I think it looks good. I hope this time it has a plot, a new script, and better songs.
Elaine Page has pretty much ruined all other versions of “Memories” for me.
I had a “Whaaa…?” moment when I read that Taylor Swift had been cast as Bombalurina. She really doesn’t have the sultry sensuality the role requires. Nor the voice, in my opinion - there’s a YouTube channel that plays pop singers with all the backing music and Autotune stripped out, so that all you hear is the vocal feed. Taylor’s is kinda weak and reedy. (Ariana Grande, on the other hand, can belt it out.) I’d see Swift more as Jemima or maybe Rumpleteazer. Of course, until I just saw the trailer, I thought the film was merely another production of the musical; I didn’t realize it was a different story altogether. (Guessing from the trailer it’s a love story between Victoria and Mistofflees?)
Actually, the intro is the best part of that:
Sort of like cats themselves.
Plot? New songs? Sounds like a recipe for messing with success.
And I’m still waiting for my Waste Land feature-film adaptation…
Musical feature, I mean:
♬ April is the cruellest month ♫
I guess this was predictable : one of the main stars is black but in the movie her fur is white, some twitter people are mad about that.
The trailer for 'Cats' has people asking why you can't tell the black lead is black
Remember syncro-vox? This is syncro-face.
Opens against Star Wars: Episode IX.
Bold move, Cats. Bold move.
The stage version worked because it was only people dressed in a rough way to suggest cats, and you had to use your imagination.
The film version doesn’t work because they tried too hard with CGI to make the actors look more like cats. They fell between the two stools of imagination and realism. It is a case of uncanny valley. It just looks wrong.
Also the cats look too small in proportion to the scenery. Have the designers never seen a cat in the house and compared the size of a cat to the size of the furniture?
I don’t think anyone is ever going to improve on Elaine Paige singing Memories.
You do realize that your link is to the previous 1998 movie and not to the stage version, although to be fair they did stay fairly true to the stage version.
Elaine Page is great but I will always be team Betty Buckley, who is singing live, as opposed to Page who presumably had the option for multiple takes in the movie version you linked.
As for the new trailer, the CGI is a total fail. Unless they are all supposed to be sphinx cats, no real cats have fur that short. Adding a couple of inches would have helped greatly. The casting for this was great and judging from my own cats, the scale seems about right to me. I had high hopes but this looks like a total fail. It looks like to create a story, they are beefing up the role of Victoria/white cat and are going to tell the story from her perspective. Since this was a purely dancing role in the original, having her speak is definitely a change. That trailer does NOT make me want to see this, so a total fail on that account.
It was basically the stage version filmed as a movie.
Sorry, but the Betty Buckley version of Memories leaves me cold.
Watching it again, I think what is really creeping me out is the faces. In prior versions, they made up the faces to look like cats using makeup to change the contours of their lips and cheeks to create the illusion of cat faces example. Here the faces are entirely human except for the absence of human ears and the addition of cat ears.
And we will have to agree to disagree on who sang Memory best. Can we agree that the trailer is hella weird, though?
I agree that the faces are the problem. Or a large part of it, anyway.
Looking again at the Betty Buckley video, it’s clear that she’s not a cat person. She does that pawing motion, but anyone who has a cat knows that they only do that when they are happy, not when they are unhappy. She also doesn’t move like a cat. You may say that’s beside the point, it’s the singing that matters - but the singing also doesn’t have the emotion and intensity that Elaine Paige puts into it.
Is this trailer supposed to get people who have never seen the play on stage before excited about this? Because it doesn’t. I have no idea of who any of the characters are or what the plot is. This is a trailer and not a teaser, right?
I think the issue is that they’re layering too many things together, poorly. They’re taking footage that may be of a live set or CGI location, putting CGI and/or very limber people into it via greenscreen, then putting the faces of famous people on them.
If you’re very very careful, you might get those to all blend together correctly but the human eye is very good at sensing when something is amiss even if the brain can be poor at figuring out exactly what is so ‘uncanny valley’ about the image. If you have a celebrity’s face just 1% off rotation from the body that you’re putting it on, it looks wrong. In a still photo, it might not matter, but in motion you’ll clearly get the sense that there’s something not quite right about it all. And it can be, similarly, messed up by differences in lighting, differences in the zoom level of the camera (or view frustum), difference in image crispness and focus, etc.
You get that sort of layering issue when you put the face on the body and when you put the body into a background, if it wasn’t rendered as part of the same CGI scene.
In addition to layering, there’s also (I’m pretty sure) some CGI bodies in there and that gives you the same sort of thing as when you’re watching a superhero movie and suddenly the action sequence starts and all of the character’s joints and bones seem to take on a slightly rubbery flexibility and you know that you’re in CGI land.
Even if you get the face perfectly aligned and all the lighting and everything else, gluing a photographic and obviously real face onto a rubber, CGI body also adds uncanny valley.
All that said, the effect wasn’t so extreme as to put me off. I think they would have done better to have gone full-practical or full-Avatar, but I don’t have the feeling like the sort of person who likes Cats is the sort of person who cares too much that he’s watching a film that looks like a bad photomanipulation romance novel cover in motion so, practically speaking, I guess it doesn’t matter too much.
For me, the reason not to go, is that Cats just isn’t very good. 
The musical is a bunch of people roller skating around singing knock-off 70s songs. The trailer represents the show perfectly, in terms of giving you an idea of who the characters are and what the plot is and, I should note, I don’t say that to mock the show. I didn’t care for it but even someone who does will tell you that it’s just people dancing and singing in cat outfits. Any minimal plot there might be is ancillary and immediately forgotten after leaving the theater.
But if you enjoyed the trailer despite it all being meaningless, you’ll probably love the movie. It is almost certainly, literally, just more of that.
Okay. You can hate Andrew Lloyd Webber, his shows and his music all you want. But you cannot argue with success.
Well, you’re wrong about that. The people objecting most to the trailer are the people who know and love the show.
Maybe you don’t get what it’s about, but that’s no reason to sneer.
To enjoy it you have to:
a) know cats
b) read T.S. Eliot’s poems.
Eliot was a highly renowned serious poet, but he wrote these light and whimsical poems for his godchildren, about cats with different characters.
Anybody who lived with cats will recognise and nod knowingly at
The Rum Tum Tugger is a terrible bore:
When you let him in, then he wants to be out;
He’s always on the wrong side of every door,
And as soon as he’s at home, then he’d like to get about.
Every cat person knows what’s meant by Macavity the Mystery Cat never being around after a crime has been committed.
Andrew Lloyd Webber simply set the poems to music, dancing and staging was added, with some flimsy excuse for a plot to tie it together, and that’s that. The plot is not the point.
:dubious: Are you confusing Cats with Starlight Express? No one roller skates in Cats. And the songs don’t sound like “70s knock-offs” either.