I listened to it all and I said Andrew is
this something I don't get? Is this about Queen Victoria she's the main cat
Disraeli and Gladstone are other cats and and then there are you know poor cats
and am I missing this? And and he took a terrible painful long pause and said "Hal,
it's about cats." And we never discussed it again. In 2012 New York Times food critic Pete
Wells published a review of Food Network personality and human can of Bud Light
Lime Right on. (laughs) Right on! Guy Fieri's Massive Times Square restaurant, Guy Fieri's American Kitchen & Bar fittingly located right across the street from the Majestic
Theatre which at the time had hosted Phantom of the Opera on Broadway for
nearly 25 years. And while some eight years later we've come full-circle to where we've all decided that Guy Fieri is both prime meme fodder and also good
now People shit on that dude all the time and as far as I can tell all he ever did was follow his dreams 2012 was a different time and Wells's review pulled no punches And in a way food reviews seldom do, Wells's piece blew up and went viral with
everyone sharing it to their Facebook and Twitter timelines cheering and
celebrating the epic pwnage of Guy Fieri that sun-drenched frosted tipped buffoon
by one of the most widely circulated newspapers in the world
and while rubber necking trash fires has been a time-honored tradition as long as
civilization has been a thing the commodification of our need to see trash
being eviscerated by the critic intelligencia has become an ever
evolving industry. One can after all easily elevate their online brand with a
well time to take down. And with Tom Hooper's 2019 trainwreck adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's
musical of the same name there was blood in the water. Are you blind when you're born?
can you see in the dark? I was one of the very first people to see Cats the movie
the musical if Tom Hooper's to be believed some 24 hours after the film
was even finished this was not because I'm the world biggest cats Stan or
because I'm just that important, it was because I cajoled my friend who got
invited to a critic screening to let me be her plus-one meow meow meow see after weeks of reveling in the pure unintentional Salvadorian madness that
was the trailer, I was keen to be one of the first. I got my complimentary cat
ears they gave us Cats temporary tattoos and Cats champagne presumably to
help black out what we were about to see and we settled in for the ride of a
lifetime there were two types of people at this
screening: people who were familiar with Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats and people
who until now had lived in blissful ignorance meow I was in fact sandwiched
right between two of these people--to my left set Angie Han, critic for
mashable.com and who knew f*ckall about Cats and to my right Emily VanDerWerff, critic-at-large for Vox.com and the person I cajoled into taking me, and who like me
was familiar with Cats Emily spent more or less the whole film
making this face and Angie spent the whole film making this face. Both of them
deeply enjoy the experience for the record. Maybe not the film itself but
definitely the experience MIIIIIIILK! For people who hadn't seen Cats before the question
seemed to be And say a cat is not... a dog is this it? Is this this what Cats is? Is
this what Cats has been the whole time? and on that day I was like I mean yeah
that that's pretty much Cats What did you expect? And say a cat is not... a dog and if you follow me on Twitter you
know I spent most of my December and January
obsessed with the Cats movie which was every bit as much of a train wreck as I
had hoped and why? Even now I honestly could not tell you. Macavity! but the more time I
spent on Cats and thinking about this movie the more I had to actually
confront these questions not just the question of why am I so fixated on this
unquestionable disaster, but why is Cats? How did this become a thing? Because that
the movie and the stage musical exist at all let alone that the musical was as
popular as it was is somewhat baffling. I got so fixated on this that I started a
podcast about it where I explain musicals to my friend who hates musicals.
Information in the description. And of course our pilot episode was about Cats
but even there were I attempt to splain that which is Cats I kind of failed
because that question of why came up a few times meow so it still leads to the real
question which is... who likes cats? - I would argue it's kids I say I don't know.
like I don't I I don't know who Cats is for because I don't know anyone who's
ride or die for Cats I'm literally looking at a person who's ride or die
for Cats No, I'm not! You can deny it all you want. And I don't think that in that episode I answered that "why?" question satisfactorily and part of that is I think the mistake of conflating the
"why?" for the stage musical which is almost 40 years old
kind of like me
and the "why?" for the movie I realize now that those two "why
God why?"s have very different answers the first time I saw the film I was like
well what did you expect? This is Cats. but I'm going to have to walk back this
assessment. If we are asking why this happened and wholly conflating this with this Don't get cocky! then, my Jellicle friends, we
are asking the wrong questions. Cats the musical is based on a
collection of poems entitled Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats written
by TS Eliot and published in 1939 As the poems were originally written for
Eliot's young god children the nature of them skews light and comedic short and
whimsical. Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber not only grew up with this book of poetry he
also just loves cats Hal, it's about cats. just big fan of
cats nothing deep nothing weird just man just like him a cat. But Lloyd Webber
didn't come to the idea of turning Practical Cats into a show until the
late 1970s. A friend had asked him if he'd be interested in composing music
set to poetry and one day while Evita was in rehearsals he thought of that
book that his mother had read to him as a child My mother used to read them to
me and I always loved them and I had them myself and I kept them for years I
always thought that there was something about them that was very musical I guess. But it wasn't until he had a long liquid lunch with producer Cameron Mackintosh
in 1980 however that Cats the stage musical became its own moving engine but
a large dance centric show was a daring move for musical theater at the time.
