“You aren’t allowed to see Cats without me” was the message I got on my phone from Friend a week ago, not that I was ever intending to see this film. So when we booked tickets two days ago and I sent a message to our other Friend with a time and place and he said, “Cannot wait to see the first horror film of the year,” I was surprised. And I was more surprised when our other Friend, upon hearing that we wanted to see it blackout, messy drunk in about twenty-four hours, also agreed. We were, as you might have expected, the only people in the theater for about twenty minutes until two well-meaning elders entered and dutifully ignored us, our soda spilled on their floor, their seats ignobly stolen, grown men and women shouting full-volume at Coke commercials and trailers (they were all right people).
I vacillate between thinking that the Cats people were in on the joke and thinking that they were basically the sloppy procrastinator in class who made his science fair project on Sunday night and got caught trying to pass it off as a full-fledged thing. I don’t want to reward laziness or slave labor, which is what Brother says was basically the way that the SFX house was able to win the bid for the movie (he also said that it was reportedly only about 10% finished when they released it to the public), but I’m also completely willing to believe that this was basically the exact creative vision of a very, very sick man, who only recently became aware that his version of reality does not match with the rest of us.
I can confirm that Ian McKellan is great in this movie (mostly because someone has told him his lines are the words associated with cat sounds but not the actual sounds) and that Taylor Swifts catboobs are misshappen and also distractingly enhanced, but I don’t think I follow when people say that this movie is too horny for its own good and that all the erect tails are distracting. I can only imagine being uncomfortable about the level of cat horn if I were taking my kid sister to this movie, but as it was, we were all adult enough to watch Dame Judy flash us with her cat minge and Ian McKellan sexually harass that milk plate with his tongue. It is kind of fucked how Rebel Wilson takes off her own catsuit (oh is it a pun? I think it’s a pun!), but there isn’t a cockroach holocaust as was billed in earlier critical reviews, unless the first cut of this movie included more graphic scenes than the one I saw. I understand what that one review meant when it said simply of Jennifer Hudson, “They did her so dirty.” I think at first it meant that of all the ugly CGI cats she was the queen of the ugly cats, and though I think that’s part of it, I think it might be a specific combination of the amount of snot they left on her lips in any given close up and their direction to her to act like someone who had just recently been told that they were contractually obligated to star in Cats.
Brother said that he could “not explain the ending of the movie even now that I’ve seen it,” which I sympathize with. Because the movie is basically “cats introducing themselves for two hours” until “Judy Dench stares directly into the camera and lectures you for three straight minutes,” the plot never really develops any characters, beyond the fact that Idris Elba seems to be some sort of powerful wizard who gains strength the less clothing he’s wearing. I’m not entirely sure how Deuteronomy is able to free herself from the plank walk, except the length of the Mephistopheles song really gives her enough time to have swim home and blow dry herself for all I know. (At what point does one song become long enough to actually legitimately be two different songs?) I refuse to believe that shitty cat with his stupid hat learns magic through peer pressure. Regardless of how many other cats are magic in this movie, he uses a fucking miniature pencil as his wand. And if he is a real wizard, why does Deuteronomy not thank him? Why does she just sing the song that the rest of the cats has been singing to make believe that he’s much more impressive than he is? Why does she appear behind them as if she’s been hiding in the wings the entire time?
This is how they win, right? They paralyze us in thought about small shit like this so that we have a hard time fighting the nauseous feeling of seeing someone’s face painted onto the front of their head or maybe carved deep into it, it’s hard to tell, because everything looks so fuzzy and out of focus, except, well, the actual fuzz, which looks painted and a little bit tacked on.
