Why the Music in Cats (2019) is Worse than you Thought

this video is brought to you by viewers like you it has been an entire year since cats was released onto the world and what a year it has been and there's something that i keep in the back of my head whenever i see a movie this bad a film this universally panned it's this quote that i always heard attributed to the late great enio moricone when it came to music and the movies and it goes something like this a good film can survive a bad score but a good score cannot save a bad film in other words if you write bad music but it's in a good movie no one will really care but if you write an amazing score for a film that did pretty mediocre people will still probably not care film scoring is a really thankless profession but that kind of gets you thinking when it comes to a film like 2019's cats with what might be the worst film of the decade keeping in mind that it's also a musical it kind of begs the question is there a possibility that we all missed something here was there a musical diamond in the rough somewhere in this cesspool of a film was the music in cats any good no part one how the sh does cats work if we're going to talk about cats and we have to talk about how it works as a musical which is not a difficult thing to do because cats is not complicated i don't just mean the film the show cats is as simple as it is vague and that's what makes it work so well i'm not kidding just give me a minute here it's all gonna make sense so let's just go down the whole show it'll make explaining everything way easier because this show is just so awkward okay so we open with this cluster of numbers the prologue jellicle songs fragile cats the naming of cats and the invitation of the jellicle ball and we're introduced to our jellicle cats a club of cats that are all trying to get selected to go to something called the heavy side lair where they can go and be reborn and have a new life so without a second to spare we're immediately thrown into a bunch of cats singing and dancing about each other i guess to try and justify why they should die yay we get jenny any dots the old gumby cat rum tum tugger the rebellious cat grizzabella the glamour cat who for some reason used to be a jellicle cat but isn't anymore she's no longer welcome to the party then we get buster for jones the cat about town mungo jerry and rebel teaser the mischievous cats old deuteronomy the leader of the jellicle cats who gets to select who gets to go to the heavyside lair and be reborn a song about dogs fighting each other for some reason and then there's this dance number called the jellicle ball fine then we have this kind of weird moment at the end of act one where we hear some more of grizzabella's number then she tries to dance in the jellicle ball but she's like old or washed up or both or whatever she just can't cut it then she sings a little bit of memory and then it's the end of act one act two opens with old dudes singing about i guess being happy we'll get into this later just trust me but then we get right back into some more cats like gus the theater cat skimble shanks the railway cat mccavity the mystery cat who also technically isn't a jellicle cat and mccavity kidnaps old deuteronomy only for all deuteronomy to immediately be saved by mr mistoffelees the magical cat then we get memory isabella gets selected to go the heavy side layer and old deuteronomy sings to the audience before they all get to go home alright so here's how cats works those opening few numbers collectively function as our establishing number it's that one song that introduces the audience to the world and sets up our story it's the star wars title crawl in musical form if you want to know more about how musical numbers work broadly speaking you can check out my video on a goofy movie so these opening few songs tell us about the world and the characters in it exactly like what you'd expect from a musical total boilerplate opening to the show do i actually see with my own very eyes a man who's not heard of a genicle cat jellicle cats meet once a year at the jellicle ball where we all rejoice [Music] announces the cat who can now be reborn and come back to a they're jellicle cats they're going to the jellicle ball one of them gets selected to die which is weird as hell but fine and that's the world we're going to be in for the next three hours great whatever now in any other musical following your opening number you'd then expect to get a number where our protagonist walks out on stage and wails to the crowd about how unhappy they are and what they want in life something called the i want song [Music] now you've heard this before even if you don't think you have i want much more than this [Music] somewhere i want so much more than they've [Music] but we don't get that in cats instead what we get are two hours of cats singing about each other and themselves these are not i want songs like we get from our disney princesses instead these are what's called i am songs songs that tell us about characters without really divulging into their wants and desires in fact he's remarkably fat gus is the cat at the theater door simple shanks [Applause] and that's because on top of not having a single protagonist that you would otherwise need the audience to emotionally latch onto all of the cats and cats want the same thing they all want to be selected and go to the heavy side layer which we learned in the opening number it doesn't make sense to have an i want song because there's no protagonist in fact if you wanted to take this one step further you could argue that the jellicle cats are a character unto themselves and that this is technically their i want song where we find out that they all want the same thing death so there are no individual i want songs in cats except for one the glamour cat used to be a jellicle cat wants to be a jellicle cat again and she's now singing about wanting to be a jellicle cat again she is desperate she's the only cat that doesn't explicitly want to go to the heavyside lair she does not have the same wants as the other jellicle cats what she wants is to go back to what she had and become a jelgal cat again and this number causes the whole show to do a 180. see i am songs are typically reserved for the villains of the show not always but frequently think about the dentist or i'm a mean green mother from outer space from little shopper or even something like i'm shiny from moana those numbers are literally this is what i am i'm a dentist i'm a mean green mother from outer space i'm shiny they do very little to explore the wants and motivations of the characters and that's on purpose by making your villain less three-dimensional it makes it easier for the audience to side with the protagonist especially in a show that's supposed to be widely accessible for families and children of all ages most of cats functions like gaston's number the cats all sing about each other the same way that lefou sings about gaston but even though it's the food doing the singing it's still a song defining gaston now that's not to say that you couldn't flesh out your villain a little more by giving them an i want song hellfire is actually a really great example of an i want song for a villain but imagine how much more complicated and potentially confusing it's gonna make your story if gaston suddenly stopped halfway through the show and sang this huge ballad about how much he's been in love with belle since he first saw her it would get really complicated really quickly which doesn't help sell your show to a theater full of families instead you're typically going to want to give your villain an i am song [Music] but what that means for cats is that as soon as we get to the ending and memory one massive i want song for just one character all of a sudden it kind of hits you that we've been dealing with several hours of musical feline circle jerking once you hear memory you'd have to be some kind of sociopathic narcissist to think nah give it to the fat cat he has a monocle i trust him all of those i am songs suddenly become irrelevant to the emotional turmoil that grizzabella's been holding on to and it's why the cats all suddenly move to be more compassionate toward her in the course of a single number this whole show isn't about vanity anymore it's about agony and that's it that's how cats works cats is almost explicitly a case study and how effective an eye wants song can really be and that's it the show's all fun and games until you get to the end and you realize grizzabella's really been suffering then the show ends the whole show hangs on memory having that single massive impact on the audience structurally speaking it's the first 15 minutes of a disney movie interrupted by two hours of almost