Cameron was already friends with acclaimed choreographer Gillian Lynne
who would ultimately choreograph the show The man was wonderful when he made love to me but I hated him But getting the rights from TS
Eliot's widow or finding a director even Everybody thought we were mad to do a
show about cats. Everybody. But it out that TS Eliot's widow was not as
hard a sell as they feared. After years of dodging requests to make Old Possum's
book into an animated film from companies like Disney--she was afraid
that Old Possum would turn out like Winnie the Pooh or something--Sir Horny
Lloyd Webber came to her with a more novel adult approach So I plucked up my
courage and I said to Valerie I said what... if I say if I wanted them
to be a bit like Hot Gossip? She said Tom would have liked that. If you're not familiar with Hot Gossip here
was their big hit at the time I lost my heart to a Starship Trooper Hal Prince was not available to direct
this show however Hal, it's about cats And after being passed over by multiple
stage directors Lloyd Webber and McIntosh settled on Royal Shakespeare
Company director Trevor Nunn but right off the bat Lloyd Webber kept running
into problems of people not getting it All cats are Jellicles, you see this is made
clear in one of the unpublished poems yes All the other cats are Jellicle as well? all cats are Jellicle cats fundamentally.
you see dogs are Pollicle dogs and cats are Jellicle cats Cats is more like a review than a
traditional plot driven musical in its format which isn't a surprise given that
it's based on a collection of poems without much connective tissue except
for the whole cat thing but it was director Trevor Nunn who suggested
giving an emotional through-line to the show that would give it some semblance
of a story the plot well if it can be said to have one is similar to
Broadway's previous longest-running show 1975's a chorus line as characters take
turns singing to win a contest and the sympathy vote goes to the one busted old
lady long in the tooth and yearning for another chance. In Cats, she's Grizabella the glamour cat a stinky Sally Bowles with whiskers
along with her are a bunch of other feline hopefuls sporting names like
Mukustrap, The Rum Tum Tugger Skimbleshanks the railway cat, Jennyanydots
the Gumbie cat, Asparagus the theatre cat Aintichief the cancelled cat, Nala the girlboss cat, Fieri the flavortown cat and so on and the success of cats was by
no means a given. The ambitious nature of the musical meant that few theatres were
willing to risk hosting it and the one they eventually did secure, the New
London Theatre, saw a massive overhaul of the theatre itself just for this
production funding was also coming up short and Lloyd Webber had to take out a
second mortgage on his home just to complete it. So Cats was, weirdly enough,
an underdog passion project that Lloyd Webber risked everything for and all this was before the show could be considered anything remotely close to done the writing process was a work in progress throughout previews right until
opening and no small part because figuring out the connective tissue
between a bunch of poems wasn't exactly a priority for Lloyd Webber who just
wanted a bunch of people in lycra to sing about being cats Hal, it's about cats Now the Peke, although people may say what they please Is no British dog but
a heathen Chinese but a major issue was the lack of an emotional linchpin a
showstopper that emotional ballad that is the keystone of every musical Cats didn't really have one nor did it have a character to sing it and none of Eliot's
whimsical poems really lent themselves to that sort of ballad said character
came in the form of one of Eliot's unpublished poems, Grizabella the glamour
cat, a poem about a sad has-been cat that Eliot cut from his collection
because given that the collection was for children he considered it too sad It was a poem that he wrote which he thought was too sad for children and I
got it from Valerie Eliot, who is TS Eliot's widow so Grizabella the glamor cat became the song that served as the character's
entrance Grizabella, the Glamour Cat But what would she sing? as a composer
Lloyd Webber would sometimes write a song but not really have a home for it
in whatever show he was working on the song that would become "Memory," the
melody for it at least, he had written several years earlier and was basically
saving it for just such an occasion so there was the melody but there weren't
really any cat poems that fit it so the lyrics are inspired by, rather than
directly lifted from, an Eliot poem that was not part of old possum, "Rhapsody on a
Windy Night" I say inspired by because the lyrics went through a lot of
versions one of which from Lloyd Webber's former lyricist and writing
partner Tim Rice who had co-written with him Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor
Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita now by this point Lloyd Webber and
Rice had well and truly fallen out even though neither of them have ever really
publicly explained why but Lloyd Webber asked him to do a pass on it, Rice was
like fine, he did, and then he was like actually don't use my lyrics, but then
they used his lyrics during previews and he got really mad and he threatened to
sue it was a whole thing I did write a lyric for "Memory" and it went into the
show for a couple of nights in previews then he was taken out and given to a
lyricist chosen by the director. The director. Eventually it was Nunn who found
the most agreeable interpretation of the poem and lo - Cats has its signature song
completed sometime during previews and despite all of those low expectations despite the no plot despite the weirdness despite the lycra, despite the hair, despite everything by 1981 Cats had opened in London and
soon swept the Olivier Awards coming to Broadway some 18 months later and there
