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I’ve never seen the play Cats, but I know the concept and I’ve heard the songs. Halle and I rushed to see the movie before it vanished from theatres, on the theory that a CATastrophe like this may come but once in a lifetime.
Regrettably, we did not see the original version. We saw the one that was “fixed” so now all the cats have human hands. All the moments where they make gestures on the clear assumption that their hands will be CG’d into paws look incredibly bizarre. We saw it with a very small audience that did not react much, except when a small child ran madly out of the theatre with a parent in hot pursuit. Neither of them returned.
I brought a canned mango margarita, which was a good choice. I think weed would have been an even better one. This was a stoner movie if I ever saw one, a movie made for murmurs of “Whoa” and lengthy fits of hysterical laughter. And now that I have seen Rebel Wilson unzip her cat suit, step out wearing another cat suit which is wearing a bikini, display her tiny cabaret in which she forces slave mice with CG’d child faces to perform, and then bring out a parade of cockroaches which are chorus girls with CG roach wings wearing Star Trek swim caps with antennae attached, make them march upside down on the underside of a table, and then graphically crunch them between her teeth and eat them, I feel that I have no need to ever take LSD.
The story, such as it is, begins when a white spotted cat named Victoria gets abandoned in a sack and found by the Jellicle Cats. They explain that they all want to be taken to the Heaviside Layer, which is Heaven, but only one can be chosen. They audition by singing. That’s when Rebel Wilson unzips herself and a bunch of chorus dancing cockroaches spin around on a strawberry cake and also there’s a lot of fat jokes. Macavity (Idris Elba in a flasher coat and glowing CG green eyes) vaporizes her to get rid of the competition and she materializes on a ship in the middle of the Thames.
This scene repeats about six times: a cat sings, then Macavity vaporizes them and they materialize on his boat. No one seems at all bothered by this until he vaporizes Judi Dench. Judi Dench has CG cat fur AND a giant fur coat the same color as her cat fur, so it looks like she made a coat out of her own clone, Buffalo Bill-style. A cat rubs against her and it is so creepy.
A lot of the movie seemed weirdly sexual, especially since some cats wore clothes, which made the ones who didn’t seem naked and the ones who only wore shirts to seem to be naked from the waist down. Every time a clothed cat disrobes, which occurs frequently, it not only makes them seem naked, it makes all the cats seem naked.
Ian McKellen has perhaps the most bizarre performance in the entire movie. It starts with him assiduously licking a shelf and just goes on from there. He defeats the bad guy by shouting “Feefiddlefuzzle!” and I was still having hysterics ten minutes later.
The play is infamous for having virtually no plot and for what plot there is to be nonsensical. However, the same can be said about some ballets. If you’re basically there for singing and dancing, you don’t necessarily need a plot. Movies, however, typically do add plot when adapting plotless materials. It’s not inherently a problem that this movie doesn’t, but it makes zero effort to consider that what works onstage may not work onscreen.
The movie is full of random cuts to new locations, which were probably done onstage with set or light changes and worked fine, but in the movie feel like the characters teleported. It also uses the same location, a street corner, about a bazillion times for no reason. Onstage the reason is that it’s the main set; in a movie, there’s no clear reason and it seems weird.
Which, of course, is not even close to being the weirdest thing about this movie. Onstage, people wearing cat suits and cat makeup and dancing is at worst cheesy and at best fun. If they’d just done this for the movie, it would have been a huge improvement over what they actually did, which was to CG fur and cat parts on to actors in bodysuits. If you’ve seen photos, you can get some sense of just how Uncanny Valley this is, but having it in motion makes it so much worse. There’s a grey cat who introduces a bunch of cats, and every time he turned around so you get a look at his pasted-on-yay face head-on, I recoiled back into my seat.
The tails are CG animated and move like dancing cobras, not cat tails. At one point Rebel Wilson uses a tail as a microphone and you can still see her own tail and there is no other cat nearby.
The scale is completely inconsistent, even within the same scene. The cats are as tall as garbage cans, then they fall into one and suddenly five of them can easily fit inside and a champagne bottle is as long as they are. The prop food is very clearly fake, but fake like a bad attempt at realism, not cartoon-like.
Every time the actors drop down on all fours and scuttle around, the effect is less graceful and cool than horrifying. It looks exactly like every horror movie ever where people crawl toward you because they’re possessed and then their heads spin around or they lift their heads and you see that their eyes are upside down or made of teeth. It doesn’t help that there’s a scene where all the cats get possessed by the moon or something and fall down and then act post-coital, like they had a giant orgy with the cat devil on the astral plane.