completely meaningless spectacle cats as a musical is just one big climactic moment called memory and that's it and if you know anything about marketing and pop music then you'll understand how this entire show became so famous by being carried by that one number and this is where the self for cats is really important cats was the first ever mega musical the stage equivalent of a hollywood blockbuster a musical that was internationally successful and known for its spectacle fun fact it was actually the first ever musical to hook up each of their performers to an individual radio mic so they could project their voices across the hall while doing all that choreography it's kind of put it before it ended up but we're getting ahead of ourselves it's such a simple moral that anyone can grasp onto it it isn't difficult to get don't judge a book by its cover you never know what other people are going through that's it everyone can understand that and it works and so in short you'd think that this would be a perfect setup for a really really successful film then they decided to add part two victoria okay so you decided to add a protagonist to the story that by design is successful for not having a protagonist anyone see a problem with this victoria's addition to the film i think is the worst thing i've ever seen in an adaptation and if you stick your head in a microwave for a couple seconds you can see how and why they thought that the changes that they'd made would work so we need to go over a few things in a little more detail in order for all this to parse midway through act one were introduced to grizzabella and we learned that she used to be a jellicle cat but isn't anymore for some reason who cares why [Music] [Music] then at the end of act 1 grizzabella tries to join in the jellicle ball angelilorum and jemima sing some of grizzabella's song and while this is really subtle it's also super important jelly lorem is the cat that helps gus later on she's sympathetic to the older cats and wants to help them and jamaima well she's gonna come back later on but it demonstrates that even some of the most sympathetic and naive cats know to avoid grizzabella at this point so after a little bit of isabella's number isabella tries to dance but isn't really able to pull it off and in her frustration we get the first instance of memory [Music] if you pay attention old deuteronomy is trying to reach out to grizzabella but he can't quite reach out to her because she's like all the way at the front of the stage and he's like in the back so he can't quite reach and anyway so grizzabella does this weird hand thing which is important remember this and as she walks off it's the end of act one and everyone in the audience goes away to pee in the opening of act two old deuteronomy sings this song called the moments of happiness which is all about how like looking back at happiness offers a different perspective on the experience you will remember your happy memories differently from how you experience them fine inspired and realizing what's going on jemima perks up and starts singing memory [Music] jemima now realizes that grizzabella is what old deuteronomy is looking for as far as making the jellicle choice at this moment jemima now knows that grizzabella would be perfect for the jellicle choice at the end of the night on top of that if you listen to the music during this number it's the exact same music as grizzabella the glamour cat [Music] it isn't so much foreshadowing or light motif as much as it is just lighting a giant neon sign over his head saying grizzabella's the jellicle choice none of you have a chance then the entire second act is full of red herrings gus is old and has happy memories but he still has a purpose with the jellicle cats he's the theater cat and i guess that it's implied that he teaches some of the younger cats and you're then led to believe that maybe old dude might pick mr mistoffelees because he brings him back after macavity kidnaps him and he's a hero but nope it's not him either now at the very end of the show everyone's super happy that all deuteronomy is back and jemima gets on a car and sings a very short song called daylight set to the tune of memory [Music] this song is literally saying it's almost daylight it's almost time for old dude to make the choice but then grizzabella shows up and ruins the party because she smells bad and the cats disperse in a last-ditch effort desperate to be a part of the club again with absolutely no time left grizzabella sings memory to try and convince them to let her join [Music] turn your face to the moonlight but it isn't working and she collapses on stage oh but what's that jemima comes in like black panther and endgame and starts cheering isabella on and tells her there's no time left it's now or never [Music] so she modulates up another chromatic median and guns it [Music] now pay attention here because this is where cats tends to lose people like believe it or not there's a really weird christmasy kind of vibe to memory everyone always thinks that the lyric here is memory all alone in the moonlight okay good that's not it that's a different part of the number [Applause] [Music] the lyric here is actually [Music] and that's more important than you'd think cats gets mocked for being really sexually suggestive and it is but the truth is that the physical contact is a big motif in the show it shows how all the cats are interconnected the cats touch each other to show that they're not alone specifically they'll do that weird hand thing just like you see grizzabella trying to initiate whenever she's on stage when she screams touch me it's far more literal than you might think she's desperate to go back to being a part of the group and she literally wants someone to touch her so she'll be accepted by the group again then we hear the line if you touch me you'll understand what happiness is [Music] if you're the jellicle cat that touches her and brings her back into the group you'd be giving her the greatest gift in honor having you for a daughter i'm sorry i couldn't resist but now here's where you really need to pay close attention to the show whenever isabella's on stage the younger cats all rushed to her to try and figure her out and welcome her to the group but the older cats always stop them before they can touch her and tell them no when grizzabella comes back on stage for memory one of those cats is victoria this moment where victoria touches grizzabella isn't significant because it's victoria it's significant because no one stopped victoria it's a universal welcome from the entire clan that's why old deuteronomy doesn't literally get up and touch her hand right here because even though he thinks that grizabel should be a part of the jellicles again it doesn't mean anything if the rest of the clan still rejects her victoria has no real significance here in fact the whole point is that victoria is just some random cat it could be butthole the cgi cat for all i care it doesn't matter what matters is that no one rushed to stop victoria and now grizzabella is a jellicle cat again and tom hooper basically took one long look at all of that and said that's nice just to give you an appreciation of how much of a colossal misunderstanding of the picture book level story we're dealing with here look at this scene [Music] under no circumstance would grizzabella ever recoil from victoria grizzabella is more lonely than pokemane subs cats is successful because it's 90 spectacle and lycra but if you pay attention there's actually a story it's just being told backwards from the perspective of the antagonists this is what it would look like if you spent entire mario game inside bowser's castle things would be really repetitive and weird right up until the last 15 minutes when all the action happened and hooper threw all the story away by adding victoria first off he gets rid of jemima which like she's critical to getting isabella back into the club then they give victoria this audience self-insert aspect to her so that monkey strap has someone to talk to but as a protagonist she's like probably the worst thing anyone's ever done since giving sonic teeth on top of that victoria and her number beautiful ghosts almost entirely replaces everything that happens at the end of act 1 and beginning of act 2. in no small part victoria's character completely replaces any and all relationship all deuteronomy has with isabella while also overshadowing and misinterpreting jemima's role in the stage show the whole point of adding victoria was to make the show more accessible if you're gonna do that then it stands to reason that you're gonna bend this show to be more like a standard musical or at the very least move it in the direction of one of those disney movies so