So what of the movie itself?
The problems start at the very beginning of the movie. of course. An eighties synthesizer score clashing against extremely interwar Art Deco set design. The eighties synth is breathtakingly ugly. Over and over again, has one of those THX 1138 effects that announce 'the audience is listening'. I suppose it's supposed to remind us of caterwauling, but that would at least make sense, and it happens at all the most inopportune moments. Including in Memories, imagine, whatever you think of the song, it's one of the most iconic music theater songs of the 20th century, sung in a great performance and interrupted more than half a dozen times by (THX effect sped up). Anthropomorphic cats, stripped of their David Bowie costumes and Cirque du Soleil sets, exist in a setting that appears to demonstrate them discarded pets of Evelyn Waugh. The cats are all naked with fur that looks more like skin tattooed on than any kind of fur, except for the cats who wear shoes! Or the cats who wear fur coats! Many male cats have bulges in wide frame that disappear in close up. The female cats, most notably Taylor Swift, clearly have nipples in wide frame but the nipples disappear from close up. Which of course begs the questionWHY DO ALL THE CATS HAVE ONLY TWO NIPPLES?!?!?!
The one human we see in the entire movie is at the very beginning, which is more I think than we ever see in the show, so this ruins any suspension of disbelief that this world might be meant for Cats and not for humans. And yet, just as in the show, every set is clearly designed as a Cat-world in which literally every building is a Cat pun. The Egyptian theater with images of Cats over the facade, a bar that seems to serve nothing but milk on a plate, Is this a world where Cats are worshipped? Is this anthropomorsis part of a symbiotic world where Cats are basically human equals? Is it set post-nuclear apocalypse where there are barely any humans and Cats have mutated into intelligent beings who have a language of song-and-dance and collective speak - not to mention mice and cockroaches have done the same, more on them later...? Or is this just a concept green-lighted by a thousand rubber stamps with objections raised by nobody at all?
In the show, the introductory song is clearly supposed to be addressed to the audience, and sets up that Cats is basically a review show in which the audience, not the other cats, are the most crucial addressees. Yet the movie addresses the introductory song to a protagonist newly created for the movie, completely unthought of by the show - a cat named Victoria, played by an incredibly talented and beautiful performer named Francesca Hayward who is terrifyingly smoldering even when looking surgically altered by Dr. Moreau to resemble a human cat. Even after Cats, James Corden shall continue his ubiquitous appearances in everything without so much of a scratch to his mystifying career, but the world will always remember Francesca Hayward as star of Cats so we will never hear from this new Ginger Rogers ever again.
By the end of the opening number, it begged a number of questions I considered too obvious to not be answered by the movie. Does the gang of Jellicle cats do this musical song and dance for every cat who passes by? Is it a way of enticing them to join the Jellicle gang? Is it a way of scaring them off? Is it a way of showing their plumage and assessing potential new members or threats? And even if it isn't all that, won't they be they be seen by humans in what's clearly a human city who will continuously exclaim HOLY SHIT! SINGING CATS!!! Also, after hearing that word literally three-hundred times over the course of the movie and now probably twelve-hundred times over the course of four viewings, I still have one overriding question: WHAT THE FUCK IS A JELLICLE!?!
And 'fuck' is a very important concept in this movie. All the cats look as though they're about to fuck each other, and I do mean all of them. The young ones look just as likely to fuck Judy Dench or Ian McKellen as more age appropriate ones. There are moments when all the cats start a group incantation of spiken word lyrics that sounds like the prelude to the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut.
