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Why is Cats?

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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

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Why is Cats?