Michelle Pfeiffer was the Best Catwoman

            On Monday morning when I got up the streets were covered in snow.

            I guess it’s possible that the old guy in the silver-grey car that’s always driving slowly past the donut shop on some mornings and then making u-turns could be a private detective. I think most of their work consists of watching people that are making insurance claims and trying to catch them out and about, so that might explain the guy always rubbernecking the Coffeetime.

I spent a lot of Monday writing my review of the Black Panther movie.
            I was finished at around 17:30 and thought about popping out to the supermarket but it was raining hard. I looked out the window and there was a line-up of people with umbrellas in front of the liquor store stretched to the end of the block, waiting to get New Years booze at the last minute. Why don’t people plan ahead? There was no line-up on Saturday.

            A few minutes later there was no line-up and the LCBO was still open, so I guess it was just a dinner hour moment with people in a rush to get something to take somewhere by a certain time. Or maybe they thought that the liquor store was closing at 18:00 like it used to.

            I had an early beer that night while doing a late kitchen clean up. I cleaned the top of my stove a lot more thoroughly than usual but it would take a lot more work to get the black stains off around the rims of the elements. I also cleaned my kitchen sink a lot better than usual.

            I weighed myself and found that I was 95 kilos even, which meant I’d gained two kilos since Friday, but that seemed like a lot. An hour later I tried it again and my weight was 93.9 so obviously something was off either in the scale or how I stand on it. I tried it several times and the most consistent reading is 93.9. I have to stand dead centre and get my weight evenly balanced before it finishes calculating.  If I weighed myself right on Friday it still means I’ve gained 800 grams.

            That night I had another beer with some turkey and dressing while watching Ant Man and the Wasp.

            Spoiler alert!
            Scott Lang is under house arrest and wearing an ankle bracelet because of his part in participating in the superhero civil war instigated by Captain America. Since he can’t leave the property, whenever his daughter comes to visit he uses cardboard and various other ordinary things to innovatively turn his home into an elaborate Tomb Raider type adventure playground complete with a very long escape slide from the top of the house to the back yard.  Unfortunately when they land his ankle bracelet sticks outside the fence and so the police come to do an elaborate search of his place.

            Scott has a very vivid dream about Hank Pym’s wife Janet Van Dyne in which he sees her playing hide and seek with her daughter Hope when she was small. He calls Hank and leaves a message about it even though they have been out of touch for several months. A little later Scott feels a sting on his neck and falls unconscious. He wakes up in a car that Hope is driving. She takes him to Hank and they question him about the dream. The details are so close to the reality of Hope’s childhood that they conclude that when Scott was in the Quantum Zone he connected with Janet who has been lost there for years. Many years ago when she and Hank had been the Wasp and Ant Man they were trying to stop a missile and Janet had to go sub-molecular to get inside. She managed to disconnect the detonator but she kept shrinking and was lost. The fact that Scott has connected with Janet and the fact that Scott has returned from the quantum zone gives Hank and his daughter hope that she can be rescued.

            Hank has built a tunnel to the Quantum Zone but he needs one more component, which he and Hope have arranged to purchase on the black market from a shifty dealer named Sonny. They shrink their lab building down to the size of a suitcase, load it into the van and Hope brings the money to Sonny in his restaurant. He refuses to give her the component unless she and Hank go into business with him. When she turns him down he says he will keep both the component and the money. Hope walks away but comes back as the Wasp and begins to kick the asses of Sonny’s gang.

Hope begins to leave with the component when she is attacked by The Ghost. The Ghost has the ability to faze in and out of solidity and she is getting the best of Hope. Hank happens to have an experimental Ant-Man suit in the van and so Scott puts it on but when he goes in, the ghost gets away with the component. When Scott and Hope come out they find that the Ghost has stolen the lab from Hank.

Scott is starting a security consulting business called X-Con with his former cellmates. He takes Hank and Hope to their office while they plan their next move. They go Bill Foster to an old Shield colleague of Hank’s who might have equipment they can use to track the Ghost. Bill Foster is played by Cowboy Curtis.

