Believe it or not, I actually already had 95% of a Cats review written and ready to publish today, and I didn’t even know it was going to be released on streaming platforms tomorrow. When I learned this fact, it seemed like fate that today should be the day I talk about Cats. However, with the coronavirus already a much more closely felt, immediately impactful threat than it was even a week ago when I originally wrote this, I felt that perhaps some edits were necessary; the only thing that could cause more cognitive dissonance than talking about the coronavirus and the changes its brought would be to not talk about it. Which, strangely, makes it an absolutely perfect time for Cats.
I’ll admit up front that I’m not a huge Broadway nerd, or even a significant musical fan; I’ve seen Wicked, I adore Hamilton, and I had my obsessive Phantom of the Opera phase almost a decade ago, but that and some additional cursory knowledge is the extent of the context I had for Tom Hooper’s Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. In November of 2019, I wouldn’t have been able to hum the melody of “Memory” or name even just one of the stupid, stupid characters from Cats. I am now, however, burdened with this and more knowledge, and shall share it with you. Knowing the context for the literal words in Cats is crucial—not because it will give you true understanding of the events in the film, but because then you know better than to try and suss out silly things like “metaphors” and “character arcs” and “story structure” during the hour and fifty minute runtime. (Trust me, there is so much else to focus on besides the confounding lyrics/dialogue.) In the late 1930s, renowned, Nobel-Prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot wrote a bunch of poems about cats and what their deal was in letters to his godchildren, and they were eventually collected and published into a cute, odd little children’s book. (They exist as an odd addendum to the rest of his non-cat-related catalog, and should not be taken as a taster for his broader style.) Flash forward to the late 70s, where composer Andrew Lloyd Webber took these poems that he’d loved as a child and set them to music, originally just as an exercise in matching music to lyrics, only for it to turn into a bizarrely enormous sensation. Unsurprisingly, the movie rights to the Broadway show were quickly snatched up by Universal Studios, who then took almost 40 goddamned years to actually make a movie version happen. Cats as we know it started production in December 2018, and wasn’t finished until the day before its release on December 20, 2019—except not actually, hang on, we’re sending a new version of Cats to theaters, it’s really finished this time, we pinkie promise.
Now for a tangent that is more relevant than it may appear to be: I recently got around to watching 2010’s Rubber, a long-awaited showing chosen by my lovely boyfriend, who dubbed it the dumbest movie he’d ever seen. Rubber, if you aren’t aware, is a low-budget, 80-minute film about a tire that gains sentience and starts killing people in a small desert town. I had heard of it, often in the context of “best bad movies” a la The Room and Birdemic. After watching it, however, Rubber didn’t quite reach the ridiculously enjoyable heights of something like The Room for me, particularly since a lot of the joy I got out of the film was that it was so well made (I’m not kidding: there are long, silent segments where the camera is centered on the tire, with no other subjects around, and director Quentin Dupieux is enviously good at using only sound and images to convey very clear feelings and intent. From a tire). But the reason I bring up Rubber is not because it was similar to my experience with Cats; quite the opposite. The real sticking point in Rubber not quite working for me as a “so bad it’s good” movie was its off-putting cynical tone. This tone wasn’t omnipresent throughout the movie (only with its semi-redundant human characters), but it was a strong enough presence that it left a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless. I found that this cynicism harkens back to the 90s and 90s media, where we all felt secure enough in life to heavily indulge in the sarcastic, the ironic, and the intentionally distasteful in our pop culture. This kind of media is not bad, and you are not bad if you enjoy it; I’ve just found that when I’m confronted with that 90s too-cool-to-care attitude, I automatically respond with the obvious rebuttal: if you don’t care, then why should I? But then—there’s Cats.
Months and months ago, when the trailer first dropped and we were all suffering from Cats fever—the only prescription for which is to walk into the ocean and never return—I noted that besides the, like, everything else about it, the oddest part of the Cats cats were that they still had human noses; why not change them to cat noses? Then the human-face-on-cat-head would belong roughly 40% less in the Uncanny Valley, and we could all get on with our lives. Unfortunately, I am not yet an award-winning script doctor for Big Hollywood, so nobody listened to me. And when I finally saw Cats in theaters, I was right; it was a bit distracting. But it is nothing, nothing, compared to the distraction that is just the movie itself; a sickening feast of constant color, noise, movement, or all three, where details, important characters, and vital plot points are treated with equal importance, and the normal three-act structure is traded in for an interminable series of events that progresses either too fast for the eye to properly process, or with the speed of a dying camel trying to crawl through quicksand during the longest day of the year. It’s an overwhelming riot of chaos that has to be seen to even attempt comprehension; and even then, good luck attempting to make sense of a film that doesn’t bother looking before it leaps from setpiece to setpiece, rolling in uncomfortable sensuality and gobsmacking lunacy.
But despite all of that—despite its failure on almost every level of filmmaking and storytelling, I still think that Cats has value, as both a film and an experience.
I know I frequently advocate financially supporting movies that perhaps don’t deserve it (*cough* The Snowman *cough*), but what Cats has over other, weaker movies is exactly what Rubber lacked: a completely sincere dedication to its own weird, weird heart. What often makes bad movies so fun to watch is the single-minded focus in vision that is so supremely confident in its own success that when it fails miserably, we all can’t help but laugh. I’ve laughed at other bad movies, sure—but I will never intentionally seek out films like Hobbs & Shaw, or Olympus Has Fallen, or Godzilla: King of the Monsters to watch again, because their failures are tiresome; just more mediocre, joyless content that Hollywood thinks audiences want. And we are going to continue getting Olympus Has Fallens and Hobbs & Shaws until all the lovably bizarre projects—like Cats—are profitable enough to encourage filmmakers to give us more of that good shit.
On a more serious note: infection and death rates, panic-hoarding, the impending election, and the isolation necessitated to keep everyone healthy all adds up to a very grim, panic-fueled atmosphere, which only gets worse when you spend time in the echo chamber that is the internet. It is vital to stay socially conscious, to stay calm, to keep yourself informed and with the proper perspective. Yes, all of these things are important, but as the inimitable Shirley Jackson once said, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” And what’s the perfect tonic to absolute reality? CATS! Get ready for: Academy Award-nominated actor Sir Ian McKellan lapping up a bowl of milk! Human-cockroach kicklines! Milk bars where female cats whine with desire for Jason Derulo-cat! Cats! Distractingly genital-less cats! MORE CATS!
Hyperfixation Film Reviews 