At some point, to indicate that Magic is Happening, gravity turns off and everything floats around for a while.
Jennifer Hudson plays Grizabella, an aging cat prostitute who is now a bag lady. She has shiny lines of snot below each nostril for the entire movie. Since her whole face was CG’d, someone made a conscious decision to put that snot in and make sure it’s there consistently and has just the right gleam.
Except for “Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser,” which was surprisingly actually good, the songs were all pretty bad versions of them. The sound mixing was off in “Memory,” so you couldn’t understand most of the words. There were clearly good dancers in the cast, but it’s not directed so you can appreciate it or even see it well. Except for some excellent tap dancing. Only the actor looked almost totally human including his tap shoes, so it was basically a tap dancing sequence by a dude in a giant cat head. For the record, this was where Halle completely lost it.
I almost forgot to mention that Taylor Swift shows up randomly and noncon drugs all the cats with glowing catnip that is clearly meant to be cocaine. She has breasts, unlike the other cats. At this point Idris Elba throws off his flasher coat and is clearly naked beneath it, with visible human muscles. So if you’ve ever wanted to see Taylor Swift and Idris Elba dance naked in fur suits, this is your chance.
At some point after this, Jennifer Hudson ascends to Heaven in a chandelier attached to a hot air balloon. Hopefully Heaven has Kleenex.
And then Dami Judi Dench stares directly into the camera and forcefully informs us that cats are not dogs while holding her human hand, which bears a wedding ring, over her heart. The camera focuses on her mouth and it is very noticeable that her teeth look terrible.
Me (whispers): “Do you think they fix up her teeth for all her other movies?”
Halle (whispers): “Maybe they deliberately made her teeth look like that for this one.”
Me: “Why would they do that?”
Halle: “Why would they do anything in this movie?”
The camera then goes lower, so we can see that they have CG’d giant wads of orange fur to her very human bare feet so they look like Bigfoot feet.
And with that, the movie unceremoniously ends.
I looked up Dame Judi’s teeth afterward. They look fine in photos. So either something went horribly wrong with makeup, CG, or lighting and nobody noticed or fixed it, or else someone decided she really needed to look like she had decayed and missing teeth to go with her Bigfoot feet. I don’t understand how either scenario could occur, but as Halle pointed out, “Why would they do anything in this movie?”
Regrettably, we did not see the original version. We saw the one that was “fixed” so now all the cats have human hands. All the moments where they make gestures on the clear assumption that their hands will be CG’d into paws look incredibly bizarre. We saw it with a very small audience that did not react much, except when a small child ran madly out of the theatre with a parent in hot pursuit. Neither of them returned.
I brought a canned mango margarita, which was a good choice. I think weed would have been an even better one. This was a stoner movie if I ever saw one, a movie made for murmurs of “Whoa” and lengthy fits of hysterical laughter. And now that I have seen Rebel Wilson unzip her cat suit, step out wearing another cat suit which is wearing a bikini, display her tiny cabaret in which she forces slave mice with CG’d child faces to perform, and then bring out a parade of cockroaches which are chorus girls with CG roach wings wearing Star Trek swim caps with antennae attached, make them march upside down on the underside of a table, and then graphically crunch them between her teeth and eat them, I feel that I have no need to ever take LSD.
The story, such as it is, begins when a white spotted cat named Victoria gets abandoned in a sack and found by the Jellicle Cats. They explain that they all want to be taken to the Heaviside Layer, which is Heaven, but only one can be chosen. They audition by singing. That’s when Rebel Wilson unzips herself and a bunch of chorus dancing cockroaches spin around on a strawberry cake and also there’s a lot of fat jokes. Macavity (Idris Elba in a flasher coat and glowing CG green eyes) vaporizes her to get rid of the competition and she materializes on a ship in the middle of the Thames.
This scene repeats about six times: a cat sings, then Macavity vaporizes them and they materialize on his boat. No one seems at all bothered by this until he vaporizes Judi Dench. Judi Dench has CG cat fur AND a giant fur coat the same color as her cat fur, so it looks like she made a coat out of her own clone, Buffalo Bill-style. A cat rubs against her and it is so creepy.
A lot of the movie seemed weirdly sexual, especially since some cats wore clothes, which made the ones who didn’t seem naked and the ones who only wore shirts to seem to be naked from the waist down. Every time a clothed cat disrobes, which occurs frequently, it not only makes them seem naked, it makes all the cats seem naked.
Ian McKellen has perhaps the most bizarre performance in the entire movie. It starts with him assiduously licking a shelf and just goes on from there. He defeats the bad guy by shouting “Feefiddlefuzzle!” and I was still having hysterics ten minutes later.
