It’s a cold night as I sit glued to the chair of a small theater I regularly go to with my girlfriend Erin, who’s sitting next to me. I’m sitting there as if I was a prisoner to my mind and the images before me while many thoughts, questions, and images float through my head as the credits roll. I think to myself how I feel like Alex Delarge being forced to watch horrific images on a theater screen in “A Clockwork Orange”, I think about all the excellent films I could have seen and reflect on the Lovecraftian horror of the cats bodies in the film and it’s bizarre proportions. We all cry out at various points over the bizarrely sexual nature of this PG film, which our small audience of 7 wasn’t prepared for, and all normal theatrical decorum vanishes. We have bonded in the same way as trench soldiers in WW1 did… simply over the horror we’ve seen. The last thing I think of, though, is my hatred of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tom Hooper, and I ponder on them as I step out of the theater back into the cold night. I know leaving that I’ll never forget this night, the bitter air bites into me as I laugh in the cold night air maniacally because I know something… all I have to do to get people to recall this night is walk up to them on the street and say one word: “Cats”. They’ll know what I mean, and we’ll have an ETERNAL soul bond, they’ll know they were in the theater with me from that alone. This film has changed me in ways I’ve only read of in the greatest horror novels.
So yeah, let’s talk about the “plot”, I guess.
Tom Hooper’s latest stage to screen adaptation after 2012’s “Les Miserables” is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats”: a stage show based off a collection of T.S Elliot poems about cats (shockingly enough)! The show and film take place in London on the night of the Jellicle Ball, an event attended by a group of cats known as the Jellicle Cats, who visit the ball to win the favor of their leader Old Deuteronomy, who will use their magical power to reincarnate a cat by sending them to the “Heavy Side Layer”. We meet various characters throughout the play who are primarily introduced by the narrator Munkunstrap as the Jellicle Cats avoid the evil Macavity. I know that sounds like a brief and vague plot, but that’s because it is!
The film features a large cast of well known Hollywood celebrities like Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Idris Elba, and Rebel Wilson. We also have to deal with more obnoxious stunt casting on the part of Tom Hooper by using celebrity musicians in the form of Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, and the extremely current and relevant…Jason Derulo?? It also features some stage veterans like ballet dancer Francesca Howard, who plays the closest thing the film version has to a protagonist in the form of Victoria.
I went into this film for a “so bad it’s good” experience after seeing the initial trailers, reviews, and just the fact some studio executives felt it would be a fantastic idea to adapt an old Broadway punchline. Andrew Lloyd Webber is a rather infamous creator in the theater circle, with many critics and theater geeks despising his spectacle driven shows for their shallow characters, repetitive nature, and a reliance on existing properties and actual people to put people in seats. There’s also the matter of the LARGE number of plagiarism accusations Webber had gotten over the years, with the most famous being how similar the opening suite of “Phantom of the Opera” sounds to the Pink Floyd song “Echoes”. Tom Hooper has also been despised for his shoddy directing and casting of theater darling “Les Miserables”, and was a poor choice to direct the adaptation of Webber’s surreal nightmare of a show. I went in looking for a good time, and while I certainly found something, I don’t know exactly how to qualify this experience other than to compare it to other forms of media involving the things mankind wasn’t meant to see. To nail down the issue of this movie we have to primarily discuss the effects and Tom Hooper’s terrible directorial choices.
The stage show “Cats” has generally received praise for three core things: its makeup work, choreography, and its stand out track “Memories”, the utterly heartbreaking ballad of the dying old cat Grizabella. The first way Hooper ruins the charm of the stage production is skipping makeup entirely in lieu of CGI for budgetary reasons, which causes the cats to fall rather deeply into the uncanny valley. The human faces of the actors are imposed on these weird anthropomorphic feline forms that have way too many human features, like the hands, nose, and feet, which makes them seem just plain wrong. This complaint was so prominent “Cats” was actually given an updated version in most theaters after about a week of being out to fix some rather glaring errors, as well as tighten up the CG effects, the most notorious issue being how the VFX failed to get Judy Dench’s hands, leaving her clearly human hand with her wedding band on it plainly visible. Choreography is excellent due to the hiring of many theater and ballet dancers as extras, but combining that with the clearly CG dancers and the bizarre nature of the cat proportions makes every dance number look more at home in your nightmares than in a PG family film.
Speaking of PG, the movie is uncomfortably sexual, with Rum Tum Tugger’s number (played by singer Jason Derulo) and Bombalurina’s number being the most clear examples along with actors just constantly thrusting, yowling, and giving each other bedroom eyes. Finally, the songs are ruined by Hooper’s idiotic decision to not include a click track to keep actors on beat and his insistence on his “dramatic” style of singing he directs, in which actors essentially speak-sing, which makes so many numbers feel like a William Shatner spoken word album that can’t even stay on beat. It utterly robs Jennifer Hudson and Taylor Swift of otherwise fantastic performances.
To conclude this, there are MANY words I could use to describe “Cats”, such as horny, soul crushing, and uncomfortable, but I’ll simply conclude with my thoughts on how theaters need to handle this film. They can obviously continue to show it, but they need to add a warning sign like films with epilepsy risks do. The sign will simply have that famous old saying-
“Abandon all hope ye who enter here”.
Rich Reviews 