swept the Tonys including Best Musical but despite the show's success critics
were not super enamored with Cats ripping apart the gossamer-thin plot the
weird mood the focus on dance which according to theater professor Alison
McLemore musical theater scholars tend to be biased against Broadway legend
Elaine Stritch just walked out Said Stitch later, but in spite of all of its strange gaudy
borderline Showtime after midnight drapings and utterly befuddling story
Cats managed to amass its own army of stay-at-home moms lonely 12 year olds
and perverts that critics could never hope to dissuade it's for everybody it's
for kids, it's for adults I've seen it about nine times now and every time it's better than the last I enjoyed it more tonight than I did 18
years ago when it first came out It's very exciting you know... different things are happening... it's very emotional To quote a Guardian article
from last winter Cats was the best show I ever saw! Gorgeous, simply gorgeous. Cats was also the
original blockbuster mega musical on the business side everything that was wrong
with Cats worked to its benefit no stars meant cast changes were not a problem thin story meant those lucrative foreign tourists don't miss anything no money quote from The Times review? well we don't need it we've got this amazing
poster that would only be harmed by critic quotes minimalism baby the actors
also traditionally interact with the audience which while not much fun for
Elaine Stritch helps most theater goers lose themselves in the shamelessness of
it all Jellices come to the Jellicle ball nostalgia is also a factor while Cats fans do come in all ages the superfans tend to be aged 40-plus and remember the
original West End and Broadway versions another part of the show's appeal is
that there are so many characters for audiences to relate to and for most fans
of the show the fact that it is so weird so removed from reality is not a bug but
a feature Magical Mr. Mistofelees Presto! in his New York Times review of Cats, Frank Rich wrote that meow Rich added some 40 years later it is not fun to watch a great
magician on television you have stagecraft there are things in the
theater that are very hard to translate to film and once again we circle back to that
question of but why though What's a Jellicle cat?
What's a Jellicle cat? Steven Spielberg and Amblin
entertainment reached out to work with Andrew Lloyd Webber on an animated
version in 1989 Spielberg's vision was to be set in a dark world war 2 era
London and to be somewhat Brechtian in tone which okay the concept art that has
been released is actually pretty cool and as is the case with most musicals an
animated adaptation makes way more sense than the Nietzschean horror that we
eventually got but ultimately between production delays squabbles about the
screenplay and how to create an actual plot and the failure of Amblin's other
animated films like an American tale Fievel goes west
we are back a dinosaur story and Balto the studio shut down in 1997 and ended
any hope of the animated film coming to fruition a multi-camera version of the
stage show was filmed and released in 1998 shortening the musical and adding
new elements like force lightning so So this should be good enough we have this
we don't need a live-action movie and of all of the musicals to adapt it makes
the most sense that Cats had evaded adaptation for so long despite its
popularity Universal bought the film rights to Cats sometime after the Amblin
production folded and it kind of existed in that development hell limbo ever
since Lloyd Webber kind of hinted at something being in the works as early as
2013 but we didn't see movement until about three years later so what happened
in that time? Ladies and gents, this is the moment you've waited for. Well, Greatest Showmen came
along and made half a billion dollars worldwide obviously I'm not mr.
Universal but we can surmise that mr. Universal saw the long and development
Cats project and thought hey let's give that the go-ahead and then we too can
make half a billion dollars and while we're there it lets attach to it the
last guy who won a bunch of Oscars for a musical that's the ticket half a billion
dollars and Oscars everybody wins so it does kind of feel
like we're missing a step here that a prestige musical adaptation equals Oscar
bait de-facto for most of the early history of the Academy Awards musicals
were a major presence if for no other reason that in the early days of talkies
musicals just made up a much larger proportion of films that got made but as
we covered in the episode about roadshows the big studio musical was
kind of on its way out in the 1960s in favor of more heady experimental
cinema but then we had a couple of big hits and more importantly big Oscar
winners in the form of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. So that created a
sort of boom and bust for the musical as an awards darling but also for the movie
musical in general after Hello Dolly was a critical and commercial failure the
Hollywood musical was kind of dead for a while so after that you had movies like
Cabaret which while unlike big studio musicals in most regard did win a bunch
of Oscars but that was kind of the end of the era of musicals as Oscar darlings
you'd have your Grease's your little shops but they were more like popcorn
movies they weren't awards bait and musicals mostly moved into animation
hell the next musical after Cabaret and All that Jazz in the 70s both directed
by Bob Fosse to get nominated for Best Picture was Disney's Beauty and the
Beast so fast-forward to 2001 where we are
still firmly in the musicals equals popcorn movies mindset. Moulin Rouge was
not designed to be an Oscar movie it was designed for Baz Luhrmann's Romeo +
Juliet made a bunch of money and he has a budget now so let's just let him do
