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Thursday, January 14, 2021

I watched "Cats" (2019) so you wouldn't have to


It was right there, staring me in the face. It's as if it were my destiny. It had to be done.

I watched "Cats" last night so you wouldn't have to.

Yeah, the 2019 remake, not the Broadway production. The one that got all the Razzie awards and horrible reviews.

Listen, I signed up for HBO Max so I could watch "Wonder Woman 1984" on Christmas Day, and my subscription isn't up for another week. It's not like I paid to see "Cats" in theaters. It was basically free.

Preface

Let me preface this blog with a little background information:
  • My family owned a VHS of the 1998 Broadway recording of "Cats" when I was growing up. I must have watched it a dozen times, over the course of my life.
  • Through a series of recent discussions with my siblings, we have determined that none of us could succinctly describe the actual plot of "Cats," beyond saying, "Each cat comes out and has its own song, and, in the end, one cat is chosen to go to Heaven or something."
  • Although I do not have any particular attachment to this musical, I would be remiss if I didn't admit that it maintains a place in the pop culture history of my family, if nothing else, as a guilty pleasure.
  • When it was announced that they were making a big-screen adaptation of the play, I was certainly curious. My siblings and I even floated around the idea of going to watch it together. Needless to say, that never happened.
  • I heard all the crap people talked about how terrible the 2019 movie was, which was a large contributing factor as to why my siblings and I never went to see it. I understood that the movie was almost universally loathed from the second it hit theaters - perhaps even earlier.
With that in mind, there was always a tiny bit of interest that lingered in the back of my mind, wondering if the movie could truly be as horrible as everyone said it was. Last night, I decided to find out for myself, and I simultaneously tweeted out my thoughts from the official @SotTUnderground Twitter account. Let's delve into all of that, as well as some additional commentary and analysis.




It Don't Look Right

Right off the bat, the CGI used for the cats was jarring. I don't know what it was, exactly; it's hard to put it into words. The first two things that jumped out at me were the ears and tails. The way they moved just made me feel a bit uneasy. The human faces plastered onto the animated bodies also bothered me. In fact, let me summarize how I believe the CGI was done for these cats, as illustrated beautifully by yours, truly, earlier this morning:


It's like the guy who Photoshopped those faces on just needed to zoom out a little bit before clicking "Save."

Here's another indication that the CGI wasn't good:



Would not recommend "Snowpiercer," by the way. I will not be joining them for Season 2.

One of the more horrific moments of the movie was the song about Jennyanydots. Just... just look at these tweets:



And that pretty much brings us to Jason Derulo, in the role of Rum Tum Tugger. Derulo, not exactly known for his subtlety, was cast as, perhaps, the most over-the-top cat of them all. I remember at one point in the movie when all the cats were singing, I heard this gosh-awful screeching rising above the rest of the ensemble. I frantically scanned the screen to identify the source of the racket. My wife helped me out by saying something along the lines of "Wow, Jason." I have a feeling that Mr. Derulo's Rum Tum Tugger and Beyonce's Nala from the "Lion King" remake would get along swimmingly.

Derulo's four minutes of infamy continued the trend of freakish body movement, as you can see if you date to watch the YouTube video below this paragraph. I honestly don't know how to describe it. It just all looks so weird and unnatural, almost like the human heads do not belong to the feline bodies they're digitally attached to. It's so weird! See for yourself:


Haters Gonna Hate

These cats are mean! There's a new cat in town for the 2019 edition of the show: Victoria. She really serves no other purpose, other than to get an original song so the movie can shoot for an Oscar (they didn't get it). It dawned on me how unkind the cats are when they took the time to sing to Victoria about how old and ugly Grizabella, the former glamour cat, has become. They make it clear that Grizabella is not accepted by their kind anymore, and, these days, it seems, they just get together to sing songs about her every time she comes around to remind her about how far she has fallen. Really kind of them.

If that wasn't mean enough, there an, of course, an entire self-depricating number about how fat Bustopher Jones is.



From what little I knew about this movie before I sat down to live-tweet it last night, I expected to hate James Corden as Bustopher Jones, but I'll be darned if he didn't end up as my favorite by the end of the night.


Stars Among Us

For as hateful and judgy as these cats are, they sure respect Old Deuteronomy, who... wait, what?! I had no idea that Judi Dench played Old Deuteronomy in this movie. Like, I knew she was in it, but I did not know that they had gender-swapped the role and made him female. So... that came as a shock to me.



Rebel Wilson, James Corden, Judi Dench, Ian McKellan, Idris Elba, Taylor Swift, for crying out loud... How did they get such a great cast for this movie, then let it bomb so badly? It boggles the mind.


