Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019)

[Aunt Peg]

As a big cat lover this is a must see for me. My partner saw the stage play back in the 80s and said it was terrible. But its about Cats and I owe it to my trio of cats Monty (named after Montgomery Clift), Ollie (named after Oliver Reed) and Shelley (named after both Shelley Duvall & Shelley Winters) to see the film.

[jindianajonz]

Why not delay the movie until it's finished? Surely it could have avoided all this heat if they waited I don't know, six months?

And miss awards season?

[thirtyframesasecond]

It looks bad, really bad, and I dislike most people in this film. I'll watch it when it comes onto a streaming platform maybe, but I couldn't walk into a cinema and watch this without dying of embarrassment. I assume it'll flop big time, but maybe it'll get an audience out of sheer curiosity.

[The Curious Sofa]

As a big cat lover this is a must see for me. My partner saw the stage play back in the 80s and said it was terrible. But its about Cats and I owe it to my trio of cats Monty (named after Montgomery Clift), Ollie (named after Oliver Reed) and Shelley (named after both Shelley Duvall & Shelley Winters) to see the film.

I think my cat would give me a stern telling off, were I to go to watch such grotesque misrepresentations of his species.

[Brian C]

I think I’ll probably go see it. I mean, I sat through the Schumacher’s PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.

[The Curious Sofa]

I will watch this eventually for the same reason I recently watched Tammy and the T-Rex. I’m not going to pay for it though.

[Lemmy Caution]

As a big cat lover this is a must see for me. My partner saw the stage play back in the 80s and said it was terrible. But its about Cats and I owe it to my trio of cats Monty (named after Montgomery Clift), Ollie (named after Oliver Reed) and Shelley (named after both Shelley Duvall & Shelley Winters) to see the film.

I feel similarly obligated to see this, since some of my best friends are cats.
Though only one of my four cats has a theatrical name: Mr. Bacciagaloup.

I did see the Broadway show Summer of '87 with my childhood sweetheart as a graduation present from my mother. I remember it being fun, with the set design and costumes being the most impressive part.

[therewillbeblus]

I have a cat. I love my cat. I will not see this movie and neither will my cat. I don't think he'll care either.

[mfunk9786]

We didn't get our male cat neutered quite as quickly as maybe we should have, and at around 8-9 months old he started getting very creepy with our (fixed, thank god) female cat, and now she reacts to him as though she's #MeTooing him over and over again. Anyway, this movie reminds me of that unwanted feline horny level which I never want to be around again

[mteller]

We had a cat named Jennyanydots, though it was many years before the musical.

[Nasir007]

If they release the entire video clip of Jennifer Hudson's rendition of Memory then I won't watch the film. I was quite taken by it in the trailer. It seemed to me to be one of the best covers of the song that I heard, probably the best. Besides that, I have little interest in the movie though I don't think it looks nearly as bad or as disturbing as people think it does. Or maybe I have a really high tolerance for creepy or unsettling visuals.

[domino harvey]

That particular performance is on the receiving end of some of the most brutal criticisms of the film

[domino harvey]

To wit

The biggest drag in the seemingly endless series of featured felines is Grizabella, the so-called Glamour Cat, whose youthful beauty has given way to mange, causing her to be shunned by the Jellicles. Jennifer Hudson tirelessly over-emotes in the role; she limps around hemorrhaging snot and looking either miserable or terrified, like she's been watching the dailies. She blubbers her way through "Memory," letting loose all her considerable lung power for the big-ass key change on the phrase "Touch me." Cue wild cheers from an audience primed on American Idol overkill. I can only hope the original Grizabella, Betty Buckley, who was at the premiere, was shielding her ears.

Jennifer Hudson’s big Cats moment plays like the evil twin of Viola Davis’s single scene in Doubt, or Anne Hathaway’s very loud death walk in Les Miserables. Squint and you can just about see her awards-season consultant reflected in the snot running down her nose, Hudson exaggeratingly quivering her lips and telegraphing her character’s inner turmoil with the subtlety of a stampeding elephant.

Playing Grizabella, the tragic “forgotten cat” responsible for the famous Cats number “Memory”, Hudson ought to be the film’s most heartbreaking component. But she is so overwrought here, crawling along the floor like a drama school student long having given up, that it produces more giggles than tears. Which is odd, considering she won an Oscar for a remarkably similar scene of musical defiance in Dreamgirls more than a decade ago. Cats, on the other hand, does her dirty.