whatever he wants and Moulin Rouge is an even bigger hit than Romeo + Juliet now Moulin Rouge came out around the end
of May but like Greatest Showman, it had really good legs and by the time award
season comes around it's still in theaters so Fox was like hey let's just
go ahead and do a for your consideration campaign and boom Best
Picture nominee. Who would have ever thought? This sets the stage for the
already in development Chicago itself fuelled by Harvey Weinstein's for your
consideration campaigns of attrition and not only does Chicago win Best Picture,
but five other Awards in 2003 the first musical to win Best Picture since
Oliver in 1968. One is that adaptations of Andrew Lloyd
Webber's musicals have historically not yielded very good results Either commercially or with regard to awards. I mean don't get me wrong they try the most successful to date is the 1996 film adaptation of Evita starring Madonna and
Antonio Banderas which while not an oscar darling despite winning Best
Original Song it did win a bunch of Golden Globes including actress for
Madonna and Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy then of course there's Phantom
of the Opera which was also released in the thick of
award season with high hopes it did have a pretty aggressive for your
consideration campaign and it did yield a couple of Oscar nominations including
bewilderingly cinematography For more on why that is terrible watch the video
I made on why it is terrible second is that Cats is not structured
like a Hollywood screenplay even in relation to other Andrew Lloyd
Webber shows which do tend to have you know like a plot so right off the bat
even in comparison to projects like Phantom of the Opera or Evita, with Cats
they are starting at a huge disadvantage which I suspect Mr. Universal knew for a
long time considering how long it took them to get cats out of development hell
how do you give this thing the structure of a Hollywood movie while also keeping
it recognizably Cats? I can dance how he dances too. Well apparently you don't.
So it wasn't just the incredible unexpected success of Greatest Showman,
it was also who directed the film and I am absolutely 100% positive that Tom
Hooper would never have been attached to Cats, if the song memory was not Cats's biggest staple. ignoring Universal's aggressive for your
consideration campaign for Les Miserables, a movie which proved that musicals can
still be Oscar darlings even into the 2010s most point to Anne Hathaway's
rendition of I Dreamed a Dream as the thing that clinched her an Oscar win.
It came true! so attaching Hooper to cats was a no
brainer. Cats has the big Oscar winning ballad, Les Mis has the big Oscar winning
ballad it's just some synergy But Les Miserables was a harbinger of things
to come and for every truly bewildering decision that Hooper made in Cats, the
warning signs were always there. When philosopher and media theorist Marshall
McLuhan famously said the medium is the message,
what did he mean by that? Simplistically, it's the idea that you can only receive
an idea or a story through a medium be that medium a poem a novel a film a
stage show or even just the act of talking. It is not the idea or story itself that is being expressed but a medium that is
expressing it therefore the medium should be the focus of study
according to theater scholar Linda Hutcheon while no medium is inherently
good at doing one thing and not another each medium like each genre has
different means of expression and so can aim at certain things better than others
so let's look at Les Miserables as a case study.
you have Victor Hugo's novel, Les Miserables. you have the PBS masterpiece miniseries
starring Dominic West and David Oyelowo and you have the Boublil and Schönberg
stage musical, three different mediums telling the same story
but owing to difference in medium, they tell them in very different ways that
are designed first and foremost to fit their respective medium so what can
often happen when you have someone schooled in one medium who is suddenly
having to figure out how to most effectively do another that can lead to
some dissonance I think what I was trying to achieve was a combination of
extreme realism so that the film would feel rooted in a visceral
reality but also allowing a certain heightening of reality we saw this in
Phantom of the Opera directed by Joel Schumacher where there's a lot of little
things that just show him trying to make it less of a musical like having them
speak singing lines that don't make sense to speak sing But why is it secret
what have we to hide? and then having Butler scream half his lines instead of
singing them. and this of course works both ways. Why Bloom go so far camera right? The Producers the 2005 film was directed by Susan Stroman who also directed the
Broadway stage show. The Producers shows us what it's like when a stage director
is uncomfortable working in the format of film people who've never seen this
show but did see the movie an adaptation which is faithful to a fault because
it's basically just the stage show are like that's it that's the winningest
Tonyest show ever? But this film version is emblematic of how medium matters so
much that worked on the stage and led The Producers to win the most Tony's of
any musical by a single production in history just didn't translate to film quoting film scholar Robert Stemmle, film
clearly has resources that the stage can never have the power of the close-up
that gives the micro drama of the human countenance and the separate soundtracks
of film that permit voiceovers music and the non vocal to intermingle. Linda
Hutcheon adds and when we sit quiet and still in the dark watching real-life
bodies on the stage our kind of identification is different from when we
sit in front of a screen and have their reality mediated for us by technology. So
live theater naturally requires way more suspension of disbelief than film does.