But if all of these cats are so confident in the opening number and full of braggadocious plumage, why then do they run off with such cowardly immediacy when the villain, McCavity, makes his first appearance. And some villain: It's never established, the nature of his villainy. Is he a drug dealer? Is he a mafia don? Does he mean to send fish in the mail for every cat he kills,... or does he just eat the fish? Well,... he does appear to have a magic dust that makes himself and other cats disapparate and reappear in a place of his choosing. The properties of said dust are never established. It's never established how he acquires it, or how he can do it, or why he does it, or why he affixes some sort of whispery magic tag on his disapparations, like 'INEFFABLE!' 'MEOW!' 'MCCAVITYYYY!'. But McCavity is played by the great Idris Elba, STRINGER BELL FROM THE WIRE! In one interview, Idris Elba explained that he refused to appear in Marvel movies because they were beneath his dignity AND NOW HE'S A NAKED CAT! It was highly presumed that Idris Elba would soon be the first black James Bond. Instead, he is this... and this is so much better, aside from being the first black James Bond, Idris Elba would eventually just be another Bond in a role defined for all time by Sean Connery, but now he will always be Idris Elba in a cat suit.
We are then treated to roughly eight-five minutes of introductory songs. 80 minutes of introductory songs you say? Indeed. And yet perhaps there is method to this madness. We need to know about cat names because the entire musical is made up of cats introducing their names. THAT'S THE WHOLE FUCKING MUSICAL!...
The introductions truly begin with Rebel Wilson as Jenny Any-dots. How do we BEGIN to talk about this: she uses her tail as a microphone, except that the first time she uses a tail for a microphone, she's clearly using the tail of a different cat who's never seen. Perhaps she's a mass murderer cat who collects tails the way the Judge collects scalps in Blood Meridian or Buffalo Bill collects skin in Silence of the Lambs! And there's plenty of evidence that she's a psychopath! She unzips her fur only to have another coat of fur underneath her fur, did she literally skin another cat!?!?! She then sings her number with singing mice with human faces that are clearly children but who also have human hands. And then she displays her army of scaled down cockroaches that she's trained to be a Busby Berkeley chorus line, a few of which she eats during the production, and so cowed are the cockroaches that none of them recoil in horror but imperviously maintain their march formation! And this is, somehow, considered a charming number.
The introductions truly begin with Rebel Wilson as Jenny Any-dots. How do we BEGIN to talk about this: she uses her tail as a microphone, except that the first time she uses a tail for a microphone, she's clearly using the tail of a different cat who's never seen. Perhaps she's a mass murderer cat who collects tails the way the Judge collects scalps in Blood Meridian or Buffalo Bill collects skin in Silence of the Lambs! And there's plenty of evidence that she's a psychopath! She unzips her fur only to have another coat of fur underneath her fur, did she literally skin another cat!?!?! She then sings her number with singing mice with human faces that are clearly children but who also have human hands. And then she displays her army of scaled down cockroaches that she's trained to be a Busby Berkeley chorus line, a few of which she eats during the production, and so cowed are the cockroaches that none of them recoil in horror but imperviously maintain their march formation! And this is, somehow, considered a charming number.
Then there's the Rum Tum Tugger song, sold by Jason Derulo with the maximum sex appeal a man can give while dressed in a cat suit. To state the obvious, Jason Derulo is a decent looking man, but not even a young Brando could sell a mid-song admiring look and comment upon his handsomeness in the mirror, while he's DRESSED LIKE A CAT. As horrific as Rebel Wilson's song is, I wonder if this song is still more. At another point Derulo seductively dances with Francesca Hayward, who clearly is a ballet dancer among her many other talents unfortunately exhibited nowhere else to the general public but here; he lifts her leg up to his head and comes within an eighth of an inch of sucking on her toes. At one point later in the movie he emerges from a trashcan with two female cats. Later in the song, Mr. Derulo literally exclaims MILK! which signals that all the Cats ought pile into an establishment literally named 'MILK BAR', where nothing but milk is served onto a plate from a tap, and toward the end of the song, Jason Derulo literally pours the milk tap into the face of one of the female cats, in what one youtube critic called with absolutely correctness: 'A MILK FACIAL!' The female cats fawn on him as though he could go to bed with four of them at a time, but that's probably inadvisable, because apparently Mr. Derulo's natural bulge was so visible through the costume that the CGI department had him neutered... there's should be a bulge there's nothing but a curve.... Derulo apparently was fond enough of his natural bulge that he tried to call out the Cats CGI for their obviously Stalinist act of artistic censorship.
