set... in... wait for it... 2005. Matt was still a thirtysomething and Anna wasn't yet SOOKIIIIIIEEE. 

on the set of Margaret

As to the Oscar question, truthfully I care not a smidgeon. I just want to see it. It's been drifting, transparent, like a ghost in our peripheral vision for years. I don't even what to see a critic's screening. I want to buy a ticket, sit in the theater holding it, come home and frame it with the inscription:

THIS REALLY HAPPENED!"

The press release I received yesterday morning said September 30th but until the day I'm holding that ticket stub it will remain an ectoplasmic dream.

Catwoman. The Dark Knight Rises has released its second official character image (the first was of Tom Hardy's hunched back) and it's Our Miss Hathaway as Cyclops Catwoman riding a very Nolan-esque wild hog. He sure likes those dunebuggy big wheels. 

I love Hathaway. I love Catwoman. But my inner child is not okay with either of them stealing Batgirl's motorycle mojo, you know?

I had...uh... this friend... yeah, a friend... who used to pretend to be Batgirl while riding on the back of his dad's motorcycle. This...uh... friend was smart enough to not share this fantasy out loud with my dad his dad but it was a pretty regular occurence. Like, every time he hopped on the motorcycle!

Don't judge.

und i'm the only man. ja ♬

Purrfect Anne Hathaway Has Big Stilettos To Fill.

A horror movie serial is opening (at least) every month all over the internet for the next 18 months. It's called News and Rumors and Collective Freakouts Concerning Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. With each new chapter the internet will shiver and tremble, cry out or shake with alarm, fury, disbelief, fear and finally cathartic release. The latest chapter involves two official casting reveals from Nolan himself. The first is that Inception's Tom Hardy will be playing the grotesquely muscular "Bane" (who we last saw onscreen in the fiasco Batman & Robin, 1997) and the second is that Anne Hathaway, she of the backless gowns and "look at me, I'm fabulous!" nakedity in Love and Other Drugs, will be playing Selina Kyle. Selina is, rather famously, Catwoman's alter ego but given Nolan's two previous Batman films we have no indication that we'll actually get Selina as Catwoman, just that we're getting Selina. 

Julie Newmar (the first Catwoman) | Anne Hathaway (the latest)

Remember when Sam Raimi kept setting up Dylan Baker to play The Lizard in his Spider-Man trilogy and never delivered?

I'd say the most we can hope for is that Anne gets to let her bitchy freak side fly a bit. Rachel Getting Married minus the babbling and the "L'Haim!"s divided by Get Smart physicality? She'll probably use a weapon at some point but sadly, it'll probably be a plain ol' gun and not sewing machine claws. What I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't exactly expect her to have nine mystical lives or suit up and throwdown with Christian Bale with pithy one liners and claws out. Maybe she'll get a whip if we're lucky. Nolan likes his female characters as dangerous window dressing or as damsels in distress and on either front Hathaway will be terrific. Or at least more terrific than previous Nolan women.

Believe it or not I don't consider the role too sacred to be recreated. (Someone will reinterpret The Joker before too long, too, even though everyone currently thinks that that'll never happen. It always happens. Trust.) Superheroes and Villians are just from that school of roles that are meant to be constantly reinterpreted, like uh.. .Shakespearean protagonists! Not that the birth of any new feline fatale will ever measure up to Michelle Pfeiffer and that snowy alley with pussies galore.

We'll always hear her roar.