You are in the same room with these people
you have to applaud after every musical number you can see the sets you can see
that the snow isn't real the actors are probably pantomiming like half of a set
that isn't there but the medium of film works against that necessary suspension
of disbelief. And must be adjusted for with stylism that's why
musicals tend to work better as animated movies than live-action movies an
animated movie requires more suspension of disbelief
because this isn't real it's a drawing why was everyone singing? we've just got
a song in our hearts and therefore it fits more easily with the requirements
of believing that these characters might suddenly just burst into song how's it you all know the words? Did you rehearse? Yeah, every Thursday. Didn't you see the fliers? Of course, film directors do sometimes figure out ways to bridge this gap
gracefully Chicago springs to mind it manages to work with the realism of the
tone while incorporating the more theatrical framing all while making it
work within its own internal logic and sometimes other movie musicals just
don't care about how realistic or not the framing is And they just don't
bother caring about that. The Mamma Mias are a good example they are not going
for high art and that's fine but part of the tilt toward realism in film is
because the Academy tends to reward a more realistic style. Not always, but
overall. And for those of you out there who argue that Tom Hooper's style is
actually kind of weird strange angles and lots of dead space of exposed brick
and wallpaper does not an unrealistically styled film make yes
Hooper does use a lot of unsettling visual language and I'll get to that in
a minute but that doesn't mean that groundedness and realism isn't
ultimately what he's going for so in addition to a sort of stylistic
discomfort with musicals in general there's also incentive to make the
visual style of the film more realistic so his proclivity for dragging the
medium of the musical kicking and screaming into the style of realism
preferred by the Oscars and it was only a matter of time before he slipped into
the uncanny valley so the tactic with Les Mis's visual
language was in part visual realism but in addition to that in order to make it
feel more immediate and more realistic Hooper also elected to use set sound
recording the actors as they sang rather than the more traditional way of doing
it by having the actors sing along to playback Hooper went to very great
lengths to make the performance feel more authentic. By recording it live Tommy's allowing us
the spontaneity of normal film acting. And it was a great
gimmick to sell to Academy voters so the medium of musical theatre which in the
case of Les Mis and Cats requires the cast to be singing the whole time
already requires a much higher degree of suspension of disbelief than film does
and not just realistic actively at war with the big emotions of the music you
have extreme close-ups constantly for three hours on actors who are singing
songs designed to play to cheap seats Well, he did. Les Mis is bad, but it won
some awards so even though the main impact of that movie is endless Javert
memes, the formula according to Universal appears to be Tom Hooper plus beloved
classic musical equals profit so that's how we got here Let's see what we got. I don't know what I expected. Although I will attempt to find rationale if not reason in the film version of Cats,
there are many bewildering choices that I can only attribute to Hooperian whimsy from horny Judi Dench scissoring and delight after Gus the theatre cat to
Jennifer Hudson spending most of her screen time in close-ups with her face
covered and snot to Macavity being played the way that he is How do you manage to make Idris Elba unappealing? Hey you know what I'm gonna dab. the aspect of the film that drew the most attention positive and negative
after that first trailer was released was the uncanny valleyness of it all
which all goes back to Hooper's attempts to draw this weird fantastical show back
down to realism said Hooper in an interview for the Atlantic I wanted to
keep it very grounded in the present moment the thing I'm most proud of is
that you feel grounded watching it it's not that fantastical Which... it's it's Cats dude. Blame has been laid upon the visual effects team which nobody more than us understands the
importance of good visual effects. Okay, let's talk about that for a moment. We've used digital fur technology to create the
most perfect covering of fur. So Hooper wanted the film to be grounded and not
that fantastical and part of that was wanting his actors to be X amount of
unencumbered and also to shoot on practical sets of weird scale so he
elected that they should not use mocap suits despite the fact that the suits
they did wear look plenty ridiculous allegedly this is hearsay no one has
gone on the record to say this Hooper didn't want his actors distracted or
encumbered so no mocap suits so all of the digital fur technology had to be
done manually which not only ballooned the post-production budget it massively
increased the labor required to finish it. But after the trailer hit allegedly
again this is through my grapevine mister Universal kind of panicked and
slashed the funding going to post-production and that in part is why
you get these shots that look well kind of bad and why you've got like these
floating faces and why there are some shots that aren't even finished so when
you hear horror stories of the VFX team for cats being underfunded and
understaffed and overworked allegedly again no one has gone on the record to
discuss this in any meaningful detail because they don't lose their job so
this is all hearsay--this is the result. so the manually rotoscoped digital fur
technology the slashed budget and Hooper's bizarre insistence on making
changes up to the 11th hour in part leads us here but even if it had gotten
the time and money it needed could this have worked visually would this have
worked for audiences? Probably not Hooper's dedication to making the movie
feel grounded backfired horribly no matter how much time the VFX team had
these decisions were all rooted in trying to bridge that realism gap so
much so that certain elements are somehow both over thought and under
thought at the same time the film's approach to the titular animal is both
way more literal and way more dense at the same time one wonders if any of
these people have ever even seen a cat The film adds way more literal cat things that aren't even there in the
show like their ears move around they crawl around on all fours and paw at each
other they lap at things and go meow meow meow Gillian Lin's choreography in the
show is designed to be like more evocative of the idea of a cat not a
literal imitation of a cat but here we are not 10 minutes in we got a crotch
licking joke. I'm a kitty. Meow. And all this adds up to create a suspension of
disbelief problem that isn't there in the musical there are not humans in the
musical for instance but here they are at the beginning of the film we see them
before we see any cats humans with their human bodies throwing away a kitten in a
bag who also has a human body but as in Les Mis, Hooper just doesn't seem
comfortable or particularly interested in the medium of the musical the
breaking of the fourth wall for instance pretty common in musicals we see this Les Mis in a scene where in
the musical Gavroche is addressing the audience. But we can't have that so in the movie he addresses some random
rich dude but then in the following line he addresses the audience anyway so Cats the musical breaks the fourth wall a lot more than Les Mis.