This movie shows just how sad Jennifer Hudson is not by recounting any of her backstory, really ever, except that she once had a couple dates with McCavity. Everybody has romantic regrets... but rather than demonstrate more about why Grizabella the glamor cat is a Jellicle outcast, this movie develops an extreme fixation on Jennifer Hudson's snot; lovingly trickling down her feline brail lips. God bless this performer, she sings her huge feline heart out. It might be an amazing performance, except that then you realize that she's singing this with fur and cat ears and whiskers and who could EVER take this seriously?
There is not a single cat pun that Cats misses. It must have taken a month of brainstorming. The culprits are, of course, the comedians, James Cordon and Rebel Wilson.... This movie... has James Corden... throwing up from overeating THREE TIMES! And this is considered part of his charm. It also has James Cordon eating leftovers from every trash can in central London like a feline George Costanza. Three times is also the number of times landed on a trash can by his nuts, as though they knew that we wouldn't find the trashcan to the groin funny the first two times and keeps trying to land a single physical gag, failing more spectacularly with each attempt - by the third time Corden gets hit in the balls, the unfunniness itself is nearly funny. At one point there's a bottle of champagne poured into his mouth which he laps with his tongue, and yet the CGI champagne LITERALLY STOPS MID-AIR before it hits his mouth!
There's the twin cat burglar cats, Mongo Jerry, and Rumble Teasrer. Chaotic neutral characters, neither good nor villainous, who simply break into a house, go right up to the dinner table, and use the three minuts of their song to SMEAR THEIR ASSHOLES ON THE PLATES!
We then are treated to precisely where Idris Elba kidnaps all the cats to, a barge in the middle of the Thames river. Why there? Who the fuck knows?! We just have to go with it. A great and underrated British actor, Ray Winstone, plays McCavity's henchman, Growltiger, who deserves so much better than his only song to be interrupted by MORE James Corden gags.
Setups exist all through the movie with all the invention of: 'WHO IS THIS CHARACTER?' Followed by the song! There are all kinds of group incantation of poetic verse, because apparently cats exist in a hive mind. And somehow the outsider cat VICTORIA KNOWS ALL THE WORDS TO THE INCANTATIONS IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT SHE'S NEVER MET ANY OF THEM! And though each cat has three individual names they chant the verse of the cat's three names as though they are a single, beehive-or-borg-like entity. Listen to this for just a moment (up to 0:24) IF THEY'RE CHANTING AS A GROUP WHY DO THEY REFER TO THEMSELVES AS 'I'?!?!?!?!?
And then there is poor Judy Dench, draped in a fur coat that is exactly the same hew as her fur, so I can only assume that at some point when she'd put on a little weight she'd skinned herself yet somehow grew her fur back. Dame Judi plays what seems to be the Prime Minister of the Jellicle Cats, Old Deuteronomy, who is introduced in a song whose rhymes do not entirely rhyme, and one cannot quite blame Cats's famous lyricist, Tim Rice, for this problem because he was stuck with the daunting challenge of rhyming with 'Deuteronomy.' Then, some more group chants, which exist while we find Ian McKellen hamming his inner cat, he's sometimes in these group scenes, sometimes not, depending on which days they could afford him, and mid-chant, intoning in his most thespianly voice: Meow Meow MEOOOOWWWWW!
And then... there is... the Jellicle ball, when the Jellicle moon so puts every cat into a pagan-like trance that they dance a Feline Rite of Spring, except that the music is, of course, Andrew Lloyd Webber synth. At the end of it, a theatrical audience would naturally emit storm of applause. But film has no such luxury, so we merely hear the winded breath of the dancers, who sound like they've all partaken of yet another exhausting orgy. The breathing was so vivid, dear listener, I swear I could smell the 'Bee O' in the theater.
