#34: Cats (2019)

Um.

Okay first off, let's say it - This movie has no plot besides 'Cats introduce themselves to enter 'American Idol', and the reward is death'.

 The production value is lovely.

For the sets. I was genuinely interested in the environment these weird hybrids inhabited. Why is everything a cat pun when there are clearly humans in this world?

There's a segment early on with Jennyanydots and her dancing mice and cockroaches and it all looks just cheap and terrible. I hope the Graphic Patch for the movie updates those in particular, as the rest cannot be saved.

(The mice themselves? Actually adorable!)

The characters themselves...every so often, I'd go "This is okay." and then the characters would turn their heads or their bodies in a particular way and it would just look awful.

I'd wince.


Visibly.


More than once.

Just when you think it's okay-adjacent, you get the rumpled-fur rug look of Idris Elba's Macavity or cat Taylor Swift's chest and it's very distracting.

 Their song is actually not bad.

The visuals...oof.

Some cats, like Victoria - the heads are too big and the features are too small. Jennifer Hudson's Grizzabella is supposed to look ratty and balding but it looks like a very half-assed furry cosplay in the face area.

The only ones that look sort of okay are Scrimbleshanks (The Railway Cat, in the best segment in the film), and the cat-leader who isn't Mister Mistofflees.

Also, it's so disorienting to see the cats with human feet, and they're walking on two feet and all fours and it's - Why do some have shoes and some don't? But they all lick themselves and each other like cats?

God.

 It's astonishing how much more I could have liked this - and there are segments that I do like, and I think the concept itself is weird enough to be enjoyable (not quite approachable) - if 90% of what was on the screen wasn't abhorrent. If they left it with the bits of fur and leotards, it would be campy and enjoyable, not terrifying.

For the first 3 or 4 songs, the sound mixing is very poor. The instrumentals are good but they're not conveying the "story" like the lyrics are, so I really need it to be turned down a bit. There's a musical stinger that sounds as if the "Inception" bong took downers. You will know what it is.

It's around the 46 - 47 second mark. I also do think this is a good rendition.

Tom Hooper does the same thing with Hudson that he did with Hathaway in "Les Miserables" in 2012 - The iconic song in the movie, Memory, gets sung with this close up shot that doesn't move away.

Remember; Hathaway was a human being in "Les Mis". So imagine staring at contortion and what is possibly the worst transfer of a human face to a CGI cat body in the film for about 2 minutes.

The biggest thing working against this movie are the visuals of the characters. The rest (besides some segments that clearly were trying to evoke a theater feel that was hit or miss) I don't find very awful.  I don't believe stories in film have to be very linear in the three-act structure, but this drops us in random shit I only know about bc I did research beforehand.