the cats addressed the audience they explained things to the audience they
interact with the audience physically but we can't have that so the movie gets
around this by making Victoria the fish out of water they explain the Jellicle
thing to her instead of the audience so cutting this Do I actually see with my own very eyes a
man who's not heard of a Jellicle cat? Sets up in the movie that fourth wall breaking is
not a thing that is done here which you know what fine it's a movie not a stage
show so then they hold to this change for the whole movie until the end when
they have Dench address the camera for like five minutes straight You've heard of several kinds of cat no interpreter to understand the cats
are very much like you you've seen us both our habits and our habitat
but how would you So first your memory I'll say a cat is not
a dog with cats some say one rule is for a cat will condescend to treat you are spoken to myself I do not Oh, cat. A cat will condescend to treat your dish of
cream or you might now and then so in time you reach your aim and call him by his Movie adaptations also often change the arrangements of songs which again fine
but in cats it just feels like Hooper did it because he was bored with them
the Rum Tum Tugger is one of the show's most high-energy numbers and Derulo is actually a pretty good Rum Tum Tugger except for that accent
so why God why do we keep interrupting this number for Rebel Wilson's bad
improv? Do you think he just got neutered? Those
notes are like high. In the very next scene we interrupt
Bustopher Jones for more Rebel Wilson shenanigans Anyway back to the song. Even during Skimbleshanks, the best number in the movie, a mouse yells "cats!" like yep that's what we're watching. These things wouldn't be bad in and of themselves except
that they don't add anything it's like he's breaking up the musical
numbers because he feels like they're too boring to stand on their own without
something to break them up I can dance how he dances too. the filmmakers discomfort / disinterest with the material expands beyond just the medium
of the musical and the show that they're adapting itself there's a patent
rejection of anything non heteronormative that's pretty overt to anyone
familiar with the stage musical there is a lot of no homo in this movie yeah god forbid that this guy be clocked as anything but the straightest manly man
it is often played in the musical that Mistoffelees and Rum Tum Tugger have
like a little something going on The Rum Tum Tugger is a terrible bore. and we can't have that so both of them get their nohomo moments
with Victoria and Mistoffelees gets it in the form of an all-out subplot For all the other terrible cat puns and figures of speech that they added in the
movie I'm surprised they didn't add something about how like rum tum tugger
loves da pussy. Heterosexual cats heterosexual cats heterosexual cats but if there's one scene that was always doomed to failure or wild success
depending on how you look at it and anything live-action or remotely
realistic it is the Old Gumby Cat sequence wherein we hear about the
titular Gumby cat who lays around all day but at night teaches mice and other
vermin to like you know be upstanding members of society the show accomplishes
this with pantomime and props that are like you know garbage from the junkyard
that the cats are hanging out in made to look like you know mice there are
multiple times in the show where the cats pantomime other animals and objects
like mice and dogs and roaches and choo choo trains by appropriating trash and
turning it into props and such now they could have done that but realism So instead we get this And it just keeps escalating and getting
more and more horrifying I can't even make commentary on this so
I'm not gonna. Except why God why did they give the mice children's faces? from the moment the trailer came out my
biggest question was how would they try to give cats the shape of a Hollywood
movie? I kind of deep down thought that they'd be smarter than that and just
wouldn't bother like they'd just let it keep its revue-like qualities and have
it be something kind of disjointed in the vein of Fantasia but Wow did they
fly wildly in the other direction structuring the film with not one
storyline from the musical on steroids but two the first is the enormously
expanded part of Victoria who's the protagonist now and the emotional
through line of Grizabella a kitten with one brief dance solo in the show and no
songs the film gives her a little orphan abandoned in the world of the Jellicle
cats narrative and takes this moment from the stage show and makes it the
emotional through line of the movie and I'm not saying this is handled
gracefully in the show but the movie tries to bolster it and in doing so
reveals the whole thing's weaknesses it is distantly implied in the show but
stated outright in the movie why is Grizabella shunned by the other
Jellicle cats? Who was she?