And now we get to Ian McKellen's song, as Gus, the theater cat. Even more than Dame Judy, Sir Ian clearly takes this very, very, seriously. And bless him, the greatest King Lear ever caught on video makes all kinds of thespian meows and purrs and caterwauls, he even laps water out of a bowl with his tongue while standing on two legs. Outside of the song, half his lines in this movie are so overacted that they cant be understood. But the true piece du resistance is right at the end of this song, the moment of this movie that truly made me cry-laugh. The cat audience so appreciates McKellan's performance that they don't cheer with applause or bravos or even woos, a hundred cats all wail rawaawawwwwrr! That is the moment when I realized I wasn't just seeing a typical terrible movie. This is a once in a generation movie! The kind of failure that can only be created by geniuses.
And then comes Skimbelshank the railway cat, and in some ways it's the best of all the numbers, frenetic as a train, actual momentum, relatively clever lyrics, even a relatively complex rhythm in the bridge, the only problem is that when the Cats come to the railroad, they are suddenly one-third their size, no larger than rats in relation to the rails.
And finally, we come to Taylor Swift, the alleged star of the show if one believed the billing. Reclining in a chez longe made to look like a golden moon, and sprinkling what is literally EXPLODING CAT NIP on all the Jellicle cats who are literally tranced and brainwashed into temporarily becoming Taylor Swift dancers. Taylor sings not of herself, but of McCavity, who somehow does not have much song of his own, but it doesn't really tell us much about McCavity. So if we never learn who McCavity is, what hope have we to learn who T-Swift is either? All we know is that Taylor Swift's cat cleavage is, for whatever reason, massive and generously areolaed, except in close-up shot, where nipples completely vanish, and yet again begs the question: WHY DO THESE CATS HAVE TWO NIPPLES?!?
We finally get to the weenie or MacGuffin of the whole thing. McCavity kidnapped all the other competing cats so that he will win the Jellicle Ball, some criminal mastermind this guy... The annual Jellicle Ball determines which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer. What is the Heaviside Layer you ask?.....
Don't...
And when Old Deuteronomy doesn't choose McCavity, he kidnaps her to the same barge to which all the other singing cats disapparated and McCavity makes 'Deuteronomy' walk the plank...
And yet, a full five minutes later, when it comes time for Magical Mr. Mestopheles to apparat her back, she is yet alive and not even wet, perhaps she finagled her way out of walking the plank to its edge, but we never find out how. Magical Mr. Mespheles is apparently clever enough to transport cats from the middle of the Thames to somewhere around Leicester Square, but is he really clever enough to effect bodily resurrection from afar? Not to mention that over the course of the song Mr. Mestopheles sings about how he's black from the top of his ears to the tip of his tail, and all the while HE IS CLEARLY MOSTLY WHITE! Not to mention the problems of continuity shots - there's one shot where a Cat is holding a hat in her hand, only to cut to a side shot where she's holding the SAME HAT IN HER MOUTH! Not to mention yet again the issue of Jason Derulo's musical hamminess. While everybody is singing "Oh, well I never was there ever, a cat so clever as Magical Mr. Mestopheles," he literally goes on his own falsetto solo in the middle of a unison chorus... After the reappearance of Old Deuteronomy, Mr. Mestophelees literally makes all the cards and instruments and flowers in the room float through the air as he flies though it. What a moment of triumph...
Don't...
And when Old Deuteronomy doesn't choose McCavity, he kidnaps her to the same barge to which all the other singing cats disapparated and McCavity makes 'Deuteronomy' walk the plank...
