Never Seen It #259: Cats

You've seen us both at work and games, and learnt about our proper names, our 400 movies and our habitat. But how would you ad-dress a cat? So first, your memory I'll jog, and say: A cat is not a blog.

Cats

2019

Tom Hooper

Well, it's not a good movie, but we knew that already. The trick is understanding why it's not a good movie. Many people will argue (and have argued) that Cats is a bad movie because it is poorly made. That's not necessarily untrue, but I'll disagree that this is why it's bad. Cats the 2019 movie is bad, in my opinion, because Cats the 1981 musical is bad. Even if Tom Hooper et al. didn't shit the bed on this one, I'd still be writing a negative review, because this shit sucks no matter how you adapt it for the big screen.

Here's something funny. Let's flash back to like 2010. I'm still working part-time at the retirement home, and I'm good enough at the job now that there's ample time to fuck around in between seatings. One day, I'm rooting through the drawers at the front wait station, just because I'm bored, and I pull out a book. Probably something that a resident left behind long ago and forgot about. It's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot. Me and my coworkers are paging through this thing, giggling. I'm doing ironic readings of it, we're having a grand old time. That's the type of book it was—it was silly. Very silly. For maybe a whole summer, a running gag in the dining room was "let's consult the cat book."

I had no fucking clue till years later, maybe not even until the 2019 release of the box office debacle Cats, that the musical was based on that stupid little book of nonsensical poetry. It just doesn't make sense to me. There's nothing there. It's just a bunch of silly words, some of them made up. I think the poems are fun and funny, and I liked reading them, even beyond the forced irony of adolescent performance. But it's idiotic to think that they could be turned into a whole damn cohesive musical.

I've never seen the musical Cats, so this is all assumption, based on my viewing of the 2019 adaptation, but assuming I'm not missing something, I'll say that the musical does NOTHING to justify turning the disparate cat poems into a Broadway production. The book's premise is "let's introduce you to some cats." The musical's premise is... "let's introduce you to some cats." The barest bullshit is introduced, with the evil cat Macavity disappearing the cats that are introduced, but c'mon. That's stupid. This is all so stupid. C'mon.

So what I'm saying is that the movie that I just watched and immediately ran to the blog to type about was always fated to be bad. There was nothing anyone could have done, beyond tearing the whole fucking source material down and starting again, which is probably not something that anyone involved in this would ever have the balls to do. But I'm here to say that all the other issues that people seemed to have a problem with, during those halcyon days immediate before COVID, all that shit is just window dressing. The special effects are bad, but so fucking what? The best special effects in film history could do nothing to save this musical from having the quality of a hairball. It has nothing to do with production. It's all the fault of the source material.

That being said... sure, I also agree that this movie in particular looks like dogshit. (Sorry: catshit.) It honestly would have been 100x better if they had just worn cat suits instead of getting cat bodies CGI'd onto each actor. It's creepy the way they have it. Cat suits would've looked silly, but isn't that silliness closer to the T.S. Eliot poems anyway? What part of this endeavor is requiring lifelike cat movements? The only thing I need to look real in a stupid, silly movie like this is the buttholes. But they couldn't even let us have that. Let Cat Taylor Swift have a butthole! She's a MAGA wife now, it's not like I'd be turned on by it. I just want the cats to be realistic in this one specific way.

Speaking of buttholes, this reminds me of something I was lightly speculating on while watching this movie and very much not having a good time. I wonder whether my feelings about cats, like the pet, are affecting my ability to appreciate this movie? Our cat Lulu has lived with us for about fifteen months now, and I've had a lot of time to evaluate and reevaluate my feelings about it. With some ups and downs (mostly downs), I can say now that me and Lulu are comfortably neutral toward each other. I feed her when I need to, and she mostly leaves me alone otherwise. And this is good! This works for both of us. I don't need to form a bond with a cat. She doesn't give a shit about me, so why should I give more than the requisite shit about her?

And why would I then want to watch a bunch of other cats squirm around on screen? Why would I want to see James Corden and Rebel Wilson dressed as cats and do their best impressions of "funny people" while dressed as cats? It doesn't make sense. It's not appealing to me. Maybe this is why I'm less interested in talking shit about the production value of Cats—I was already disappointed with cats, so the disappointment over Cats feels like overkill to me, like old news.

Nah, I'm fronting. It always comes back to the musical. I'm just tired of the idea that any existing IP can be a musical. That's a 2020s problem, not a 1981 problem, so I can't blame Cats the musical for playing into it, even though everyone involved should've known that adapting this particular book of poetry was a bad idea. Do we really need a SpongeBob musical? I don't even see that many musicals and I'm still tired, just tired of hearing about it. I'm tired of having to pretend that it's good because there are songs and dancing. There needs to be something else here. A motherfucking story, ya know? Having a couple decent songs does not excuse the fact that there is no story here.

That's not just a problem with Cats, of course, and that's another reason why I'm reluctant to come down hard on this movie. This is a problem with most film adaptations of musicals. It's a different artform, the big screen. I need to be invested in the story, the characters. Cats could not give less of a shit in getting me invested in the story, because there is none. It's just a bunch of poorly animated legacy actors and theater lifers and butthole-less Taylor Swifts dancing around to songs composed of like 40% made-up words. That's not a movie!

I'm getting bored writing this like I was bored watching Cats, so I'm going to wrap it up now. But let me just reiterate one more time that it's not the movie's fault. It's the fault of the musical. I will never have a theater musical version of the Never Seen It list, because that means that I'll have to watch Cats the musical. I don't need to do that. No one needs to do that. We were all pretty happy before we knew what Cats was. Let's go back to that.

GRADE: 1 puke out of 5

STRAY (CAT) THOUGHT: "Memory" strikes a chord of recognition for me. Why? Was it just popular enough that it penetrated the pop culture consciousness? Or some other reason? I have this weird feeling that the song was either featured in or parodied in a movie that came out during my lifetime, like a kids movie. I can't find anything on google. Maybe you can help.

NEXT TIME: Group E takes a bow with the final film on the Film Club list (alphabetically speaking), 3:10 to Yuma.