She used to be the star of the windmill Then she went with Macavity. Macavity! Trying to add a little more logic to her story is not
the most counterintuitive change in the world but it does conflict with the
other big change they made: Macavity. Macavity is like an obstacle that shows
up towards the end of the show like earlier some cats titter hearing about
him and then later he shows up he kidnaps Old Deuteronomy they immediately
undo it and no one ever speaks of it again and again I'm not saying that this
is good it is charitably flimsy and Macavity is not really an antagonist
more of like a thing that happens the tension of the story (if it can be said
to have one) is just the question of who gets to die. Who gets to die the good
death? Macavity in the show doesn't really care about this but in the movie I'm determined to win and I prefer my competition chained up. Wow it's his life's goal that Heaviside layer.
Why? Because. and then as if all this doesn't
make you wanna crawl out of your skin enough... Okay, so Macavity is the color of
Idris Elba. Like couldn't they just make him like a black cat or make...Give him
like stripes or something? I get that that could be problematic but I don't... I
don't think that the only alternative is to tumble head over ass into the uncanny
valley by creating a cat that's just the color of human skin which is itself kind
of revealing like imagine if one of the wide actors had the same treatment just
a cat the color of human skin would they have not caught this for the uncanny
valley yikes that it is? So Macavity's function in the movie is
to remove the other cats from the competition so he will be the Jellicle
choice despite the fact that he seems to be doing pretty well in this life but
whatever he wants a new one. Macavity also serves the dual purpose of
extracting your A-list celebrities who wanted to be in the movie but didn't
want to be on set for more than three days. So he ferrets his kidnapped
celebrity cats and also Skimbleshanks to a boat which is manned by Ray
Winstone who is also a cat And despite Macavity's magical powers once they I
don't know get bored of being tied up with a large chain they escape easily
they get back just in time for Memory and then this happens Anyway, so when Grizabella shows up at
the end after the whole boat fight it's like well the movie's already had its
climax we got old Dute back why are we still here oh right the heavyside layer
the big climax making the Macavity subplot more of a
focus leads to the resolution of that subplot getting way more screen time and
involving way more characters and it gives it the feel of the climax of the
movie, but it's not. Memory is the climax. so the film builds in a new climax on
the boat While also keeping the original one. Jennifer
Hudson is such a good singer that like I've never not watched this scene and
gotten chills like the arrangement and mixing are so
good that even in the two rowdy screenings I've gone to the audience
reverently listens to this bit the plot was always paper thin and flimsy and it
was that by design but the film doesn't make the plot such as it were less
flimsy it just creates more of it and more nonsense that the film obligates
itself to explain because we have committed ourselves to the style of
realism and logic but ultimately if you want to ask the question of why Cats is
the way it is, Cats is the story of hubris Awards hubris celebrity hubris
director hubris just good old-fashioned hubris. Like Les Mis, they wanted to have
an all-star cast but Cats is a terrible thing to adapt for big stars because
unlike Les Mis, it requires its cast to more or less be onstage the whole time
as opposed to Les Mis, where you can have Anne Hathaway for her 20 minutes of
award-winning screen time and then she's out for the rest of the movie. Cats is
not designed like this. You're either a cat that has a solo or a cat that is in
the ensemble but you're on stage more or less the whole time most of the songs
don't have the cat singing about themselves but another cat doing the
singing. The movie changes this by having them half the time just singing about
themselves. Gus is the cat at the theater door. Gus the theater cat, Bustopher Jones
and especially the Old Gumby Cat come to mind as songs that were changed to give
the stars more screen time because they certainly were not changed
because the arrangement was better and wow do they fuck up the old Gumby cat by
giving this song to Rebel Wilson who is not only not a great singer it also nixes the three-part harmony.
Because if you want Rebel Wilson in this movie for 20 minutes she gots to gets
her a solo Or in the case of Macavity they take a duet and make it a solo
because Taylor Swift is not sharing the stage my friends so what do we do with a
bunch of celebrities that want solos and want to be in the movie because it's got
the awards guy attached to it see so it's gonna win awards but they don't
wanna you know be on set for more than like three days? Cordon's got his talk
show to work around, Taylor Swift's on tour you know what we can't be bothered
by being on set for more than three days well how about Macavity kidnaps the
A-listers? this not only solves our problem of not really having a threat or
tension it also means that we have a real solid good reason for these people
not being in the background when they are not the center of attention so not
only do we now have a lazy reason to get our A-listers who don't want to be in
the background out of the movie we also made the movie worse! Go team. And no Awards hubris musical would be complete without the unnecessary new song. This one's called Beautiful Ghosts.
