\u201cI don\u2019t say that the bird is \u2018good\u2019 or the bat is \u2018bad.\u2019 But I will say this: At least the bird is less nude.\u201d
\n\u2013Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey<\/p>\n
After I saw the new Cats<\/em> movie, my companion and I had sharply divergent assessments of what was wrong with it. I thought it gave a clinic, by negative example, on why the musical worked; my companion thought it exposed the ways the musical (and, in her opinion, Old Possum\u2019s Book of Practical Cats<\/em>) was always a completely bats and whackadoo idea. Perhaps we\u2019re both right!<\/p>\n I wanted Cats<\/em> to be good. I would actually have preferred that to \u201cso bad it\u2019s good.\u201d I harbored a secret judgmental suspicion that people hated Cats<\/em> because movie audiences today enjoy feeling superior to the movie. They don\u2019t want to be overwhelmed. I enjoy MST3K as much as the next nerdy jackass, but MST3K is no way to go through life\u2013or films. So I thought, you know, what if they just can\u2019t hang? What if this is a bats whackadoo movie that completely commits to its bats whackadoo premise, and rolls all over it in glory, and critics and audiences are just holding back out of an addiction to self-protective irony? What if Cats<\/em>\u2018s problem is that critics were desperate to be better than it?<\/p>\n I\u2019m not better than any person; I am, in fact, worse. But I might be slightly better than Cats<\/em>.<\/p>\n Cats<\/em> absolutely does commit to every choice it made. I would like to respect it for that, but the choices were bad.<\/p>\n There are basically two problems here. First of all, the cats have metaphysics and a plot. This is almost all from the musical itself and well confirms my companion\u2019s point. Nobody remembers this\u2013I had to check Wikipedia\u2013but the musical is not in fact just songs. I regret to report that it has a story. Eliot\u2019s poetry hasn\u2019t got a plot, I\u2019m like 99% sure. It\u2019s pure whimsy. Andrew Webber, the scourge of the skating world, used a couple unpublished fragments or unrelated poems to weave together a story in which an aged cat must choose one cat each year to go to the Heaviside Layer (apparently a real astronomical thing, but also here the \u201cHeaven-side Lair\u201d of cat religion) and be reborn into a new life. Thus the songs about each individual cat are their entries in a kind of Eurovision of the soul. Macavity, the villain, tries to disrupt the proceedings by catnapping participants so he can be the victor and be reborn. Instead the\u2026 divine cat-judge, Old Deuteronomy, picks Grizabella, once \u201cthe Glamour Cat\u201d but now a battered and rejected stray, and she ascends to her new life in a cloud of glory (or on an old tire, in the original, junkyard-set musical).<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible that if you just don\u2019t pay any attention to this plotline at all the movie will work better for you. The songs are perfectly serviceable and quite catchy musical-theater type stuff, and they\u2019re acted out here with (mostly) unimaginative fidelity to the source, which is fine. But now and then the movie wants you to attend to its plot, and these moments are either distracting (Macavity is such a perfunctory villain!) or gross (\u201cMemory\u201d).<\/p>\n I love \u201cMemory.\u201d Okay? I love it. Of course it is kitsch. And it\u2019s always fine to reject kitsch. But if you don\u2019t love any kitsch, are you still a mammal?<\/p>\n But this Cats<\/em> film highlights the problems inherent in \u201cMemory.\u201d Jennifer Hudson, committing to the material with every fiber of her being (they all do), delivers it with a face wracked by sobs. Her purpose is to evoke only pity. It\u2019s entirely possible that my own memory is rose-colored, here, but my impression of the musical when I saw it was that Grizabella also evokes awe. She knows<\/em> that she once touched sublimity, and some of that sublimity hangs around her still. This movie\u2019s Grizabella doesn\u2019t seem to know that she\u2019s still touched by fire, and so her songs and scenes have a more groveling air; the final choice of Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) seems like Lady Bountiful bestowing a gift because of her personal superior magnanimity rather than a recognition of and bowing before Grizabella\u2019s greatness.<\/p>\n \u201cMemory\u201d is also followed by two other songs, both of which are bad in a way that undercuts the heartfelt and touching kitsch of the musical\u2019s breakout number. \u201cThe Meaning of Happiness\u201d is just weird and pointless, a jumble of abstract nouns given no interesting inflection by Dench\u2019s performance. ETA: WHOA it\u2019s from The Four Quartets<\/em><\/a>! MAYBE IT WORKS IN CONTEXT. Man, I loathed it here. Like a parody of inspirational self-help crossed with a parody of impenetrable theology. Anyway! \u201cBeautiful Ghosts,\u201d by Taylor Swift and new for this movie, is actively obnoxious. I\u2019ve ranted before<\/a> about the contemporary musical trend of just saying whatever emotions the characters feel, but singing!!, as if that\u2019s art. (You know what new musical doesn\u2019t do this? Hamilton<\/em>. You know what people liked???) Bland, didactic, not trusting the audience with unexpected imagery or contradictory emotional valences\u2013it\u2019s so fully of our own time that it stands out like a human thumb on a badly-CGI\u2019d cat paw.<\/p>\n SPEAKING OF WHICH. The other problem is the one which has led reviewers to use phrases like \u201cexistential dread\u201d and \u201cCongratulations to dogs.\u201d This is the furry element. And this is where I am right, and the musical figured out how to do its whackadoo thing whereas the movie did not.<\/p>\n The musical\u2019s cats are designed to look\u2026 glittery, punk-pastiche, all feathery fur and dandelion-clock hair. Don\u2019t think of a real cat. Take the idea<\/em> of a cat and throw it as hard as you can against the back of your mind, and also it\u2019s 1981, and that\u2019s the cats in Cats<\/em>. They\u2019re theatrical: stylized, OTT, playing to the gods, the costume and makeup equivalent of belting it out. They put you in a kaleidoscope mood and when you leave the theater the outside world seems somehow still permeable by that weird glam theatricality.<\/p>\n Cats<\/em> the film disaster goes in the opposite direction, aiming for a seamless blend of real cat and human actor. Aspects of this are fun (I loved the ears!) but this was never a wise choice. Human-cats eat human-cockroaches. Cats undress, and suddenly you realize that there are cats around you all the time, naked. Movies allow an immediacy, an intimacy, and an illusion of everyday reality which the theater can\u2019t provide. The thing is that I did not want to be immediate and intimate with the everyday reality of naked person-cats. This movie will make you feel like normal real cats violate the indecency laws.<\/p>\n Photo of T. Eliot having just watched \u201cCats\u201d via Wikipedia.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI don\u2019t say that the bird is \u2018good\u2019 or the bat is \u2018bad.\u2019 But I will say this: At least the bird is less nude.\u201d \u2013Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey After I saw the new Cats movie, my companion and I had sharply divergent assessments of what was wrong with it. I thought it gave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":13074,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1408],"class_list":["post-13071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-cats"],"yoast_head":"\n