we really should get a number for victoria before anyone else her i want song to tell us that she wants to be a jellicle cat because everybody wants to be a cat cause cat's the only cat who knows i'm gonna stop i'm sorry anyway so by not giving us the victoria disney princess the wizard and i i want song moment until halfway through the show there's like no attachment to her whatsoever who gives a crap about her she basically doesn't have a personality then her i want song beautiful ghosts is basically telling isabella oh yeah well your life has actually been really great i was dropped off in a bag with no friends or family at least you have beautiful ghosts but at least you have beautiful ghosts which like excuse me miss this is a wendy's belittling the emotional core of your show is um stupid but it's a nuance stupid because they aren't just diminishing grizzabella's plight they're also breaking victoria's already senseless character does victoria know what's up with the jellicle cats or not she's supposed to be the naive one that doesn't know anything so we can have everything explained to the audience but at the same time she's sitting here lecturing isabella about her life like she knows but she doesn't or does she does monkey strap need to show her the ropes or does she already have it down because she seems to know all the words when it matters does victoria know what's going on or not because if she does then her whole i want song is basically saying yeah being a jellicle cat does sound awesome and you did totally screw it up sucks to be you which is a really callous thing to do to the backbone of your show then when all deuteronomy gives us that limp-wristed delivery of the moments of happiness and don't worry we're gonna get to that it almost feels like it's for victoria not isabella victoria is at best a severely confused character that makes almost no sense and comes at the cost of the core of the only story that you really get in cats so not only does victoria's inclusion detract from the central point of isabella's emotional storyline it actually invalidates it it actively works against everything that makes this show work which is why it's all so confusing this whole show is just memory and two and a half hours of justifying memory and you've almost single-handedly annihilated basically everything about how it works the lyric is literally touch me and grizzabella here does not want to be touched how simple do you need this to be oh but if you pay attention to what happens right before jennifer hudson screams touch me you'll find that victoria is actually touching her how did you get this so wrong [Music] and then they give jemima's line in memory to victoria which is really weird [Music] like victoria's entire song is explaining that isabella's life is better than hers because she got to be a jellicle cat then why is she suddenly so concerned with bringing her back into the club what does victoria want besides having what isabella had and why didn't she express that in her number what is her motivation for wanting to help her so badly and again i want to reiterate this song isn't some magical song that summons isabella or anything it's literally just telling us that it's daylight but this film gets that confused and thinks it's the only reason why isabella comes to the gelco ball like without victoria isabella would have never shown up to the party and tried again it completely removes all of isabella's agency victoria's the one trying to explain to grizzabella that she's got it good while also being the one that's trying to bring her back into the jellicle cats so cool that doesn't make any sense and then we finally get to the end of memory and old deuteronomy sings this line from beautiful ghosts for a reason all your memories of pain let them go so hey like that doesn't have anything to do with like anything unless you're literally about to kill grizzabella and she's gonna dance with ghosts because she's gonna be dead she just wants to be a jellicle cat again isabella's entire character arc is the absolute opposite of this kylo ren let the past die crap she's so desperate to go back to her old life that she dies to be reborn into this club so cool that also doesn't make any sense she's not letting go of the old memories that's the point you just don't understand like how cats works bro on top of replacing the relationship that old deuteronomy has with isabella victoria just gets in the way of everything that katz has going for narratively speaking and from here we get into all the performance issues part three music is hard some of the performances in this film are absolutely pathetic at times this film feels like an exercise of musical humiliation i don't even know where to start with this we might as well dive into the part that everyone likes to rip on when the day's hustle and bustle is done then the gumby cat's work is but hardly begun i'm just i'm speechless not just because this is a bad performance it is but there's something really awkward about it if you haven't noticed yet she's not singing the melody's hustle and bustle is done then the gummy cat's work is when all the families are dead she tucks up and forget the fact that she's having some really serious intonation problems for a minute because believe it or not most of this isn't actually rebel wilson's fault in an excerpt i found from the score from the cat's wiki because of course that's a thing you can see that they label jelly lorem with having the melody in this trio section and that's the line that they gave rubble wilson to sing all by herself but according to the score jelly lorem is sandwiched in between the other two singers of the mice their behaviors if you're like me and hear this top voice as the melody then when you listen to rebel wilson's performance it doesn't sound like she's singing the melody it sounds like she's singing one of the harmonies with no one actually singing the melody in short in changing this from a trio to a solo they've opened up a situation where some people are going to hear this as a melody with no harmony and others are going to hear this as a harmony with no melody combine that with the fact that wilson here is already having some difficulty with this number and hooper's not giving her any of that perfect pitch treatment yeah some of you didn't believe me when i said that they auto-tune everybody but all of this just leads to a really really rough performance it's like bizarre i want to use the word unacceptable but that doesn't feel strong enough it's like your actor forgetting their lines halfway through a take and keeping that in the final cut of the film we're like collectively having to go through that middle school music theory exercise of find the melody in real time and it's just not something that i'd expect to be a problem for film with a 100 million dollar budget maybe the top line was outside of rebel wilson's range so they made her sing one of the harmonies or maybe they literally just looked at the label and saw melody and that's what they gave to her fine but either way it's like why and i can't believe that i'm saying this but this is barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this number there's a great little moment here that i haven't seen a lot of people talk about listen to this part where she says they can't keep me in this kitchen i can't keep being in this kitchen don't get cocky aside from the obvious horror show if you pay attention the cockroaches aren't dancing in sync with the music keep being in this kitchen don't get cocky and i don't just mean the animation the tap dancing is offbeat [Music] the whole point of putting together this night terror on valium the whole point of this rotoscope digital fur technology was to capture the essence of live dancing which right here literally isn't in sync with the music this is the first number and we aren't sure if we're hearing the melody and the dancers aren't in sync with the music should we just stop and call it here is there any point of continuing oh sure there is cause like hey if we can't figure out if the star is singing the melody and we can't get the dancers to keep to a beat why don't we just add random music for absolutely no reason [Music] it's tough to figure out if you did the melody thing on purpose with your actor so it kind of sounds like she's singing a harmony to herself and you can't get the tap dancers to tap to a beat but you still think that you're good enough to add child-faced mice scouting to this horror show yeah good choice there bud believe it or not there's a point to the structure in jenny any dots's number it opens with monkey strap singing at a slower tempo before it speeds up and gets picked up by the trio only to slow down again when it gets picked