DPRK:
Right, because he’s a magician, and magicians pull animals from hats. That isn’t saying he is a female. :rolleyes: Or do cats give birth out of hats now?
I agree with DPRK .
Read the original T.S. Eliot poem and see what the intention is. Especially in the context of the rest of the poems.
DPRK
January 1, 2020, 7:12pm
124
Maybe it was a really big hat?
Anyway, that’s my theory… please let me know if any more background is known for these poems, like the identity of specific cats he may have been inspired by.
DPRK
January 1, 2020, 9:00pm
125
Or, for a less Spock-like interpretation: this cat mysteriously produced a litter of kittens. I wonder how that could be?
Wait a minute…
Mysterious cat…magical cat…can create life…
Is…is he kitty Jesus?
Thank goodness somebody else interpreted Mr. Mistopheles the same way I did. To me the whole point of that poem is that the cat is female and the family is clueless.
typoink
January 2, 2020, 3:43pm
128
In a classic case of different strokes, I would have said those two segments were the only ones that kinda worked. The originals are just so earnest and bombastic that I couldn’t imagine them working. The movie’s tweaks at least gave the actors something to work with.
Boy, though, this movie is something special. Damn near every decision made was the wrong one.
Here’s another “man on the street” stream of consciousness review worth reading. A few highlights:
– The first cats appear onscreen. Holy crap. I have never done acid. Is this what it feels like?
– 10 minutes in, someone down the aisle actually cried out “No, no, please stop.” I am not making that up.
– Also — is Old Deuteronomy the ‘Cats” version of Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs?” Because she is wearing a fur coat. Which means she is wearing the skin of another cat. Which means … we need to put some lotion in the basket.
– Why. Is. There. So. Much. Licking?
– Finally, 45 minutes in, the cat orgy begins.
– This is the weirdest way to start an orgy I have ever seen. And I’ve seen “Eyes Wide Shut.”
– Wait. Is that cat wearing pants?
– The cats have shoes. And are breakdancing. I don’t know what anything means anymore.
– The scale of the cats in this movie makes no sense. One minute the cats are half the height of a human doorway. Next they are so small that they are tap-dancing IN ROWS while standing on the rails of a railway track. Are they two feet tall, or two inches? I question the science here.
– Why does Taylor-Cat have giant cat-boobs? None of the other cats do. I have even more questions about the science going on here.
– I kid you not — by now, this audience is treating the movie like Rocky Horror and yelling things at the screen. “Try again!” they shout at Mister Mistoffeles, after his fourth straight attempt at magic fails. And when he finally pulls the magic feat off, the whole theater bursts into applause and hooting.
– Covered in fur and snarling, Ian McKellan just pushed another cat off of a boat. Someone in the audience yells “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” Whole theater loses it.
– The movie got a standing ovation. Holy shit. People were chanting “Cats are not dogs!”
Good article in the New York Review of Books:
Cats the musical, which premiered in London in 1981, was primarily a human variety show: a pastiche of twentieth-century music and dance tethered to some of T.S. Eliot’s lightest verse. Amid the jazz choreography and leg-warmers, the trash-strewn Thatcherite dystopia of the set and the guileless pizzazz of the performances, the stars of the Broadway run were never convincingly cats, just particularly exuberant people. In Cats the movie, they are not even convincingly human. …
Cats’s aesthetics are glossy and appalling, not handmade and flamboyant; it is boring when it should be weird and weird when it should be sincere. It is the extruded plastic from the Disney factory floor, the byproduct of the convulsions of an industry increasingly unsure of how to represent human beings at all. …
The technology is onerous, and it is strange. This goes beyond the problem of the uncanny valley common to digital animation. To be sure, it doesn’t help matters that the animation is often a mess: the film was reportedly being worked on right up until its premiere, and the studio still had to deliver a revised print to theaters a week after its initial release; most obviously to the untrained eye, the actors’ faces often seem to float and slide around in their cat heads. Yet the digital device at the heart of the movie, the trick that makes these cats cats—their fur—does look impressively real. Indeed, by the same token, it looks insane. …
As the plotless spectacle drags on, disbelief at its oddness gives way to boredom and, at least at the screenings I attended, real-time conversation. In this respect, Cats is fitting for the Internet era as its emptiness accommodates the compulsive need to play with our phones at all times. Boisterous audiences are tweeting, instagramming, and otherwise sharing snippets of the film and, more importantly, the atmosphere of good-humored incredulity. …
There is something stunning about the scale of the catastrophe on screen, given the slightness of its source material. …
True that you would expect the actual birth to take place in a closet or cardboard box or other isolated, quiet, comfortable spot where the cat can lie down. However sometimes the mother will move the kittens to a different spot, if the original nest was not secluded enough. Like into a sock drawer… so why not a top hat? But in any case, why would a male cat be messing about with kittens? By Occam’s razor we can conclude the cat in question was female.