It was co-written by Taylor Swift and Andrew Lloyd Webber. You can't write a modern lyric for Cats, so like if you can't get TS Eliot like get TS and it like all of these musical numbers added to the movie to win an award
is completely unnecessary and totally grinds the movie to a halt you know more
than it already was If Francesca Hayward sounds kind of unsure it's
because she doesn't really know this song because they more or less finished
it like the day of. We were just rushing we had written it the day before I came
in and we had the sheet music made up and Like an hour or two before they shot
it. Taylor Swift over here looking at Lady Gaga
oscar-winner like hmm I want that. One step closer to EGOT. And her singing it got us a Golden Globe nomination. so what in the end is
the fallout of cats are we gonna have a bunch of Cats copycats? Is Cats gonna be
like the Sharknado of musicals? Well I doubt it.
First of all, Cats is kind of one of a kind. It was a massive massive loss and
despite the fact that it's probably going to be the new darling of midnight
screenings and supplant the likes of Rocky Horror and The Room with its cult
following, these are not the tracks that any other studios are going
to want to follow in but I have heard some concern that this might kind of be
the end of musical movies in an Entertainment Weekly article conflicted
theater fan Mark Snedeker wrote, I fear a similar turmoil that happened in the 80s
may occur again because cats is at its core a musical that confirms for people
who hate musicals why they hate musicals but though we did not ask for it though
we are not responsible for it though we need not answer for it I believe theater
fans must not abandon cats because as much as we may hate it we can't deny
that we care about it. You care about it. here is the thing some musicals not all but most of them
require a visual medium that jives with the way that the musical itself is
constructed Les Miserables was constructed for the stage
Cats was constructed for the stage that is the thing about theater especially in
a show like Hamilton which basically has no props let alone a set it is
constructed so that the audience has to imagine what's going on in the story
overcoming that suspension of disbelief is built into the design of the medium
in a way that it is not with film but your traditional Oscar bait movie does
not allow for that Oscar bait movies demand visual realism and it's very rare
that something actually gets rewarded for being stylistic it happens but the
Academy prefers gritty realism right now that's just how it is to this idea that
there might be a backlash against musical films, that Cats might be the end
of Hollywood taking musicals seriously to that I say good. Good (bleep) riddance
Tom Hooper and your musical awards bait bullshit popular musical being adapted
to films because Oscar bait is a disease the only way movies like this work is
either through hyper stylisation in the vein of decent films like Moulin Rouge
or Chicago or animation which likewise can rise visually to the magical
unrealism inherent to the medium of musicals. But gritty realism? Oscar bait?
No thank. Llike I loved Hamilton but Hamilton the movie? Please no. Yes I will gladly take your
live recording that you filmed five years ago and won't release till next
year I will take it but the Oscar bait musical the
adaptation for adaptation's sake? Let it burn. Musical theater right now is kind
of in a new golden age it is doing just fine and it does not need legitimacy
from Hollywood we do not need film adaptations of musicals
just cause. Just because it's brand-name recognition, just because Chicago won a
bunch of Oscars. So if Cats marks a demarcation where musicals are being
adapted for the screen anymore good I don't want Hadestown the movie, super
do not want Hamilton the movie. If you watch any one of these amateur animatics
on YouTube I promise you they work way better than anything Tom Hooper has ever
done. So thank you, Cats. Thank you not only for being the true embodiment of
modern horror A monument to celebrity hubris but also for ending this nonsense
of bad musical adaptations with aggressive for your consideration
campaigns and Oscar dreams wow we don't need it just save everybody a lot of
heartache and money and just film the damn thing cats 98 will always be there
but cats 2019 is a cautionary tale of a completely different sort someone is smoking over there something we
cats would never do filling their lungs with thick dark hair what a disgusting
thing to do cats have nine lives with eight to spare
humans have one with none to barter why do they smoke? Why don't they care? Humans are smart, but cats are smarter Listen to cats, you men and women take care of your
lungs you're only human the American Lung Association the
Christmas seal people Buckle them into a car seat. No one
wants a child to become a memory
I've watched it four times, and I'm not even a musical theatre person. It's just so well done.
This movie is a mess, but the videos talking about it are such comical masterpieces that it’s almost worth the suffering we got from the Cats movie itself. Almost.
That time when Titus Andromedon discovered what Cats is really about
https://youtu.be/9GKN1QvjFDc
Additionally, check out this Cats! video essay by Maggie Mae Fish. It covers how the poet whose writings were the basis of Cats!'s music may have been the teensiest bit fascist and incel-y. It's also just a very well produced and fun video to watch in terms of costumes and scripting.
Seeing this movie on edibles was probably the most fun I’ve ever had in a theater. Everyone in that room was there for exactly the same reason.
"It confirms to people who hate musical why they hate musicals."
My problem exactly. Is there one that would change my mind?
edit: Thanks to everybody for help and suggestions
I LOVED hearing all the voice cameos at the beginning! I think I heard Tom Green, the narrator from Kurzgesagt, Ollie, Lindsay (of course) and Jenny Nicholson.
16:46: the moment I realize why I loved this movie so much as a kid.
Never thought I'd hear that Kurzgesagt guy in a breadtube video.