up by monkey strap and then they pass the number back and forth [Music] the whole point is that these two tempe and the different performers reflect jenny any dots's character during the day she sleeps around like literally is asleep in different places in her home lazing about all day she sits beneath the stair [Music] but then at night she teaches the cockroaches and mice like things that would help them get a job or something there's a dichotomy to this character that's represented in the music they also represent it in the costuming when she takes off one of the costumes on stage so by having rebel wilson constantly speed up and slow down however and whenever she wants to to the basement of creep i am deeply concerned with the haze of the mice she is deeply concerned with the ways of the mice their behavior is not good and their man is not nice because i guess someone thought it would make the performance gooder you're throwing the entire purpose of the structure of this song out the window the entire effect that makes this piece of music work is just gone this is such an amazing failure at such a basic level it verges on parody like are we supposed to be the joke here even if they didn't look like something that crawled out of willy wonka's tunnel the music is almost pitiful then we get rum tum tugger and buster for jones that are constantly interrupted by rebel wilson and james corden's improv i can dance how he dances too let me see [Music] yep okay nice and good everybody ready and five six seven and just before and i don't wanna spend too much time on this because other people have already pointed out how awkward the improv is but i really want to focus on hooper cutting the music the way he does in this show because i just can't believe how much he decided to cut up the music in this musical so many numbers of this musical were interrupted for completely pointless reasons and it absolutely ruins the music in this show like cooper looked to one of his assistants and was like hey you know what would make the music better less of it like the absolute worst culprit here has to be mr mistoffelees which at times feels more agonizing than watching our text in that swamp because it starts and stops over and over and over and over and over again so let's get a little positive spin on it here let's go over some songwriting 101 you never really want to have your numbers start and finish at the exact same energy you'll tend to want your song to grow in energy over time especially if you're writing in this poppy musical theater kind of style so what happens is that you can break down all the songs and cats into two groups songs that start soft and quiet and songs that start loud and fast what weber does for the slow songs which is most of them is he'll start with a solo then build up over the course of the number and then by the end he's pulling out all the stops with the ensemble the orchestration and the harmonies and has a big finish the cavity is a great example starts with a solo the cavity is a mystery and by the end everyone's on board [Music] and it's a similar story with mr mistoffelees starts off with a solo ever a cat's so clever as a magical and by the end of the whole number you get the whole ensemble the brass is coming out of the orchestra rum tum tuggers rum tum tug in the harmonies it's great [Music] but in the case of numbers that start fast and end fast weber pulls out a different trick if you start fast the only way to make it feel like you're speeding up is to drop the tempo and that's how you stop a high energy number from feeling like it's stagnating a great way to make it feel like you're making your high intensity number even more intense is to drop out for a second before throwing everything you have at the audience with numbers like rum tum tugger and skimble shanks that start fast and end fast weber gives them a reason to slow down so that we can get that sense of musical acceleration rumtum tugger gets this little moment i don't really really like what i find for myself now and actually there's a moment in the number where he kicks the ball and mr mistoffelees is supposed to catch it but it totally goes over his head but skimble shanks does something similar it has that fake train fall apart on stage just to give us a little breather [Music] and webber doubles down on mr mastopolis by completely cutting out when mustafalis brings old deuteronomy back only to then come back as big and loud as possible when the number ends [Music] even if you don't get something like a literal tempo change you might break for a dance number which keeps the music going even if the vocals stop and that's really important because since the music continues while the energy might feel like it could be dipping a little bit it maintains the impression that it's all one continuous piece of music because the music never stops that's not what happens in the film because mr mistoffelee starts and stops over and over and over again and it loses any and all momentum that it builds up over and over and over again we're restarting the tune from the very beginning six times it's clear what hooper thinks he's doing here he thinks that he's dangling a carrot on a stick in front of his audience taunting them with one of the more popular numbers but it ruins how the number actually works instead of baiting his audience by prolonging one long exciting piece of music he's giving us six smaller repetitive boring pieces of music on top of that every time it restarts it's with a soloist who doesn't sound like they're plugged into a click track so it just drags and drags [Music] there's absolutely no reason to do this if it isn't a literal pause in the music so a talk show host can get hit in the nuts then it's a needless tempo drop in the middle of a number when a character shows up that's when i would appear and i'd saunter to the rear i'm just so frantic to a man [Music] i love this number and i think that having skimble shanks tap in a way that makes it sound like he's a steam engine firing up is a really really cool effect but it completely halts the number it almost makes it feel like it cuts it in half and there's no point in interrupting a poorly performed piece of music with brand new meaningless music as great as it is that you have jason derulo handling this cadenza just leave him on screen stop cutting away and when it comes to the end with judy dench's performance and the addressing of cats weber does what hooper thought he was doing so first your memory a jog it's an absolute nightmare this is probably the most difficult number to perform because it's supposed to start with old deuteronomy singing very softly several kinds of cat and then he continuously builds and builds over the course of his solo [Music] until he's at his absolute maximum and then the ensemble repeats his last couplet [Music] beginning old dude starts soft builds throughout the solo before he's at his max the ensemble comes in but then this time he continues singing and he starts singing the harmony only to end on this absolutely huge note i think it's a high b [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the problem here is that judy dench just wasn't given the right direction no one sat her down and explained to her how this number worked she gives this spoken word-esque performance which means that she doesn't build during her solos the ensemble comes out of nowhere and saying a cat is not a dog and when they finish it feels like a cadence [Music] only to go back to judy dench doing the exact same thing at the exact same intensity for another whole minute with cats some say one rule is true it's why the ending just has no punch compare this to have his personal taste and so in time you'll reach your aim and call him [Music] to this personal [Music] you can't look at a single number in this film and not find some kind of fairly serious problem with it like even with the opening if you pay attention you can hear that the ensemble just isn't the name together she never will get the name that no human research can discover and then at times you can hear the choreography kind of getting in the way of the vocal performances like right here whenever you see a cat jumping or landing that impact throws off their ability to maintain consistent breath support and throughout the mongodjarian rumbleteaser number uncle jerry is constantly doing these movements that's throwing off his ability to hold notes for we are incurably given to rob ramp oh teaser and while we're here why did they use a different version of mungo durian rumple teaser this one's in 4-4 but the original one or at least the one that everybody knows from the 98 film has parts that are in seven eight and i feel like the 7-8 version is way better than what