Embarrassment factor: 10/10

[Finch]

It seems the VFX weren't the only unfinished elements. As per Slant:

for a musical, the film’s sound mixing is erratic, with sudden spikes and lulls in volume that contrast sharply with the actual tenor of a given song.

[feihong]

In fairness to Jennifer Hudson, all that over-emoting over faded glamor is exactly what that part is there for, and what that song is designed to fetishize. I saw Betty Buckley perform the role, and I got that same impression from her overwrought performance that people are reflecting in their assessments of Hudson. Grisabella is just Andrew Lloyd Weber once again grasping at his endlessly regenerating central theme of fame; the glamor of fame, how fame is sustenance to this special breed of narcissist which is Andrew Lloyd Weber's hero figure in so many of his shows. These are central themes of Evita and others, but it's also why Jesus Christ is a "Superstar" in Lloyd Weber's conception, and why Joseph feels that his technicolor dream coat could make any man "a star" ("Could be famous, could be a big success" drones the chorus). Of course, Phantom and Sunset Boulevard are stories that have that theme baked in, but it shows up in everything Lloyd Weber does. It would be one thing if he had a lot to say about the vicissitudes of fame, about its destructive aspect, or something equally worthwhile; but he has a sunnily uncomplicated view of fame as the ultimate, the end of the road; it makes all his musicals maudlin and overdone for long, dreary passages. "Memory" has always been a song that played schmaltzy and sentimental, without any saving irony or distance.

It sounds like what this Cats movie does in general is thrust us too close up to the stage show, in a way; closer than we could ever get while sitting in the audience of the broadway production. There the performers wear furry suits and heavy makeup, but the distance we have before them means we never get caught up in the anatomical differences between cats and humans––something that nearly every critic listed here has noted is disturbing in the movie. In a way it seems as if the intimate closeness of the movies removes the magical thinking that makes audiences for the stage show see a performer as a cat. Instead, we end up looking for hair follicles and grimacing at bared cat-crotches, and wondering at uncanny–valley tails protruding from...what exactly? If this film were animated, we would regain the distance of the stage show, and we wouldn't so readily question or even dwell upon the anthropormorphism. The stylized nature of the drawings would mean that we never came close enough to the physicality of the figures to be put off by it. In a way, Hooper's Les Miserables did something similar, bringing us too intimately close to actors tentative or overconfident in their singing capabilities. It is the gulf between the audience and the stage that makes these shows work on broadway. Film almost automatically closes that gap, and in the process, robs these musicals of the way our imaginations work to span that gulf. Seeing the show on stage we never fret over why the cats seem to have human genitals or not, because our imaginations smooth out those incongruities of scale and adaptation. In filling in those blank places, it sounds like Hooper and company have made a ton of very particular creative decisions that we can't turn away from, can't tune out, can't minimize.

[domino harvey]

I don't remember where I read it, but apparently ALW forbade any animated adaptations of the musical, so it was never an option

[feihong]

I can understand why he'd do it, too. So much of the reputation of the show rests in its size, and part of that is the visually very striking idea of scaling a cat's world to human proportions. You only have to watch the Aristocats for a couple minutes to see how that sense of scale wouldn't readily apply to the animation. If anything, it suggests to me that the stage is the only place where this musical can sort of work.

[jsteffe]

The reception of the film and my impressions from the trailer lead me to believe that a furry porn knockoff will be coming soon.

[hearthesilence]

Show a little respect for hard work, people.

[domino harvey]

Show a little respect for hard work, people.

This is terrible, even for a recent the Onion article

[hearthesilence]

Show a little respect for hard work, people.

This is terrible, even for a recent the Onion article

As soon as this popped up in my feed, the headline and the photo for the CG Supervisor alone looked hilarious. (The article's just filler.)

[domino harvey]

Alamo Drafthouse is hosting a “Rowdy” screening

[The Narrator Returns]

[feihong]

Wow. That's kind of a bad precedent to set, no? Has this happened before?

[Black Hat]

I have a feeling all this bad press is going to help the film cash in. I know I'm going to watch it and I'm some who has hated Cats since my mother dragged me to see it when I was 5.