The play is infamous for having virtually no plot and for what plot there is to be nonsensical. However, the same can be said about some ballets. If you’re basically there for singing and dancing, you don’t necessarily need a plot. Movies, however, typically do add plot when adapting plotless materials. It’s not inherently a problem that this movie doesn’t, but it makes zero effort to consider that what works onstage may not work onscreen.
The movie is full of random cuts to new locations, which were probably done onstage with set or light changes and worked fine, but in the movie feel like the characters teleported. It also uses the same location, a street corner, about a bazillion times for no reason. Onstage the reason is that it’s the main set; in a movie, there’s no clear reason and it seems weird.
Which, of course, is not even close to being the weirdest thing about this movie. Onstage, people wearing cat suits and cat makeup and dancing is at worst cheesy and at best fun. If they’d just done this for the movie, it would have been a huge improvement over what they actually did, which was to CG fur and cat parts on to actors in bodysuits. If you’ve seen photos, you can get some sense of just how Uncanny Valley this is, but having it in motion makes it so much worse. There’s a grey cat who introduces a bunch of cats, and every time he turned around so you get a look at his pasted-on-yay face head-on, I recoiled back into my seat.
The tails are CG animated and move like dancing cobras, not cat tails. At one point Rebel Wilson uses a tail as a microphone and you can still see her own tail and there is no other cat nearby.
The scale is completely inconsistent, even within the same scene. The cats are as tall as garbage cans, then they fall into one and suddenly five of them can easily fit inside and a champagne bottle is as long as they are. The prop food is very clearly fake, but fake like a bad attempt at realism, not cartoon-like.
Every time the actors drop down on all fours and scuttle around, the effect is less graceful and cool than horrifying. It looks exactly like every horror movie ever where people crawl toward you because they’re possessed and then their heads spin around or they lift their heads and you see that their eyes are upside down or made of teeth. It doesn’t help that there’s a scene where all the cats get possessed by the moon or something and fall down and then act post-coital, like they had a giant orgy with the cat devil on the astral plane.
At some point, to indicate that Magic is Happening, gravity turns off and everything floats around for a while.
Jennifer Hudson plays Grizabella, an aging cat prostitute who is now a bag lady. She has shiny lines of snot below each nostril for the entire movie. Since her whole face was CG’d, someone made a conscious decision to put that snot in and make sure it’s there consistently and has just the right gleam.
Except for “Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser,” which was surprisingly actually good, the songs were all pretty bad versions of them. The sound mixing was off in “Memory,” so you couldn’t understand most of the words. There were clearly good dancers in the cast, but it’s not directed so you can appreciate it or even see it well. Except for some excellent tap dancing. Only the actor looked almost totally human including his tap shoes, so it was basically a tap dancing sequence by a dude in a giant cat head. For the record, this was where Halle completely lost it.
I almost forgot to mention that Taylor Swift shows up randomly and noncon drugs all the cats with glowing catnip that is clearly meant to be cocaine. She has breasts, unlike the other cats. At this point Idris Elba throws off his flasher coat and is clearly naked beneath it, with visible human muscles. So if you’ve ever wanted to see Taylor Swift and Idris Elba dance naked in fur suits, this is your chance.
At some point after this, Jennifer Hudson ascends to Heaven in a chandelier attached to a hot air balloon. Hopefully Heaven has Kleenex.
And then Dami Judi Dench stares directly into the camera and forcefully informs us that cats are not dogs while holding her human hand, which bears a wedding ring, over her heart. The camera focuses on her mouth and it is very noticeable that her teeth look terrible.
Me (whispers): “Do you think they fix up her teeth for all her other movies?”
Halle (whispers): “Maybe they deliberately made her teeth look like that for this one.”
Me: “Why would they do that?”
Halle: “Why would they do anything in this movie?”
The camera then goes lower, so we can see that they have CG’d giant wads of orange fur to her very human bare feet so they look like Bigfoot feet.
And with that, the movie unceremoniously ends.
I looked up Dame Judi’s teeth afterward. They look fine in photos. So either something went horribly wrong with makeup, CG, or lighting and nobody noticed or fixed it, or else someone decided she really needed to look like she had decayed and missing teeth to go with her Bigfoot feet. I don’t understand how either scenario could occur, but as Halle pointed out, “Why would they do anything in this movie?”
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. I have to say, I really love that cover. What could possibly be better than a dude in a cape and armor, carrying a torch and riding a giant flying cat in a surprisingly practical-looking harness?