they put in the film and then there's growl tiger why the lyrics literally say that mccavity is a ginger cat [Music] it's the like it's the words in the song dude the song literally describes what he's supposed to look like between memory and this i'm starting to question if there's a 100 literacy rate in hollywood directors i can't get over just how bad almost every aspect of the music in this show is even if they did somehow figure out how to make these human cat hybrids without frightening children there would still be these enormous musical issues it's just so painfully apparent that hooper doesn't understand how or why these numbers work and in the process of messing the numbers up he tried to course correct them by adding to them which only made them much much worse but the thing about all this is that he never really had a chance in the first place because he ruined the show before he even started part four stolen time a lot of les mis is what they call recitative okay so the material is really suitable for this kind of freedom i do the soliloquy and it starts with what have i done sweet jesus what have i done become a thief in the night become a dog on the run have i fallen so far and is the hour so late okay so that's if you were singing it literally be like that i can go out there and some take so i'd be like what have i done sweet jesus what have i done become a thief in the night become a dog on the run have i fallen so far into the hours so late now i already have a video about how the live recording on les miz was really bad and originally i was going to talk about this problem in that video but honestly it seemed too nerdy like who would really care about this but lo and behold hooper dragged it into cats as well okay so originally i had like a half an hour segment here talking about the differences between like arya and restative and then the differences between restaurativo seco and recetivo companado and it all got really complicated from everything i'm getting here he's describing a second performance but most of les mis is really accompanied at best when it isn't almost explicitly in arya or at the very least an arioso but i'm not going to sit here and explain what all that means because we're going to be here all day in short he's not completely wrong but i feel like he's missed some really serious nuances about how like music and opera works like for starters i feel like the soliloquy in les mis is a little bit more of an aria because it's just valjean singing about his feelings and his thoughts and nothing's really happening in the story but we're just not gonna get into it what this gets down to is that he's talking about taking some really serious liberties with the performance when the music just doesn't really allow for it check out how what jackman's talking about here snowballed into some really serious problems there's a dance where if they need a millisecond more to form a thought before they express it they can take that time i feel my shame inside me the actors are leading that piano that is a huge relationship between the actors and the pianist for whatever reason whether it was hooper or jackman or some other music director producer whatever they decided that what they should do is have the actors lead the performance and then have their pianists that they had on set follow along i can only speculate why they wanted to do this hooper really seems to lack the musical vocabulary to really describe what he wants in any meaningful detail the click track gives us the pulse where the piece is flowing which is basically a sound that the orchestra here in their ears the thing that's taken me years to learn about orchestras is that you can direct them like you direct an actor careful of being too romantic i mean like it's about it's written very romantically but what he's singing about is is the loss of absolutely all his friends which in terms of him being the director kind of feels like finding out that your math teacher can't count but in trying to have the actors lead the music what ended up happening on les mis was that the actors basically did whatever the hell they wanted with the music and then the poor piano player was just left to try really hard in one scene you can see the conductor desperately trying to keep this show together but he just looks so defeated you will sense that they want to slow down in and i either conducted a bit faster or slower and we sort of did it together and it's worked i think it's really worked but the actors are singing the piano players doing their best with whatever the hell the actors are deciding to do and that's how they got their takes but in leaving the actors to do their own thing with the tempo it created an egregious problem with the orchestral recording in post since all the actors basically didn't keep it beat the orchestra had to do rhythmic backflips to keep up it's agonizing to hear them describe what they're doing normally when you're composing film music you keep the click either completely regular or very or with very few changes so the orchestra can use it as a simple thing to follow in this film because the actors are you know made lots of choices about temper the conductor has to memorize this these flows in tempo and then the orchestra have to learn it it goes slightly faster on the downbeat of 66 and beats 3 and 4 is slightly slow not to say it's the wrong way round but it is and we all learned how to do it how to uh manipulate to push to drive to breathe with the actors at the end of a long day which is this is the end of our third session we got so that's sort of seven hours later of play we get to the people's song we played it sort of quite well but we just didn't get into the moment into the spirit of it because we were a bit tired just give them a breather just give them a little bit yeah i need two minutes yes you guys i know oh no i can't go straight on there do you need something and hooper and macintosh were so oblivious to this entire process that they put all of this in the special features as if it was some kind of triumph as if the orchestra managed to conquer some magnificent beast without realizing that they were the problem in the first place this is the most exotic thing i've ever seen in a film production since the room and i mean that and it shows lame miz is a metric [Music] nightmare [Music] oh [Music] and when it came to cats they dialed all this up to 11. it's all about creating a frame where that where the actors got incredible freedom to make choices in the moment that bring alive the lyrics they even brought simon hayes back who won an oscar for his work on les mis and rightly so that was an insane amount of work that he had to do for les mis the first time that tom and i met he was talking to me about the honesty and the energy that you get from a live vocal recording we've pioneered live vocal recordings on les mis but this is les miserables on steroids in an article penned by the different audio leads on set discussing what they did to facilitate hooper's expectations while working on cats victor chaga i hope i'm pronouncing your name right the pro tools music editor specifically outlines how they rigged up this five-track musical system where at the press of a button they could switch between a playback of pre-recorded music like a mock-up of the orchestral track a playback of an orchestral track but with a live piano over the top to help guide the performers with certain cues that they might be struggling with a live piano playback with a click track based on a tempo map of the pre-recorded material a live piano playing but with a few reference clicks from a click track like having a metronome count you in but then the piano goes from there or finally a setting where they can let the piano player play completely free following whatever the actors decided to do on stage and all of this was happening in the middle of takes one part of a number could be played to a click track while the next would be performed alongside the piano player following whatever the actor wanted to do and then back again it is stunning to read about because it almost feels like the audio equivalent of mythbusters on meth creating this absurd playback system is kind of like strapping a rocket engine onto a three-wheeled shopping cart like yeah it is extraordinarily impressive that you managed to pull this off and i feel really sorry for the team of and let's be real here top of the line audio engineers these people are literally at the top of their field imagine if you had world class cancer researchers working on a marketing campaign for the health benefits of mouthwash enemas that's about what we're dealing with here so when the ensemble feels like they're suddenly listening to a click track it's