Watching all this terrible CGI really made me appreciate how good the cats looked in the 1998 Broadway production. It was just makeup and fur suits, but they looked a lot more believable than this garbage. However, I will say that I think the cat who looked "best" was Ian McKellan's Gus. Maybe it's because he didn't need to get out there and dance. He pretty much just walked around and stood there as he sang (surprisingly well) his sad song, but at least he, unlike any of his other co-stars, can say that his costume wasn't a complete eye-sore.


I... Actually Understand This?

For the first time, perhaps, ever, I actually understood some of the words and lyrics in last night's production. Maybe I was listening more closely, maybe it was being explained more clearly. But I'll give the movie this: I probably understood this portrayal of "Cats" better than any other viewing in my lifetime.

I was confused for a bit about Idris Elba's motivations as Macavity, but it was later clarified for me: Macavity desperately wanted to be the "Jellicle Choice" - the cat chosen at the end of the film by Old Deuteronomy to be taken up to the Heaviside Layer to receive a new life. He wanted that honor so badly that he would cat-nap his competition throughout the film so that he would be the only remaining option. So... I guess that was interesting.


Tweets of the Night







The Magical Mystery

Mister Mistoffelees was, by far, my favorite cat, as a child. I was introduced to his song, thanks to an Andrew Lloyd Webber "Greatest Hits" CD that my parents had in my youth, and I just always thought he was so cool.

The Mistoffelees I saw last night was... pretty lame, quite frankly.



Wardrobe Malfunctions





A Beautiful Moment, Ruined by Technology

The big, show-stopping musical number of "Cats" is Grizabella's "Memory," sung, in this case by Grammy and Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson. She does a pretty good job in the movie, and there is one point where she is really belting it out. But, uh...



Man, that CGI is horrible. Hudson's is, I believe, the biggest example of the jarring animation. It looks like something straight out of my furriest nightmare. It's a shame, honestly.


An Abrupt End

 In another moment widely mocked by moviegoers, the movie ends with some odd song about cats not being dogs or some such. I don't really know. Once Grizabella is sacrificed to the chandelier, I guess you just kind of stop paying attention. In a change from the rest of the movie, Dench's Old Deuteronomy is directed to sing the song to, um, the camera, or the viewers at home? So she's just standing there and singing at the screen while the rest of the cats purr up against her. It's all kind of uncomfortable.



And then the movie was over.

Final Thoughts

To be completely truthful, this movie was not nearly as bad as I was prepared for it to be. I had heard so much trash talk about how much people hated it, so I really was braced for the worst. Of course, in retrospect, I began to wonder how many of the bad reviews and hilarious comments came from people who actually saw the movie at all. It's like how the Playstation 5 got so many customer reviews from people who were either hardcore Sony supporters that gave it a 5-star rating before it was even in their hands or from angry would-be buyers who left 1-star rants about how they were pissed that Walmart sold out within 5 seconds. It would be so easy to hop online and talk about how much "Cats" sucked, just to get likes and retweets. Perhaps the feedback I saw was not completely to be trusted.

The other thought I had was, out of the people who actually did see the movie and really did hate it, how many of those people were familiar with the musical to begin with? If you walked into the theater without any previous knowledge of what you were getting yourself into, I can totally believe that people later left the cineplex wondering what in the infernal blazes they had just witnessed.

The absolute worst offense committed by this movie is the abominable CGI. It's stunning, in the worst way possible. They should have hired the team from the "Sonic" movie to do a patch-up job before "Cats" was released to the public. It's so tough to swallow that nobody - absolutely nobody - had the guts to put their foot down and stop the movie from coming out looking this way.

I mentioned to my co-worker today that "Cats" would be an acceptable movie to have on in the background while you worked. That way, you could hear all the music and only look up for about 65% of what was happening on-screen.

All things considered, I actually don't think I hated it. Am I glad that I didn't pay money specifically for this movie? Heck yes. Do I regret having watched it at all? No, I'm not sure about that. Would I watch it again? I don't know. But, to answer the question that got me into this pickle in the first place, was it as bad as everyone said it was? No. It really wasn't.

TL;DR

I would definitely not recommend this movie to anyone who has never seen "Cats" on a stage. If you've seen it a time or two and are familiar with the music, I think it's fine to watch once in your life. It certainly won't kill you. I have seen movies that were WAY worse than this.

Here's my final review, submitted officially to IMDb:



And then I ascended my son to the Heaviside Layer:


*****

If you made it this far, you are a blessed soul and I thank you for humoring me by reading this blog. Feel free to follow me on Twitter (here and here), leave your thoughts in the comments section below, or chat me up on Facebook if you want to re-evaluate my sanity.

Bum-bum-bum-bum to the Heaviside Layer.
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Location: The Underground, Jive City, USA

1 comment:

  1. lisaJanuary 14, 2021 at 8:42 PM

    I love your take on it. I've yet to watch it all the way through. I sat through the play. Enjoyed the music, but thought the storyline was bizarre, so sitting through the entire movie, has not been on my radar. It was on the other day and we caught the end of it. I'm glad that we didn't watch the whole thing.

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