skygiants | (no subject)

All right, so I have bad news and good news.

The bad news is that -- although

genarti very kindly acceded to my requests for her to a.) drive us an hour away from her family's home in Vermont to the nearest movie theater that was playing Cats in the hopes of seeing the film in all its originally-released glory and then b.) watch Cats with me -- we did not manage to catch the un-patched version before they "fixed" the "CGI errors". This was apparently not just a tragedy for me but also for everyone else in our theater: "Is this the old, disaster version?" the people ahead of us in line asked hopefully, and when they were told it was in fact the new version, everyone around us groaned in unison.

The good news is that the "patched" version decides to have done away with the apparently CGI-messy question of "hands or paws" by just giving up on the notion of cat-paws entirely. Instead, every single cat just has human hands all of the time. So, you know, if you were worried you've missed your chance to experience this uncanniest of valleys: rest assured! You have not!

Also, there remains no such thing as a 'consistent' sense of 'scale', half the cats wear shoes and half of them just have normal human feet, and Mister Mistoffelees' ears are constantly clipping through his sparkly hat.

So, Cats! Cats. The Cats experience. Where do I begin.

The first time we get a close-up on a CGI cat-face, half the theater, myself included, whisper-screams "oh no" in unison.

This "OH NO" is reflected on the face of Victoria the white dancing cat, who in the first shot is the size of a normal cat as she got thrown away into an alley in a sack and then immediately emerges from the sack as a full-size dancer. The other cats prowl around her; Victoria looks deeply unnerved; "I don't think she knows she's the same species as them," I whisper to

genarti.

Later in the show, this turns out to be true -- she doesn't even know if she is a Jellical Cat, she sadly confesses to Old Deuteronomy -- so good job on Victoria and her CGI face for conveying that accurately, I guess!

The spate of whisper-screaming from in front of us continues throughout the first number. What you've heard is true: Jennyanydots does a.) unzip her cat skin, revealing a sparkly bikini underneath, and b.) casually chomp down on a lot of showgirl cockroaches with human faces. The mice also have human faces -- children's faces -- which I guess is maybe why nobody actually eats them, they only talk about it. We'd both heard about all this from advance reviews and thus are moderately prepared for it.

We're not prepared when Idris Macavity Elba appears ten minutes later, after the Rum Tum Tugger and Bustopher Jones, and poofs Jennyanydots into nonexistence. "Did he ... kill her?" I whisper to

genarti.

But no, he's just magically transported her to a murder boat where he will spend the rest of the show collecting a zoo of rival cats in an attempt to go to the Heaviside Layer? It's fine. Don't worry about Jennyanydots. She can escape by unzipping her own skin at any point. It will always be just as horrifying.

genarti, by the way, is actually moderately unfazed by this because she's still busy fuming about the endless stream of Bustopher Jones fat jokes and also the Rum Tum Tugger's weirdly sexless number, a surprising choice for a film that has already committed to a lot of slinky, constantly stoned cat-people rubbing up against each other and lifting their legs in the air.

But actually all of the numbers throughout the show are weirdly low-energy -- "It's like the lounge version of Cats," says

genarti, accurately -- which in some ways, I guess, explains why, later on in the show, Taylor Swift will need to descend from the ceiling in zebra-print high heels and dose all the cats with surprise nonconsensual catnip in order to get any energy out of them at all.

Anyway, by this point, I don't actually expect any greater horrors from this show. I've seen Rebel Wilson eat showgirl cockroaches. I can handle anything. The people in front of us are not so blase. Other points when the people in front of us scream and throw themselves bodily backwards in their chairs:

- when Old Deuteronomy is introduced and all the cats' tails jerk up in the air in unison and then all the cats fall over as if they are possessed
- when Sir Ian McKellen licks a table (

genarti says it was a saucer of milk, but it sure looked to me like Sir Ian McKellen was just crouched over licking a table)
- every time the cats turn on a dime from standing and dancing upright, more or less like people, to scuttling away on all fours, like uncanny valley nightmares
- every time we get a super-close-up on Grizabella's face and the two lines of snot lovingly daubed onto her upper lip
- when Dame Judi Dench, at the very end, turns her beruffed head to stare directly out at the camera and sings the entirety of "The Addressing of Cats" directly to the audience. (It would be easy to interpret this as a cry for help but actually, honestly, Dame Judi Dench looks like she's having a truly stellar time throughout the whole film and more power to her.)

On the other hand, they are excited by Memory -- "I actually know this song!" one of them exclaims, as the first chords come up -- and enchanted by Skimbleshanks -- "A TAP-DANCING cat!" another person breathes, as Skimbleshanks warms up in jaunty red suspenders.

Also, in the most important moment of our whole experience, they lead the whole theater in a rendition of the wave during "Magical Mister Mistoffelees."

-- well, second most important. The actual most important moment, for me, is when Idris Elba kidnap-poofs Sir Ian McKellen in a back alley and then triumphantly screams "MACAViteeeeeeeee" before disappearing. I'd thought I was ready for anything, but it turned out I was wrong.

Ummm what else? What else is it important for me to tell you? Oh, there's a new song, for Victoria, and it sounds almost exactly like it came off the soundtrack of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies. In the end we learn it was co-written with Taylor Swift, and realized that was the only reason it didn't sound exactly like it came off the soundtrack to Love Never Dies.

Also, Sir Ian McKellen defeats a villain by shouting "FIREFROREFIDDLE!" at him so frighteningly that he falls off the boat, while Skimbleshanks aggressively tap-dances another one into the ground, and then a defeated Idris Elba -- who has spent most of the show in a fedora and trenchcoat, and is all the more horrifyingly nude once he shucks them -- attempts to stow away to the Heaviside Layer by hanging onto Jennifer Hudson's balloon, but falls off onto the top of Wellington's hat. There are actually a lot of cats who start out wearing clothes, and then shuck them over the course of the show, and it is always, always worse than when they start out wearing no clothes, but not quite as bad as when Rebel Wilson unzips her skin.

And then Judi Dench stares into our souls and Jennifer Hudson's balloon dissolves heroically into the sunlight and the movie ends.

"But what happened to Taylor Swift?" the people behind us ask, forlornly, as the final credits come up. Good question, people behind us (she helps Macavity steal Old Deuteronomy, briefly appeared in Macavity's Cat Zoo, then disappears from the plot) but maybe not the most important question? On the other hand, who am I to say? I have no ability to frame any questions about this film anymore. We saw what we saw. The experience is the experience. Until Universal Pictures releases another patch, I guess.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

troisoiseaux

I am literally crying with laughter, reading this. All the reviews and tweets I've read about this movie bring me so much joy and almost - almost - make up for the fact that this was something that a number of human people living among us actively decided to greenlight, invest a huge amount of time and energy in, and then unleash on the world.

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