                        

It turns out that Foster used to be Black Goliath in a comic that only ran for five issues in 1976. Dr. Foster first appeared though in the Avengers in 1966 and he first showed up as Black Goliath in 1975 in the Luke Cage Power Man comics. Foster says they could maybe track the ghost with a defractor but Hank says that he eliminated defractors when he upgraded the suits. Scott confesses that he didn’t destroy his old suit. The problem is that he hid the old suit in a “world’s greatest grandma” trophy that his daughter gave him for Fathers Day and she took it to school for show and tell. While trying to retrieve it his experimental suit malfunctions and he has to go into her school stuck at the size of a five year old.

They track the Ghost to her hideout and find her sleeping in a special chamber. They try to take the lab but she wakes up and knocks them both out. When they come to they are tied to chairs and Foster is with the Ghost. She says her name is Ava and tells her story. Her father was a scientist named Elias Starr (in the original Ant-Man comics he was a villain named Egghead) who got fired by Hank and tried to continue his quantum experiments on his own. There was an explosion and Ava ran to him. Both her parents died and she was afflicted with molecular disequilibrium. Every cell in her body is torn apart and stitched back together over and over. She was adopted by SHIELD and they built the suit to help her control her abilities but they trained her as a weapon and used her to steal and kill. Foster built her the chamber to slow her decay but she is dying. They want to find Janet and extract the quantum energy that she’s been absorbing to repair Ava. Suddenly Hank is having a heart attack and he tells Foster to get his pills from an Altoid tin on the table. When Foster opens it several ants burst out and grow to giant size. They release Scott, Hope and Hank. They disable Ava and Foster, grab the component and the lab and run.

Meanwhile Sonny shows up with his men at the X-Con office and gives Luis truth serum to find out where Scott is. The funny thing is that Luis thinks it’s really cool to be given truth serum. He babbles like crazy about whatever pops into his head until he finally tells them where Scott is. The Ghost arrives there just as he gives out that information.

Back at the lab Scott is suddenly taken over by Janet’s mind so he can fix the algorithm in the quantum tunnel. It’s really a horrible performance and it just looks like he’s trying to imitate a stereotype of a gay person. She gives her exact coordinates before Scott comes to and finds himself holding hands with Hank.

Scott finds out that the feds are coming to his house and so he has to go home. But the feds also come to the lab and Hank and Hope are arrested. Scott busts them out of FBI headquarters.

Hank takes a specially made small ship into the Quantum Zone where he finds Michelle Pfeiffer.

There is a car chase with Sonny and the Ghost in pursuit of Hope and the lab. She uses a lot of shrinking and re-growing to avoid them. Scott is dealing with a malfunctioning suit and gets stuck as a giant. Sonny gets the lab and now Hope is chasing him. Near the ocean Scott shrinks and calls for a flying ant to help him but each time one approaches a seagull eats it. Sonny tries to escape on the ferry with the lab but Scott grows 100 meters high and takes the lab back.

Hank and Michelle Pfeiffer are returning from the Quantum Zone. The Ghost tries to extract energy from Catwoman but Ant-Man and the Wasp arrive to fight her. The vehicle strikes Ava as it emerges from the tunnel. When Michelle Pfeiffer steps out she senses Ava’s pain and uses some of the power she acquired in the quantum zone to stabilize her.

When the police arrive outside the lab they find that Luis and Scott’s other partners have apprehended Sonny and his men and given them truth serum. They can’t stop confessing to their crimes.

The Ghost escapes and Cowboy Curtis helps her.

This story seems to take place just before the Infinity War. The final scene takes place at the end when Thanos turns half the people in the world into dust. Hank and Catwoman send Scott into the Quantum Zone to collect energy to help Ava but communication goes dead. We see Scott stuck in the Quantum Zone while Michelle Pfeiffer and Hank have turned to dust. This is how Ant-Man survives Thanos’s attack.

Canadian actor Evangeline Lilly plays the Wasp.

The Ghost was a male character in the original comics and an enemy of Iron Man. The suit gave him his abilities rather than helped control them. This version is much better. She is played by Hannah John-Kamen, who was Ornela in Game of Thrones.