The best part of the Catwoman DVD that I rented the other day was the special feature titled “The Many Faces of Catwoman.”

As for the movie itself… believe the reviews. It sucked way more than I expected. I honestly assumed all of the negativity came from obsessed comic fans who felt the movie wasn’t true to the original vision of Catwoman or too campy or too serious or who knows what. For the record, I actually didn’t hate Batman Forever or even Batman & Robin and figured that similar criticism was aimed at all three movies. That certainly wasn’t the case. Catwoman just plain sucked. Read any of the reviews for Catwoman for more information on that. (I guess I could be thankful that reading about the film on Wiki introduced me to the Films Considered the Worst Ever page.)

But Catwoman the film aside, “The Many Faces of Catwoman” was great. The documentary basically goes through every actress who played Catwoman (Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, Eartha Kitt, Adrienne Barbeau [voice of Catwoman from Batman: The Animated Series], Michelle Pfeiffer, and Halle Berry) and features original interviews with all but Pfeiffer. It also goes into the history of Catwoman from a comic book perspective and traces her evolution (apparently no comic book character has changed her look so many times).

While the documentary wasn’t groundbreaking or life-changing, it did make the stupid DVD worthwhile and if you happen to accidently rent it or are forced to or who knows what, at least check it out so you get some good out of the DVD.

One of the ways in which Darwin’s work has been (mis?)interpreted is that the stonger/better species will evolve while the lesser/weaker species will go extinct (i.e. natural selection). This idea has been somewhat perverted and combined with economic theory to come up with the whole survival of the fittest justification that has been used to especially stigmatize and deny help for poor and oppressed people around the world throughout history. Basically, survival of the fittest says that one’s surroundings and external forces have little or no effect on one’s success in life and that one’s perservarane and hard work is what gets them ahead and out of trouble.

The documentary Darwin’s Nightmare takes an extreme case of Darwin’s theory of natrual selection and explores the way it affects not just the surviving species, but the entire world (in a way).

There are too many details for me to really go into the documentary in-depth, but what I really liked about it was that the documentary didn’t really place any “blame” for the current situation in Tanzania. Some might fault the documentary for this — what would the point be without telling us what we can do? But I usually feel that understanding the complexity of an issue is much more important than finding a quick, simple solution.