And yet, a full five minutes later, when it comes time for Magical Mr. Mestopheles to apparat her back, she is yet alive and not even wet, perhaps she finagled her way out of walking the plank to its edge, but we never find out how. Magical Mr. Mespheles is apparently clever enough to transport cats from the middle of the Thames to somewhere around Leicester Square, but is he really clever enough to effect bodily resurrection from afar? Not to mention that over the course of the song Mr. Mestopheles sings about how he's black from the top of his ears to the tip of his tail, and all the while HE IS CLEARLY MOSTLY WHITE! Not to mention the problems of continuity shots - there's one shot where a Cat is holding a hat in her hand, only to cut to a side shot where she's holding the SAME HAT IN HER MOUTH! Not to mention yet again the issue of Jason Derulo's musical hamminess. While everybody is singing "Oh, well I never was there ever, a cat so clever as Magical Mr. Mestopheles," he literally goes on his own falsetto solo in the middle of a unison chorus... After the reappearance of Old Deuteronomy, Mr. Mestophelees literally makes all the cards and instruments and flowers in the room float through the air as he flies though it. What a moment of triumph...
Finally, we return to Jennifer Hudson's snot. What does Memories have to do with the rest of Cats?... Well... What does any song in this movie have to do with any other? After four experiences in the theater, I have absolutely no idea what Memories is about. Traditionally, the point of music theater songs is that they can't just exist on their own, they have to move the plot forward or else they halt the plot completey. BUT WHAT PLOT DOES CATS HAVE?!? And then, of course in the middle of the song there's(THX)
So inevitably Jennifer Hudson's outcast cat is the Jellicle Choice. Why? Because she can sing loud. She makes her way to the hot-air balloon to ascend to the Heaviside layer. So what is the reward that Idris Elba and James Corden and Rebel Wilson and IanMcKellen sought so fervently? It is, very simply, A PAGAN SACRIFICE!!! Jennifer Hudson ascends to the Heaviside Layer to be reborn, the moment before the movie ends, she disappears in a twinkle of light, presumably in the same moment when she suffocates from the lack of oxygen in the Earth's upper atmosphere.
But not before Judi Dench imparts a bizarrely long homily to the audience about how to address a cat atop one of the lions of Trafalgar Square. The moral of this story: (original cast recording of 'a cat is not a dog'). Which is then repeated at blazing fortissimo by feline Nuremberg. ('a cat is not a dog').
This movie is so bad that it is one of the best movies I've ever seen. It could only be made by a great director, and Tom Hooper is a truly great director. Not of movies per se, but of TV miniseries there's hardly anyone better in the world. He is perhaps the first ever director of 'expressionist historical fiction.' The costumes and history are real, but everything is so bizarrely off-puttingly filmed that it's jarring in a way costume dramas have never been in the stuffy old days. His most famous movie is The King's Speech, but his masterpiece is John Adams, a seven-episode HBO recreation of Colonial America that so far as I know has never been bettered on celluloid. This is history as it always should be, and yet he persists in making really, really, really terrible musicals....
Long may he continue making them! If they are all as bad as Cats, they are worthy of the most honored place in film history. Cats is one of the worst movies ever directed, ever produced, ever seen. May we have a hundred more like it!
This movie is so bad that it is one of the best movies I've ever seen. It could only be made by a great director, and Tom Hooper is a truly great director. Not of movies per se, but of TV miniseries there's hardly anyone better in the world. He is perhaps the first ever director of 'expressionist historical fiction.' The costumes and history are real, but everything is so bizarrely off-puttingly filmed that it's jarring in a way costume dramas have never been in the stuffy old days. His most famous movie is The King's Speech, but his masterpiece is John Adams, a seven-episode HBO recreation of Colonial America that so far as I know has never been bettered on celluloid. This is history as it always should be, and yet he persists in making really, really, really terrible musicals....
Long may he continue making them! If they are all as bad as Cats, they are worthy of the most honored place in film history. Cats is one of the worst movies ever directed, ever produced, ever seen. May we have a hundred more like it!
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