I have the 1998 version on DVD and saw the original show on Broadway in the '80s. I have the book of poetry and my daughter is also a fan of the poems. But this looks horrific. Seriously, this is clearly someone saying “Hey, we now have the CGI capability to make people look a lot more like cats, so let’s get a bunch of famous people to do the show. We can fix any obvious problems with the singing and dancing in post-production.”
Except that with Cats the singing and dancing are the entire show. There is no real plot; it’s just a bunch of character studies (which is not necessarily a bad thing - consider how Wilder’s “Our Town” works as a play) but the sole attraction is all the people dancing around like cats - which is a lot more physically demanding than one might think - and belting out fun songs. That’s the entire attraction of Cats. And if the trailer is anything to go by, they’ve missed the point by a mile in exchange for a CGI-driven slushfest.
ETA:
The play did not have a plot. Not really. Grizabella skulks around occasionally between numbers, sings her one song, and then ascends to the Heavyside Layer at the end for no real reason other than we feel sorry for her. The rest is just songs about the various other characters.
The weird thing is the reviews are ***so ***bad that it makes me curious enough to want to see it. Is it just bad, or is it so spectacularly bad it’s good and destined to be a cult camp classic?
Will it turn out to be a forgotten misfire like the “A Chorus Line” movie, or will it end up being this generation’s “Xanadu” (objectively bad on so many levels, but I can’t not watch it if I stumble across it)?
Huh, I never realized that the Heaviside layer is a real thing. It doesn’t seem to be a thing that a cat might particularly want to ascend to, though.
The whole business has kind of a weird feel to it. Every year Old Deuteronomy picks a cat, and that cat . . . goes away.
“So every year you pick one of us, and then they . . . go away?”
“They do not go away, they ascend to the Heaviside Layer!"
“But isn’t that just the layer in the ionosphere that radio waves bounce off of?”
“Shut up, Brainylura.”
Why do I have the feeling that, if AMPAS really wants people to watch next year’s Oscars (which are on February 9, for some reason which probably has something to do with Yet Still Even Another Misguided (and failed) Attempt to get the nominations done before the Golden Globe winners are announced), the academy’s musicians will take great pains to make sure the new song, co-written by Taylor Swift, is nominated, and the show’s producers will sell their souls to get her to perform it live?
I had the afternoon off so we caught a matinee; we enjoyed it.
I suspect that the majority of negative reviews there are from critics overly attached to the source material, similar to what happened with The Lone Ranger. Another movie not anywhere close to as bad as it’s been made out to be.
Maybe, but I also think there’s a lot of negative reviews from critics who hate the source material, because a lot of them focus on criticisms of the music and plot that are part and parcel of the whole Cats experience.
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
I am not familiar with the stage musical except for having heard “Memory” on TV at some point and looking up the synopsis on Wikipedia. So I have no attachment to the original. And I say this looks terrible.
Keeping it as a stage production with people in cat costumes would have been the humane way to go. The audience can pretend it’s cats dancing while enjoying the performances. No one has to stress about how to translate that to a movie without it looking creepy and/or cheap. Whatever.
But this monstrosity? I think what’s really freaky looking is the human faces with cat fur all around. It just does not look right to see a human nose and voluptuous human lips wearing bright pink lipstick surrounded by cat fur. They probably didn’t want to obscure the performer’ faces too much, but it was needed if they were going to produce this thing.
