People complain that movies have gone into the superhero shitter, but the most talked-about film of today is a musical setting of T. S. Eliot by the most heralded operatic composer of his generation, maybe there’s still room for highbrow cinema after all
A nice thing about Cats (2019) is that actually watching it in no way prevents you from appreciating it as a Lovecraftian horror-work that you hear about in the form of shocked secondhand accounts all fixating on different aspects.
Like today I’m reading Twitter and I’m like “yeah, the people-cats were dancing ecstatically atop a highly visible occult sigil before the Cat-Devil abducted Cat-God, what was that about?”
Thinking about how Cats (2019) implied that Ian McKellen’s Gus and Judi Dench’s fem!Old Deuteronomy fucked when they were younger and Mungojerry & Rumpleteazer might be their kids
Saw Cats again and I’m not sure if it was cause of the new print (I noticed Grizabella didn’t have rivers of snot coming from her nose, just… creeks, and I think the light on fur and the nose makeup were better), or cause all the surprise was killed, or different crowd (a full theater) of normies or cause the first viewing got me in the right “this is musical theater” mindspace…
But I wasn’t gobsmacked, I just took it as a good movie take on musical theater, specifically Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Cats”
Started individually judging players on singing, dancing, and… other, I guess “acting”, I mean like non-sung line delivery and facial and other not-dance-move relating and communicating with the body
Victoria’s strongest as a dancer but they use her primarily for that, in contrast they seem to have cast Munkustrap as a dancer first but used him more for dialogue and singing
Mungojerry & Rumpleteazer probably come off most underrated judging that way - they’re fun!
Appreciated the jellicle dance medley more this time around
Whether a cat sings with and whether they speak with an accent seem like independent variables
This movie really begins with haunted carousel synths, doesn’t it?
So when I say that it’s really interpreted with the Jellicles as 1981 London theater people and that makes it not very now-queer but pretty then-gay…
Like, “found family” is definitely a theme they hammer with the new viewpoint character Victoria. And the 1981 way that plays out is the emotional arc is unapologetically about insecure lowbie Mr. Mistoffeles coming into his own as a troupe member by welcoming her in and showing off for the sake of getting with her.
And yes, the awkward shy goth theater kid is still kinda gay-marked even if he gets with a girl. I wasn’t alive in 1981 but I was alive while it was still alive in cultural memory and we were still doing gay subtext and queer-coding then. Specifically, even musical theater with hetero plots was marked hella gay.
Tbh I really love what they did to give Mistoffeles a throughline. A subtle bit people might’ve missed, in the Old Gus song when he’s trying to use his magic wand for emphasis, in the stage show at that point there’s a big fire-snorting dragon mechanical prop effect, so that’s what you’re kind of expecting, but first a total fizzle and then some stage effects does a good job of calibrating the stakes.
(Also on the stage wasn’t there a pirate ship bit to the Gus song? Or was that a separate, cut number?)
And then having his title song as people pumping up his confidence enough that he can do real magic and resummon Deuteronomy – that’s honestly brilliant, resolving the new-grafted emotional and plot arcs using the original text.
It’s really great how they use the strengths of film to augment the stage musical core - the arcs are carried by very brief close-ups, intimate dialogue, and CUT TO:s, while pieces can be cut in ways to emphasize and twist meaning that would have to be done in music, vocals, or gesture on stage. Meanwhile they totally retain the option to go theatre-in-the-round, pull back and show you 15 incredible things at once of which you can follow at most 4.
They’re pretty consistent with the cat scale except in the theatre bits – if that was an actual human-size stage Gus would’ve been drowning in it. Also Grizabella on the chandelier that lifts her to the Heaviside Layer.
Oh, they replaced the tire lift with a chandelier skyhooked through a glass roof, which is also kinda an Andrew Lloyd Weber slant reference.
The movie cleverly sets up the Jellicles as theater people putting on a production - several pieces take place on a stage or in a ballroom or what’s set up to invoke a choreography studio.
As part of that, the movie leans into being not queer as 2019 would understand it but hella gay as 1981 London theater people would, before AIDS showed up - wistful old actors and Falstaffian toffs, Munkustrap the neurotic stage manager and Skimbleshanks the Elton John-level fabulous, the women respected old queens, fallen divas, fat or, um, catty.
Rebel Wilson seems to be playing Jenny Anydots as Hilda - fat, playful and subject to frequent pratfall comedy. Except sometimes she unzips her fur and turns out it was a disguise for… an also-fat warrior girl in pink roller derby spandex? I dunno, man.
Jason Derulo seems to be using some ‘90s black British swagger for Rum Tum Tigger. Too far out of my wheelhouse to place, but I got reminded of Tricky, Goldie, and Cat from Red Dwarf.
And yeah, if someone hadn’t made a thing of it, I’d have no idea that Francesca Hayward, the ballerina who played white-furred perspective character Victoria, was half-Kenyan
For all it goes to present itself as a really London thing, the last entries in the credits thank production incentive programs from Quebec and South Australia, and judging by surnames a lot of post/CG stuff was done in India
Cats was as batshit as they say and it was great, very specifically true to the spirit of 1981 London musical theater taking on prewar London
The only part I thought didnt work was the fight scene on the trash barge with Ian McKellen and Rebel Wilson
OK and the Jenny Anydots musical production with the human-faced cockroaches she kept eating, ngl that was weird but it opens the film with a decent nod to an earlier Bubsy Berkeley tradition of adapting stage musicals to film
They do a better job of rescuing incoherent source material than any movie since Resident Evil – with a bit of dialogue, scene changes, and close-ups, they stitch it into viable mechanical (Macavity plots to steal the Choice!) and emotional (Mr. Mistoffelees gets confidence and saves Deuteronomy, Victoria joins the Jellicles and saves/sets up Grizabella, they end up together) arcs
Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, and Taylor Swift are transparently enjoying the hell out of themselves
It is, in fact, the horniest movie I’ve ever sat through previews of treacly kids’ movies (Harrison Ford co-starring with a dog!) before.
The Taylor Swift performance of “Macavity” was a very Taylor Swift performance, showing off her standard vocal tricks, aspirating her leads and weighting her vowels and then swapping into a British accent for a line. For all that, it probably departs from the stage Original Cast Recording least of any take in the movie.
By contrast, the Taylor Swift-written song is like the most Taylor Swift song, uses all her standard writing tricks and her little-poor-me outside-looking-in perspective. Not to mention it is the defining song for Victoria, the new central viewpoint character (and Taylor is clearly ventriloquizing her vocal approach), so it claims basically the entire movie for her, specifically appropriates Grizabella’s pathos for herself, and steps on the last line of Memory with a callback.
So, it is the most Taylor Swift song.
(Her role here probably counts as some of that U.K. market-specific fanservice I’ve mentioned, too)
I love how everyone just decided to call it “Cats 2019″ because “Cats” is the most unsearchable title on the internet
Something about the Cats trailer is it’s a specifically ‘80s aesthetic – the blue/pink neon, Grizabella in a fur coat, that one cat with the white/black face so it looks like he’s wearing the classic goth eye makeup
The Tayswift character, the flirty, fighty mercurial cat Bombalurina, is done as a designer-print, diamond-collar rich girl toying with a custom-blinged
cocainecatnip vial, so that might be interesting
Honestly, “Baz Luhrmann’s Cats” is an amazing idea
