Cats Notes
I do not like musicals. I feel like people spontaneously breaking into song sends my vicarious embarrassment into overdrive. Hell, I cannot handle people singing in general, unless there is a stage involved. Remember that Nell Carter show called Gimme a Break? No? It was a sitcom about a black housekeeper played by singer-actress Nell Carter that worked for a white police officer’s family. (That would be a neat show to update nowadays, huh?) Anyhow, it ran from 81-87 and introduced a child actor named Joey Lawrence to the world who would later go onl to star in Blossom and have a short-lived popstar career. Anyhow, there were episodes when little Joey was asked to sing on Gimme a Break and I shit you not, I would hide behind my couch because I was so embarrassed. So, needless to say, people just suddenly singing to move a plot along, a la West Side Story or The Wizard of Oz – I just cannot handle it. And Cats is nothing but that. But again, this music is mostly horrid, so now I embarrassed by them suddenly singing, but even more so because the music is atrocious.
I loathed Cats. It was difficult to watch and unbearable to listen to. It left me feeling exhausted and hateful. And it’s not because it’s all bad either. It’s actually a mixed bag, which makes the whole thing more frustrating because you cannot dismiss it outright.
The movie gets slagged and dissed for the character design and visual effects, which honestly, are two of the only things making it worth watching at all.
Based on all the bellyaching, you’d think the stage play was originally called Dogs and the movie had pulled the typically lazy Hollywood reboot trick of changing the title animal to Cats.
But no! As everyone knows, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s original stage musical was indeed about an assortment of bizarrely named stray cats.
Well, sort of, right? I mean, these were actors, dressed as human-cat hybrids. All the movie does is animate their ears and tails and place them in a few digital environments throughout early 20th Century London. But essentially it retains the character design from the show. And the FX? It’s really damn impressive. We’re talking every shot of a way too long 1 hour fifty minute movie here. All pretty convincingly rendered into some gorgeously designed set pieces, as the production design here too is beautiful.
Finding issue with the visual effects artists is bunk. One of the companies, by the way, went out of business after this with part of the reason due to its being blamed (loudly, in part by director Tom Hooper who no doubt was looking anyplace he could for a scapegoat) Saying the movie flopped because upon release there were shots that were not quite ready including a scene where Dame Judi Dench’s wedding ring was left in the shot – and blaming the CG artists is really shooting the messenger when the message itself is an unintelligible mess that would have made more sense were it written by actual Cats. What I am saying is it’s the goddamn script and music of Cats the movie that truly makes this thing the abomination everyone says it is. Andrew Lloyd Webber is to blame here kids. No, and not even him alone, but every chucklehead that firmly believed there’s anything worthwhile in this cloying mess when it was on Broadway. It’s about fucking stray CATS in London that are vying for a chance at rebirth as decided by an older cat who has this power because I DO NOT FUCKING KNOW WHY NOR DO I CARE. All of this parading around as meowing, mewling, writhing, and leaping feline-human creepozoids all happens because Andrew Lloyd Webber took too much peyote and decided some old TS Eliot poems REALLY needed to be set to vaudevillian stage music resulting in a form of torture that classless, clueless 80’s thea-tah consumers blissfully endured in what I must assume was some kind of self-flagellation to amend for their selfish turn from hippies to corporatists.
Poor TS Eliot, honestly he’s a bit blameless as “Jellicle” is a nifty word to include in a poem, but not at all something you EVER want to hear uttered allowed more than once, never mind 600 fucking times in a song. And I suppose unrelated vignettes about cats done in verse for kids seems a clever way to get them sleepy before bedtime. So TS Eliot, you get a pass. But Andrew Lloyd Webber? He strung Eliot’s words together with mostly unlistenable melodies and a vague storyline about rebirth culled from some unpublished Eliot poetry, so yeah, he is certainly in part responsible because this thing is unintelligible. But look, people commit horrible ideas to stage all the time! Remember, Stephen King’s Carrie was made into a musical?! Webber may have birthed this mess, but the people decided it was a goddamn cultural touchstone. Hell, we can’t even blame Tom Hooper, the film adaptation’s director. This guy had a critically well respected pedigree going into this with some well-liked wordy British dramas under his belt including the multi Oscar-winning “The King’s Speech.” And one of those Oscars was for best director! This is his Oscar-winning follow up! Friggin CATS! It appears he earnestly tried his damndest, but this is a weird game of “Telephone,” bringing Cats to the big screen. From Eliot to Webber, Webber to Hooper. And his miserable failure, partly due to what the visual effects team say was his complete ignorance about CG and his apparent bullying of them because he did not know what he was doing, isn’t the true Achille’s heel here. At the end of the day, it’s the source material: it’s about Cats; a subject perhaps fine for whimsical poetry but not for any self respecting audience looking to be entertained by a cohesive narrative or a good song. Finally, in 2019 – a solid 30 years into this phenomenon – the audience found its self respect and this thing was torpedoed the way it should have been decades earlier, but with the visual effects team shouldering most of the ridicule. Look no further than the reaction I first had when you told me I had to watch this thing, Mike! First thing I thought was buttholes because 1) I have owned cats and 2) because there’s rumors of cat anuses being digitally added and removed from the movie – another weird fallout on the hardworking digital craftspeople!
