Cats (2019)

(On Cable TV, October 2020) Like most avid cinephiles, I heard about the Cats experience back in December 2019—the hyperbolic bad reviews were bad enough to convince me to wait for Cable TV broadcast, although I reserved skeptical judgment until I had a chance to find out by myself. Alas, it really doesn’t take a long time for Cats to fill up the litter box. From the first few minutes alone, the film only raises one certitude: It should not have existed. Not like that. As animation, perhaps, but as “live action” (yet with more CGI than the entire first century of moviemaking), it’s simply grotesque. The production animates cat fur over motion-captured bodies, but does it so badly that it ends up creating more revulsion than admiration. Visually, the result is repellent: they don’t move like cats nor like humans (a corrosive impact of CGI is that you cannot suspend any disbelief regarding physical movement of the actors in cat suits. This isn’t like a musical of yore where you knew they got everything live: here, there are enough unnatural movements that everything may as well be animated by hand) and the celebrity caricatures are the things that will tarnish their resumés. (The one lone exception, and the only moment in the movie that I actually liked, was Taylor Swift vamping it up as Bombalurina–at least she understood how ridiculous it was, and her part was strong enough to overcome everything else.) Of course, it doesn’t help that Cats-the-movie is built upon the rickety Cats-the-musical, something weird enough that it first drew derision among Broadway fans. The story makes almost zero sense, and the way the film invents its own vocabulary like a mentally disturbed person does no one any favours—although I was grateful for the competent closed captioning. I could go on and on, but the thing is: I like cats (the animals) and I like musicals (the movie genre) and I cannot imagine watching Cats-the-movie again except to point out how terrible it is. It’s a misfire of such colossal proportions that it actually made me feel better: in an age of super-commercialization, industrial psychology used to manipulate wide audiences and movie producers searching for assured profits by adapting known properties, it’s a heartening statement that even the industrial-entertainment complex is fallible: hundreds of people and millions of dollars can be invested in an obviously boneheaded concept and still make it through to the end. It kind of makes you feel as if anything is still possible, right?