because they are someone pushed a button and now they all have a metronome in their ears suddenly we have an explanation as to why it sounds like rebel wilson is being left musically unsupervised on a set right here where she's messing with the tempo if it sounds like these soloists are waiting for a click check to start in their ear that might be because the whole set is waiting for them to do just that and here's where a really great example of this misunderstood warped metric technique is at its absolute most it's gandalf and some people really like this performance and that's fine everyone's entitled to their own opinion even if it's wrong just listen to that clarinet and flute try to follow him around in the background it's absolutely not i don't know if this is what hoover wanted or not but i feel like now is the best time to try and explain what i think hugh jackman was talking about what i think he was trying to describe was rubato rubato or tempo rubato translates to stolen time this is what happens when a performer messes with the internal meter and rhythm of a phrase in order to make the performance seem more natural and expressive betty buckley's performance of memory is actually a really great example of this while you're listening to this pay attention to where her and the orchestra [Music] separates the orchestra is keeping the beat they're playing the melody as it's written you might even go so far as to say they're playing a really boring version of the melody but betty buckley is playing with the internal structure of the meter to make it more expressive and organic she's moving where the rhythms and beats are in the line that she's singing to fit how she wants to express the melody listen again now compare that to elaine page's [Music] performance and now compare that to barbra streisand [Applause] [Music] rubato is a component of phrasing which is basically how and why you perform a piece of music the way that you do phrasing is the art of performance and it's an extremely complicated subject to try and cover in short that's why people get doctorates of music performance now there are a few things about rubato that you gotta know you don't just speed up and slow down whenever you want whatever time you take you have to give back that's why it's called stolen time otherwise people will slow down during the tricky parts and then they'll speed up when it gets easy again and you see this a lot in inexperienced performers you could spot it a mile away like oh say you've gotta deliver a line really quickly or something and your diction might not be up to par hint hint with the ways of the mice their behavior is not [Music] just to keep the overall structure of the piece you can mess with the internal structures but not the overall form you can't be so fast or slow that you finish the chorus while the orchestra is still playing the verse one of the ways that these performers are able to stay on track so well when they're messing with the rhythm is that they use the orchestra to keep their plays typically you don't want to rubato your orchestra on the fly you don't just want to suddenly slow them down because you feel like it if you do everyone will speed up and slow down at a different rate it's a complete mess now let's go back to what's happening with he's all over the place and the orchestra is trying to keep up with him landing the notes where he puts them not the metronome so instead of getting a genuinely robotod effect it's just warped the whole meter listen to the original you can actually hear susan tanner deliver some of these lines a little more rubato and it makes it feel a little more personal more natural gus is the cat at the theater door his name ought to have told you before but here it's just kind of an awkward spoken word soliloquy with some strange music in the background probably because hooper was thinking well this is gus the theater cat and we have ian servant of the secret fire wielder of the flame of anor mckellen why not have him deliver it like a soliloquy the issue is that they didn't completely commit to it never half-assed two things whole ass one thing so mckellen goes up there it delivers it in his own way and then the piano player just had to do their best to keep up which then translated to these awkward woodwinds doing everything they could to try and maintain a melody gus is the cat at the theater door as opposed to the almost lullaby quality that we're supposed to get with the orchestra in the stage version similar effect with how dench delivers her lines at the end of the show it's supposed to be this big show-stopping moment when old dude sends a cat to the heavy side lair but instead it almost feels like old deuteronomy is sundowning and just like the bizarre cuts in almost every number you can hear this effect everywhere like while mr mistoffelees drags on from all the cuts there are moments where lori davidson is pulling this number off and not long ago this phenomenal cat produced seven kittens right out of a hat but the real problem here is that instead of robotoing to make the performance sound more naturally expressive he's warping the melody to the point where the rhythm and the delivery is the exact same in every line i can walk on the narrowest rail i can pick any card from a pack i am equally cunning with dice he can pick any card from the pack he's equally cunning with dice he's always deceiving you and super leaving that is only hung on myself so instead of coming off like a more natural music performance it makes it sound like more of an artificial spoken performance you can even get this effect in jennifer hudson's memory right here where she says easy to leave me it feels like the orchestra hesitates for just a moment so they can place the note where she does it's really subtle but once i noticed it i couldn't help but feel like the orchestra is working against her a little bit here if i play other versions of memory you can tap your foot along with the orchestra and the performers dance around the meter [Music] but it's not quite as exact when it comes to hudson's version [Music] instead of having the orchestra supporting the performer like we get with buckley or paige here the orchestra is following hudson and you get these moments where it almost feels like the orchestra's trying to anticipate where and when she's gonna land on those notes it's holding her back ever so slightly and believe it or not there's an eye-opening revelation about hollywood's methods that you can glean from this film part five dance rehearsal it kind of lied to you a little bit back when i said you can't rebottan an ensemble like an orchestra you can but it's really difficult to do on the fly so you don't instead you do it in rehearsal see so many people have only ever performed in a scholastic environment where the rehearsals were where you learned the words and the music and you all learned to play together that's not even remotely close to how it goes in the professional world you walk in already knowing all the words in the music or in the case of most orchestras you're already good enough to sight read it and the whole point of the rehearsals is that the conductor tells you how they want to perform it the phrasing they'll say things like i want to slow down at measure 30 whatever and watch me on the downbeat of letter q i really like to lean into that formatta you write all that down with a pencil and then you're ready to go for the show and in the case of you accompanying soloists on stage this is where and how the soloists performers everyone all comes together and decides how they want to play what never in the history of forever have you ever had someone walk on stage and just hope that the orchestra would follow whatever the hell they're doing that is so impossibly backwards that just writing this made my blood pressure rise you would never ever just suddenly slow down on a whim and expect the orchestra to bend around you i don't know how or why tomothy hooper and the powers that be have all of these horrible preconceived notions about music that are all just entirely wrong but they along with this film have single-handedly proved that we do not in any way shape or form live in a meritocracy this is ass backwards to how live performances work hell even pre-recorded ones you never record the voice and then write the music around it ever ever there are countless videos and stories of someone screwing up on stage and the orchestra just keeps chugging along they don't care if you messed up that's not their job they play the music and you have to pray to god that your brain fires up again before the end of the piece best case scenario your conductor's going to give you a sympathetic frown tell you to do your best and then go right back