The original musical HAS to be the byproduct of a deep cultural bankruptcy, it’s the death of art on paper, but then is realized without irony by skilled actors and technicians desperate to milk some sense of wonder, interest and value from it. Which is true “blood from a stone” territory here because it’s about CATS. Strays looking to be reborn because their lives are… Christ, No one even knows why! I mean, the one cat who’s chosen has a sad life because she’s got a bad reputation for running with the wrong Tom, but why didn’t the old actor cat get his big break after a life worth of serving audiences? He’s like the proxy for every single craftsperson that worked on any production of this vapid story! Just grant them all some mercy because this whole damn thing is a journey taken to a place no one has any right to visit. Anyone who clutches their pearls that this big-screen adaptation is shameful, but that somehow the stage musical has more merit is biggest part of the whole damn problem. It’s these clods who made this thing into a stage sensation, ushering in the “megamusical phenomenon.” They bought the tickets and took the ride, but somehow the people who made the movie ended up taking the fall for all of it.
And let’s talk about the actors, another unfairly maligned group of respected and hard working folks who take the fall for this. (Webber, by the way, had the audacity himself to dismiss and ridicule the movie, citing the script, the director, FX and acting.)
There are actually three kinds of acting in Cats that throw it way off balance: the first is film acting, which is done very capably by Judi Dench as old dueterodomy and Ian McKellen as Gus. The other is stage acting which is uncomfortable to watch with or without cat CGI. This is what most do in this flick and it’s… ugh… it’s just awful. Particularly Robert Fairchild as Munkustrap and Francesca Hayward as Victoria the White. Starry eyed wistfulness from her, egregious fake confidence from him. Part of this is the camera in film being too close to the face of the theater kid who is playing for the back row. That over confident theater kid acting – a kind of fake, blissful, unblinking attentiveness that becomes a stagey assurance in each move? On stage it is a kind of “big acting” but onscreen it manifests as a synthetic “charisma” (in quotes) that we’re supposed to accept but is so devoid of authenticity that it simply annoys. Finally, there’s “singer acting.” Ever watch vocalists live on stage and they’re just really feeling the music? Like 80’s era Bono or Celine Dion in her heyday? It’s a rare blend of film and stage acting with a focus on emoting through the music and in Cats Jennifer Hudson and Taylor Swift yield some pretty good results, although most of what they sing is just terrible.
Another thing about musicals – especially this one: how do people new to a situation know all the words and the dance choreography? Like, Victoria the White is new to this whole scene with the Jellicle cats, you know? She gets tossed in a bag out of a car at the beginning and all these weirdo felines swarm around her and they’re saying Jellicle, Jellicle, Jellicle eight million times (I’m going to have nightmares about that fucking word) and then, after a short time, Victoria is there in lock step with these cats and singing along with them. How? How’d she know the damn steps and lyrics? Maybe it’s because I suck at memorization, but that is a willing suspension of disbelief I have been asked by musicals to perform time and again, and nope! I cannot. Blame my inability to line dance if you must.
Let’s just… imagine if you will all of this money and technology being applied to a live-action Thundercats movie instead of to this. 80’s kids would have been all over it – nostalgia fueled entertainment of the highest order! And maybe it would have done ok? I mean, isn’t Avatar just big half-cat, half-human CG characters running around in battle? That seemed to have done pretty well, last I checked. Thundercats could have been lapped up like a saucer of milk by pop-culture enthusiasts and the visual effects teams would have been lauded, the way Cameron’s were for Avatar. Unless of course they de-sexualized Cheetara or something. Oh, the Twitter rage that would erupt if Cheetara wore something over her leopard leotard that covered her cat bewbs! Release the #cheetarackcut! Think I am wrong?! Look no further than Lola Bunny in SpaceJam: A New Legacy.
Anyway, point is, we cannot fully fault anyone but our own damn selves for Cats. It’s a case of mutually-assured self destruction, a handshake deal between bad creative ideas and poor cultural taste that even an Oscar winning director couldn’t make palatable.
