Cats Review the Movie Cats Doesnt Even Know What the Musical Is

[Jason Derulo vocalism] JASON DERULO!

Image: Universal Pictures

Cats is what you'd meet if your third eye suddenly opened

The film adaptation of the striking musical is a fever dream

By Dec 18, 2019, 7:00pm EST

There are three skilful things to be said well-nigh Andrew Lloyd Webber'southward Broadway musical Cats: It's an impressive showcase for dancers, the costumes are inventive, and the songs, while nonsense, are catchy. Tom Hooper's film accommodation neuters all three aspects. Information technology does, all the same, have a fully nude but Ken-Dolled Idris Elba, Ian McKellen lapping milk out of a platter, cats getting yeeted into thin air, dancing cockroaches with man faces, and Jason Derulo screaming, "MILK!"

It's worth mentioning that Webber's original stage musical barely has a plot. For most ii and a half hours, a bunch of cats sing about themselves, then one true cat gets picked to get to sky — excuse me, the Heaviside Layer. The film cuts about 40 minutes of these shenanigans, even though it adds a new vocal, delivered past Victoria (ballerina Francesca Hayward), an abandoned cat who becomes something of an audition surrogate.

In fairness, though, Hooper's Cats defies all principles of linear time or applied storytelling. Cats is a fever dream, a hallucination, an approximation of what would happen if your third centre really opened and yous could suddenly see into the astral plane. The cats all wait similar larger versions of the cat Jemaine Clement turns himself into in What We Practice in the Shadows — he says he "e'er gets the faces wrong" when he transforms, which is why he comes out as a cat with a human face superimposed on it. In the case of Cats, CGI fur, ears, and tails are superimposed on human actors, simply the issue is then uncanny that it seems every bit though things were washed the other style around. The faces have wills of their ain.

That face is BARELY fastened.

Image: Universal Pictures

It likewise happens that the actors aren't made to expect specially catlike — they endeavor to move and carry similar cats (nuzzling and clawing at each other, meowing, leaping at random, etc.), but beyond having their ears CGI-ed out and pelts CGI-ed on, they nonetheless expect like humans. It's discomfiting in one case it sinks in that some cats are wearing clothes (coats, hats, cat-sized sneakers, Rebel Wilson unzipping her fur to reveal a sparkly vest and still more fur) and some aren't — and it'southward even more startling when the cats that are wearing apparel take them off. (Encounter: nude Idris Elba.) There's also no sense of scale; mice and cockroaches (all with the same floating faces every bit the cats) are almost the same size as each other, and seem to be as pocket-size to the cats as they typically are to humans. A later musical number performed on a set of railroad tracks seems to posit that cats are virtually the size of hamsters.

That approach removes the phase show's costumes — usually leotards, leg warmers, and extensive makeup — from the picture. And the dancing is obscured by the fog of CGI around the performers, and by shots and edits that don't serve information technology at all. The cuts are frenetic, losing any sense of motion, and a few scenes even zoom out so far that the cats get dots, so the choreography hardly registers.

The songs are similarly chopped upward, both in terms of bafflingly ho-hum new arrangements and unnecessary asides and exposition dropped in to destroy any sense of menses. Even "Retentiveness," Cats' crown jewel, has the indignity of being saddled with "Beautiful Ghosts," the song Webber and Taylor Swift co-wrote specifically for the picture.

Taylor Swift as a cat.

Image: Universal Pictures

The new song was inevitable. Near every big movie musical adaptation has a new song shoehorned in, with the hopes of winning a Best Original Song Oscar. Les Misérables had "Suddenly," Aladdin had "Speechless," Beauty and the Brute had "Evermore," and and then along. Like these predecessors, "Beautiful Ghosts" is a shrug of a song, and information technology's distinctly poppier than every song that surrounds it. It'due south hither used as something of a chaser to "Memory," as if to siphon respectability from the ane powerhouse number Cats has going for it. The gambit does not piece of work.

But "Memory" itself is yet keen. Hooper's Cats achieves a few bright points — and not just delirium — when its performers commit to their roles. Jennifer Hudson, who plays the disgraced cat Grizabella, delivers "Retentiveness" as if she could retroactively steal Anne Hathaway's Oscar for Les Mis by singing powerfully plenty. As party cat Rum Tum Tugger, Jason Derulo puts on a perfectly convincing British accent and yowls to his heart's content. (And unlike Taylor Swift, he's actually present throughout the movie, instead of only dropping in for a cameo.) And Ian McKellen, every bit former theater true cat Gus, shows up to remind everyone what acting is. Honorable mention goes to Ray Winstone ripping it upwards as tough-guy cat Growltiger. (Recollect Ray Winstone, but a true cat.) Elba, meanwhile, projects the free energy of a army camp counselor who has stopped really caring well-nigh the talent show, but is still committed to having fun, screaming, "Meow!" or his name, "Macavity!" every time he disappears in a cloud of dust.

Though the fact that Macavity is kidnapping other cats is a holdover from the show — he's attempting to brand himself the only cat eligible to ascend to the Heaviside Layer — the way he disappears his competition into puffs of smoke feels similar the strangest possible way of doing it. Is Macavity the devil? Maybe. Like the size of the mice and cockroaches, the cats' clothing, and who is or isn't immune to go to heaven (some mean girl cats initially try to go along Grizabella out of the motion picture), the rules aren't clear. But really, Cats doesn't seem to have any rules at all.

The facts are these: Cats undermines itself in both editing and musical organization, barely has a plot to hang its hat on, and is CGI-ed into oblivion. Yet there'south something weirdly wonderful about but how committed Hooper is to his vision, which feels like it should have been audience-tested into something less phantasmagorical. (Information technology's a trivial like Welcome to Marwen in that sense — the movie isn't corking, but it'due south certainly memorable, and the outcome of someone seeing a startling and unorthodox vision through until the bitter terminate.) Cats also serves every bit a plumbing fixtures end to 2019, equally a death knell to irony. There'due south not a drip of it to be institute among these felines, and information technology's impossible to hang onto information technology in the face of such total Cats confidence, either.

Cats hits theaters Dec. xx.

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Source: https://www.polygon.com/2019/12/18/21028823/cats-review-musical-taylor-swift-idris-elba-jason-derulo-francesca-hayward

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