to the music there's no reason to do what they did here's a kick-ass question that no one ever decided to answer why did they need a five-track system that helped the performance sing to certain cues and eventually elect to just not keep the beat why do they need additional piano cues to help them keep their place because and heaven forgive me if i'm overstepping my bounds here but it sounds like they just didn't know the music if you're changing the accompaniment in the middle of takes to help your performers keep track of what they're doing with the music then guess what your performers don't know the music james corden got top billing for this show and he only had to perform his song in 20 second chunks and then he spent the rest of his time on set deep throating fake champagne hey tom tommy tombo my man if you wanted to capture the live energy of a real performance then maybe you could i don't know train it like a real performance talk to the music department and your performers figure out what everyone wants to do for their number then have the orchestra record the music and the way that it's going to appear in the final film then you blast that into the actor's ears while they're performing bada bing bada boom you've got a show baby and i saved you at least a couple million dollars in overhead and i didn't even have to reinvent the wheel there that's just how this works on earth what the were they doing in rehearsals i swear to god if someone says that they were learning the music then guess what folks we weren't watching a professional production we were watching the world's most expensive rehearsal of the world's most basic musical even if they rehearsed the crap out of the show and knew it all like the back of their hand there's no point in encouraging them to change their performances each take live on set you can't treat these musical numbers like improv comedy that's just not how this works because here's the thing i'm gonna be fair there are parts of this film where it kind of works there are dance numbers in the jellicle ball that look kinda cool in the right lighting jason derulo honestly does a good job let's be real here when it's not getting interrupted skimble shank slaps and do you know why do you know why tom i'm gonna give you a little bit of a clue here cooper if you want to dance you have to dance to a beat no one's ever listened to burial sequenza number three and thought oh yeah daddy that's a real toe tapper no one's ever counted in a group of ballerinas with one two screw it in your own time you spent enough money to fund a quarter of a space shuttle to try and make a movie that captures the majesty of dance and you made it impossible to keep to a beat in at least half of these numbers correct me if i'm wrong here tom but that doesn't really make a lot of sense does it that's it you can't dance well without a beat because nothing in this show is some kind of free dance with no music not even victoria solo [Music] everyone walks away talking about how this show is about the dancing and they took out the one thing that makes it possible to dance to this show now i know that someone out there is gonna reference some avant-garde solo dance routine that's performed to radio static because they took one semester of intro to dance before becoming a family studies major like everyone else in the performing arts department and they just want everybody to know go ahead make a tick tock where you dance to gandalf gus here and see if you can make it go viral i dare you i can't believe i'm saying this but there's a reason weber wrote the numbers in the show the way that he did and there's a reason this show has been as successful as it's been you could very easily move your body to the original version good luck with whatever the hell this is despite all the cuts in his track rumtum tugger's number maintains all that energy because it's one of the few numbers played to a click track that's why it carries that energy with it or skimble shanks it's because you need a click track to keep everyone on that thirteen eight you can't do the one two three one two three one two three one two one two when someone's making up the tempo [Music] you need to have your performers on a click track if you want a popsicle's chance in this fur covered hellscape of ever being able to sync that to dancing if you want a good example of that not happening check out the cockroach dancers right here stephen mcrae is literally tapping his foot to the beat and it's certain that i wouldn't approve but what that means is that the numbers in this film that worked almost feel like they were done by accident think about this really think about this it is a massive tell that the best performances in this show were all sung by dancers really let that marinate for a minute they gave all the power to the performers to do with the numbers what they wanted and in the hyper toxic environment of hollywood all those dancers took one minute to look at each other and had that telepathic mind link where they realized that this ship was sinking and they said nah that's fine just play the orchestral mock-up that's set to the click check it's what i'm used to anyway lol but that's the kind of polish that you need to have if you want a truly spectacular performance with this film we just weren't watching a finished performance they spent tens of millions of dollars digitally enhancing what should have been their rehearsals i want to come back to this quote that we started with a good film can survive a bad score but a good score cannot save a bad film it goes without question that hudson would have won at the very least an oscar nomination if this film hadn't been such a flop i'd even go so far as to say that she could have even gotten a grammy nomination under the right circumstances for all the complaining i'm doing about the orchestra she did an amazing job along with a lot of the people who were on set for hours and hours and hours doing these dance routines and getting these numbers out on top of the orchestra who are putting in so much time and effort into this ordeal that they were recording music as late as two months before this film's release date but every time you look up something about this film it's about how that digital fur technology looked absolutely horrific someone might say something about how charming it was to see taylor swift and that's about it no one brings up all the musical problems in this film both in terms of the performances and in the music's role in telling the story it's kind of frightening to think about how the effects were so bad that it actually distracted us from how bad the music was as well in this you know musical why make a musical without focusing on the music thanks for watching i like thank my patrons for making these videos possible with an extra special thank you to alec kulikowski alex klinkert always posh anthony de donato artemy hey artemi ariella giglom captain casey charlie holly christian clara tan darren almgren don marie curran edith with the man hands el arira elise and thomas constantine eyeball boy for the horde google it gregory holdenness hayden jondro i don't trust anyone who isn't honest about their addiction to ice cream i want you to tell me if my fear is justified that no one will pay attention to me if i'm honest about my addiction to ice cream it was too long before but ice cream dude is valid jason kim jeff bridges but you can call me the dude joe angle john egbert jordan adams joseph spiros josh bakte julian dubois justin harley karen rosenau keltier looney majors lordwina elizabeth iv the lanyard quentin you michael hubbard mike wisnick myron john tataran nicole nicholas cowan praylock progressive app store russia's greatest youth machine rachel augsburger rafael martinez ravenhorn rich marzullo rick osborne ryan vick sideway tastic mr ben skye pilot tabitha aquileford take that rewind it back sideways music theory make your brain cells go clap thanks for that i'm sorry i'm so bad tara fimiera transpanic powerhour vox wisdom minari you are loved you are valid you deserve to live you are not the exception you shall call me the pumpkin queen and that little symbol that i still don't know how to pronounce i'm really sorry please send me a dm so i notice what i mean i'd also like to thank everybody who requested this video i know it's been a long time in the making and i'd like to thank everyone for requesting that i talk about this nightmare film and if for whatever reason you like what you saw here be sure to subscribe and check out my other videos uh follow me on twitter twitch to have musical questions answered live and if you really like what i'm doing then consider supporting the channel on patreon but that's all i got for now thanks for watching