Bottom 5 Assholes
I took this to mean characters I positively despised but apparently all seem to be in pretty good-to-great films.
- Manny Carp from Blow Out – 1981 – directed by Brian De Palma. Blow Out is a seedy Philadelphia-based thriller starring John Travolta as a movie sound guy who witnesses, and records audio of, a car accident that kills a politician. He connects with Robocop’s Nancy Allen, a woman with a shady history who survived the car crash, and together they’re tracked by a psychopathic mastermind played by John Lithgow who’s gone rogue from his politically motivated handlers. Will they survive long enough to notify the media of a conspiracy they uncovered? Awesome movie, but the worst character isn’t even Lithgow’s watch-wire pulling, ice-cold staring assassin, but rather the filthy-shirted drunk photographer that worked with Allen’s hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold to shake-down adulterous husbands by catching them on film in flagrante delicto. Played by Dennis Franz, best known as the more-lovable asshole Sipowitz from TV’s boundary-busting NYPD Blue or perhaps as the infuriating chief of airport police in Die Hard 2, the photographer character – known as Manny Karp – is greasy, disreputable and – more than anything – straight up gross. Morally contemptible, he even manages to overstep his own nastiness when he attempts to force himself onto Allen’s character in the cesspool of a hotel room he calls home. While the character is cartoonishly vile, he’s 100% memorable and belongs high on any list of cinematic a-holes.
- Harry Ellis from Die Hard – 1988 – directed by John McTiernan. Everyone knows Die Hard, the Bruce Willis-starring action-adventure flick that introduced audiences to John McClane, the vulnerable Everyman NYC cop with just about the worst, or best?, luck ever. Here he travels to LA to visit his estranged wife Holly Gennero, played by Bonnie Bedelia, only to end up trapped in a skyscraper overrun by international terrorists led by the wonderfully snarking and sneering Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber. For most, Hans would be asshole enough to make a list like this, but by my definition, most villains kill people, elevating them from asshole to, well, murderer. Additionally, they often command too much respect and, as is certainly the case here, follow a code or are just too sharply dressed and refined to dismiss as a mere asshole. Hans? He’s something more, a prick perhaps, but Die Hard definitely has another scum to fit the bill. Played by Hart Bochner with a surfeit of sleaze, Harry Ellis is the co-worker of Holly’s at the Nakatomi corporation who first hits on Holly at the company Christmas party, by gifting her a Rolex, then later sells out McClane while trying to make a deal with Hans before ultimately meeting a grisly, surprise end when that deal goes south. Ellis is the personification of 80’s coked-out yuppie greed, a Gordon Gecko disciple that proves to be a Welp of Wall Street and whose death is among Die Hard’s many cathartic pleasures. While Hart Bochner demonstrates some pretty solid acting chops as the reprehensible Ellis, nothing in his filmography stands as far out as much as this role unless, like me, you’re a fan of the 1994 comedy PCU which Bochner directed and which features a very young and very funny Jon Favreau in dreds as a perpetually stoned frat boy.
- Caledon Hockley from Titanic – 1999 – directed by James Cameron. A recent rewatch of Titanic revealed to me that the movie doesn’t hold up all that well, particularly the “modern day” sequences with a woefully bad turn by the usually likable Bill Paxton as the deep sea treasure hunter desperately searching for “the heart of the ocean” who instead finds a heavy-handed and sloppy metaphor in the form of a over-sentimentalized romance recounted by a glassy-eyed centurion. Sure, as Rose and Jack respectively, Winslet is wonderful as ever and DiCaprio does some of the best work of his career. And yes, the spectacle of the ship’s sinking is as awe inspiring and startling as ever. But the one big superseding joy over everything else was, for this viewer, Billy Zane as Rose’s rich but morally bankrupt fiancee Cale Hockley. Speaking 90% of his lines through a perfectly clenched jaw, Zane seems to relish bringing this level of upper-crust snobbery to the screen and then seems to enter a state of batshit-level joy when he gets to mine into Cale’s damaged male ego, turning bully after Rose rebuffs him. But while all of this alone might qualify Cale on a weaker list of screen assholes, it’s his actions when the ship starts sinking make him a must-add. If it wasn’t enough that he lies to Rose about paying a way onto a lifeboat for himself, Rose and Jack and then reneges on Jack – of course – it’s when his own ride doesn’t work out and he becomes desperate enough to pretend a scared abandoned child is his own to get onto a boat. “I’m the only thing she has in the world,” he says. Later, he hands the little child off without a second thought about what might happen to her, as ever, only thinking of himself and firmly landing himself a space on my list as one of the dodgiest mutha fuckas in cinema history.
- Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – 1975 – directed by Milos Foreman. Standing toe-to-toe with Jack Nicholson is a feat of true cinematic strength, especially when you’re talking about the mid-70’s to mid-80’s era Nicholson which gave us some of his most memorable performances. And yet, the then-relatively unknown Louise Fletcher did just that in her stony, authoritarian turn as Nurse Ratched, head of the mental ward to which Nicholson’s Randle McMurphy is perhaps willingly committed in an effort to avoid hard labor after being convicted for statutory rape. The movie is a tug of war between Nicholson’s livewire, freewheeling wiseass and Fletcher’s cruel, rule-enforcing ice Queen. Their battles are entertaining as all get out, this is a GREAT (all caps) movie, and Nurse Rached’s losses are gloriously satisfying, largely because she always has the high ground and so much of the movie is spent focusing on how much she abuses these poor souls by revoking what few simple joys they have in the ward. I mean, the World Series people! THE CHIEF RAISED HIS HAND!!! The sum of her offenses ensure her place in cinematic history as one of the most venal characters ever, but for me it’s her final confrontation with the very vulnerable Billy, a young inmate played with wide, frightened eyes by the great Brad Dourif in his screen debut, that makes her enforcement of order over empathy inhumane beyond compare. Bill attempts to rebel, to stand up for himself and obtain a backbone after one of the best nights in his life, but Ratched knows his weakness and exploits it mercilessly leading to one of the most tragic outcomes imaginable. Thatcher received a best actress Oscar for her cold hearted portrayal of institutional power run amok, and that’s no surprise; this is the perfect match of a talented actress and a deliciously overbearing role. Nicholson got his own statue for his contributions, but how mean is Nurse Ratched as a character? So much so that the character has appeared in two television programs decades later, first in Once Upon a Time as a subsidiary villain to the big bad Queen and then as the titular character in Netflix’s Ratched, which acts as a prequel to Cuckoo’s Nest.
- L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries from Rear Window – 1954 – directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Sure he’s played by number three on the AFI’s list of greatest American actors, a man who is often called “America’s Favorite Actor,” but James Stewart did some odd turns while working with Hitch, and though most would point to Vertigo for his darkest character, it’s Stewart’s portrayal of laid-up photographer-turned-peeping tom L.B. Jeff Jeffries in Rear Window that heads up this list. What’s weird, of course, is that Jeff is the charismatic, likable hero of this classic which is often considered among the best-written films of all time. He’s not a bit part player, or even a supporting character… He is the lead character we’re supposed to cheer for! Yet if you take a step back from the witty dialog and near flawless direction and camerawork, it’s pretty easy to see Jeff is an asshole. Whether it’s the fact he spends his time spying on his neighbors while recovering from a broken leg, or his irritating habit of actively dismissing Lisa, played by Grace Kelly – yes, THE Grace Kelly, before she was Princess of Monaco – who fawns all over him, serving him dinner and trying to seduce him with neglige. Or maybe it’s the way he speaks almost every sentence as if his opinions are facts, something that his ball-breaking nurse (played in note perfect form by the fantastic Thelma Ritter) doesn’t have any patience for and for which we, as an audience in this modern day of a weakening patriarchy, can barely tolerate. He’s allegedly a man’s man, a strong adventurer type, a guy who speaks from his gut and ignores the attentions and wisdom of others for his own conjecture and rumination, especially if those attentions and wisdom come from women. But then, in the third act of the film, he… turns into a total coward! Given the opportunity to impress Jeff, Lisa breaks into an apartment across the way that Jeff’s been surveying, as a possible murder has been committed by a shady-acting neighbor. The suspect comes home, Lisa is trapped and Jeff… calls the police anonymously. He doesn’t scream for help or create a distraction. He doesn’t try to save her himself. Instead, he sort of whimpers and is powerless. I get he’s supposed to be a proxy for the audience – terrified and unable to help in that tense moment – but it’s surprisingly spineless, and when added to the rest of his boorish behavior, he ends up being, well, a total a-hole. And because also in play are the wholesome, do-good, honorable and brave expectations that hang on Jimmy Stewart as a leading man, Jeff ends up at the bottom of this list. A hero who hides in the shadows when the going gets tough and lets his lady take the fall.
Staff Pick
Vertigo – Alfred Hitchcock – 1958
Jimmy Stewart Kim Novack. Bernard Herman score. Robert Burks cinematography. He also did many of Hitchcok’s other films including The Birds, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and North by Northwest.