At this very moment I am at the musical at the Keller Auditorium in Portland, it is intermission, and in every way, shape and form it is light-years ahead of that abominable movie.
I believe that Rifftrax (the spinoff from MST3K) gets around that problem by being not including any audio or video from the film being mocked. It is an original recording that just happens to comment on a film when you play it in sync with the film. It’s a pretty ingenious way to be able to pan any film regardless of copyright law; they put out “riffs” for just about everything, including new releases.
Call The Burn Ward! This is 3rd Degree!
Do they use any tricks to synchronize them, or do they just tell you to hit “play” on both at the same time and trust that that’ll be close enough?
Rifftrax tells you when to start the movie, and also has several lines scattered throughout the film spoken by “DisembAudio” which should be synced to the film, so you can make sure things are on track. They also have an app which will sync the track automatically.
These days Rifftrax also sells complete films which are in the public domain, but their original gig was selling audio tracks to play alongside the movies, which allowed them to finally do those big budget films they never could have afforded when they were on basic cable.
Casting Taylor Swift makes sense. Casting her as Bombalurina, does not. Bombalurina is sexy and sultry and sensual; her duet with Demeter in “Macavity” is unabashedly erotic. That doesn’t seem to fit Swift’s image or her talents (although she may have been trying to move past her “cute-girl-next-door” persona). I would have expected her to play Rumpleteazer or Jemima. However, she didn’t seem to come in for much abuse in the reviews I saw, so maybe she wasn’t bad - I sure as hell ain’t gonna watch to find out.
I’ll put my hand up to loving the 1998 filmed stage production, that featured the soaring vocals of Elaine Paige and Ken Page - who, incidentally, was the voice of Oogie Boogie in Nightmare Before Christmas - and the playful dancing of John Partridge and Jo Gibb (to name two of my favorites). But one trailer was enough to convince me that Tom Hooper had screwed the pooch with Cats. So to speak.
Consider Rebel Wilson’s Jenny Anydots. Jenny is an elderly, floofy cat who spends all day basking in a sunbeam. But at night, she sneaks into the basement to teach the mice music and crocheting, to “improve their behavior”. She also organizes the cockroaches into scout troops, to keep them from “wanton and idle destroyment”. She’s apparently a parody of a well-meaning but patronizing upper-class Briton who’s self-appointed task is to redeem the “lower orders”; she even organizes the roaches into a “beetle tattoo”. So how the hell does that fit with Wilson’s Jenny casually eating one of them? And Bustopher Jones is supposed to be a dandy, a cat admired by all the Jellicles for his style, dignity, and girth; his song calls him a Beau Brummell. How this matches with James Corden rolling around in cat litter and garbage, I do not see.
Yeah, thank you for throwing yourself on this grenade, @RickJay; I will happily contribute to the GoFundMe you set up to get therapy so that you may heal from your trauma and once again live a normal, happy life.
Swift, herself, was fine. The song was not well produced, but she did pretty well. She can sing, and she’s charismatic.
The Wilson and Corden numbers might actually have been the worst musical numbers I have ever seen in a movie, and I saw Ewan MacGregor try to sing in “Moulin Rouge!” Guys, I saw Xanadu. It’s impossible to overstate how bad they are.
Again and again, it’s as if Tom Hooper literally did not listen to, or read, the lyrics; the visuals contradict the songs over and over.
But was it worse than Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood “sing” in Paint Your Wagon? That’s my benchmark.
I’m thinking of starting a thread about widely despised movies that I’ve seen and my opinion of them (just as soon as I get around to actually watching them all). I’ve been wavering a bit on whether I should make an effort to get Cats, so I’m glad to have this thread.
My guess is that I wouldn’t hate it (I have an extremely high tolerance for “bad CGI” and “uncanny valley”, and “cringe” doesn’t register at all), but I’d find it super hard to make it all the way through. I’m not a fan of big operatic musicals to begin with, and if the quality is as bad as it sounds, I’m going to be asking myself “Why am I wasting my time on this?” pretty quickly. I’d almost certainly have to fast forward past all the bad singing parts at least. Honestly, the only reason for me to pick this up at any price would be for the aforementioned thread, and it’s going to have to get in line behind Swing Kids, Howard The Duck, Leonard Part 6, Ghostbusters 2, and Young Einstein. And Street Fighter if I can find it anywhere.
“Cats” is so much worse than Ghostbusters II it’s ridiculous. I mean, Ghostbusters 2016 was WAY worse than Ghostbusters II, just brutal, and compared to “Cats” it’s Citizen Kane.
Had my family not drives 40 minutes, and had we not cooked for everyone, no way I’d have made it all the way through.
Get the 1998 version if you want to see what Cats is all about. It has the best cast (all from London or Broadway theater), and it’s basically the play as performed on stage recorded on film, with closeups and better viewing angles. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s entertaining, and the singers and dancers are great.
Yeah, the 1998 version is quite good, although the DVD I own of it has fairly poor video quality. I wonder if it exists on Blu Ray?
On the downside, it skips Growltiger’s Last Stand (and thus, implicitly, The Ballad of Billy McCaw)
I agree. One of the highlights. Although definitely not PC anymore.
It does. Video is excellent.