Channel: Sideways

Views: 1,957,343

Rating: 4.9505363 out of 5

Keywords: Cats, Hooper, Tom Hooper, Victoria, Grizabella, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Musicals, Disney, James Corden, Jennifer Hudson, Cats 2019, Judi Dench, Jason Derulo, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson, Francesca Hayward, Skimbleshanks, Memory, Macavity, Mistofelees, Deuteronomy, Musical, Music Theory, Tempo Rubato, Les Miserables

Id: i3aK-EK5V2k

Length: 64min 43sec (3883 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/pm_me_your_molars]

As someone who's seen the stage show, I think this video brings up a lot of points that have been missing from the "hurr durr cats looks bad!" conversations. The musical has energy and momentum and the jokes land. There's a sweetness and camaraderie to the characters that's missing in the film and the background cats aren't a sea of background dancers, they are their own characters as well.

[u/Wiger_King]

You are telling me that the music in Cats is worse than in my ... memories?

[u/[deleted]]

This actually does a really good job of explaining why the music just sounded plain bad. The stage show is bizarre and not the greatest show, but you can still tap your foot along to the songs and enjoy them.

I remember the the Mungojerry and Rumpleteezer part sounding so bad. It was like neither of the singers were in time with the music so it was almost painful to listen to how badly they were out of time with one another.

On my first and only watch of the movie, the only performance I liked was the railyard cat because he seemed to be on the same page as the orchestra and the tempo was tight. The guy in this video seemed to think it was one of the better songs too...

But it's also crazy that a musical had so many characters that were just not very good singers at all. And so many of the songs had that weird sort of spoken word vibe to them rather than being songs with the singer and orchestra on the same page.

This movie ruined the choreography by painting over everyone with terrible cgi which makes it all look animated. Then it ruined all the songs by having non-muscians just sort of make up their own tempo and phrasing regardless of what the orchestra is dictating and then the orchestra is left trying to fit themselves to the weird spoken word "singing." So all the songs just sound incredibly off.

[u/LiquidAether]

This video does an excellent job of explaining how little I know about music.

Or at least, my inability to decipher all the individual elements that make up music.

[u/calimatty]

I did not expect to watch the whole thing...but I did.

[u/blazingwaffle58]

Good vid

[u/CertifiedKinophile]

My guy's video! It didn't show up in my sub feed. How?

[u/[deleted]]

As a connoisseur of bad movies I really got to pencil this thing into my schedule.

Damned crime it has been out so long and I haven't seen it.

[u/NeoGrotesk]

Hooper is incapable of doing good musicals.