Just finished Cats. I think I need to talk about it to give me the needed catharsis to be able to begin the slow, painful process of being able to move on.
Yeah, the CGI is terrible, but I really can't get over how flawed the film is at its core. There was no need for the added narrative. I guess Universal thought that audiences wouldn't understand it if there wasn't an outsider cat guiding us through the non-story of the show? I appreciated that they tried to weave the songs in naturally with this story, but they entirely gave up about halfway through once the ball officially begins. Were Jennyanydot's, Rum Tum Tugger, and Bustopher Jones' songs not a part of the competition? They said that they were, but where was Old Deuteronomy? Were they in the qualifiers, but didn't make it to the finals that is The Egyptian's stage?
The songs were ok. Beautiful Ghosts sounds nothing like the rest of the show, which makes sense now that I see that Taylor Swift wrote it. Honestly, the only two truly great songs were Gus', and Skimbleshanks'. I really loved Ian McKellen's performance during the song, but he lost that goodwill during the barge escape scene.
Speaking of the barge escape scene, what even was any of that? First of all, Old Deuteronomy is kidnapped only to be returned immediately, then the film forgets about the other kidnapped (catnapped?) cats, only giving them a weird slapstick scene that doesn't work. Also, the cats keep falling over all throughout the movie, and I don't know why they had like four different cats do that exact same joke.
I am absolutely not qualified to complain about this, but I was also super bothered by the orchestration. It was really stripped down, and there was, I feel, way too much synth. I even compared after finishing the film to see if there was synth in the original, and, while it's definitely there, it's super overbearing in the film. It's not even that there's just synth; there's synth on top of synth, making almost no use of the actual orchestra. Because of that, the soundtrack loses a lot of that bombastic...ness, leaving us with overbearing, frankly cheap sounding orchestration in some of the show's most important numbers. I never thought that I'd get so worked up over the Cats orchestration, but here we are.
This is longer than I thought that it would be, but I was oddly compelled to talk about it after seeing it. The film didn't have to be as bad as it was (I don't think that the musical is unfilmable), but there are too many absolutely bizarre choices all the way down that bewildered and upset me. I'll be mailing a strongly worded letter to Andrew Lloyd Weber in the morning.
Also, I keep picturing a night once a year where a single cat-sized hot air balloon rises from every major city in the world before disappearing into the stratosphere, and this is the world I wish to live in.
The anniversary round though....
