how was cats. i need a FULL movie review
oh man. okay. i’m going to start by saying it was, to put it lightly, really bad. between the animation and jennifer hudson’s snot and jason derulo’s accent it was, from start to end, absolute garbage! i haven’t seen the stage musical so i don’t know how it compares but the entire time i was thinking “wow this would be so much better onstage” while my brain was gradually obliterated by whatever the fuck was happening onscreen.
jason derulo really did almost suck some toes. i also could not understand a single word he sang and i looked up videos of the rum tum tugger to see if that was just the character but no, it was just him. i don’t think he has an acting career ahead of him.
the cockroaches with faces were just as bad as everyone’s been saying
rebel wilson unzipped her skin twice with no explanation. the second time was a vital plot point.
she just unzipped her skin and there was more skin plus some clothes underneath and that almost made me start crying
what DID make me start crying was naked idris elba, which i’ve been thinking about nonstop for the past 3 hours
dude was completely naked i really thought i was gonna see idris elba dick for a few horrifying seconds
the entire cinema reacted. people were laughing. people were crying, multiple people loudly said “what the fuck”
none of the other cats’ fur was the same colour as their skin, and none of their bodies were so tightly contoured that you could see their actual body. unfortunately, idris elba did not get to experience this dignity.
this was the point where i actually started crying and i don’t think i’ve fully stopped.
i think enough has been said about the cat-human abominations against god but somehow that wasn’t the only animation crime
the cgi outside of the cat-human hybrids was terrible! during bustopher jones some cats pour some wine in james corden’s mouth and it didn’t even look vaguely realistic. victoria does some really impressive ballet (big kudos to francesca hayward!) but she does pointe and rather than just let her have ballet shoes for the scene, like they did with the random hip hop cats, they cgi-ed feet onto her which was done so poorly that it didn’t even look like she was touching the ground for half of it. ears clipped through hats. tails clipped through arms. there was better cgi in spy kids.
speaking of limbs, the hands. the feet were jarring enough, they had human feet with human toes but they were at least appropriately coloured, but they just straight up had their human hands.
there were multiple serious scenes with jennifer hudson that i couldn’t take seriously because she was just covered in snot thanks to crying every time she was onscreen
the alternating between cat attributes and human attributes was really disturbing. they had human hands but ian mckellen licked water out of a bowl. they alternated between walking on two and four legs but at one point jennifer hudson just dropped to the ground and crawled away like a baby. i thought judi dench was about to kiss mr mistoffelees at one point
some plot points are just never explained like. at all. i went in knowing a little bit about the plot but i didn’t know the cats could do magic and it’s never explained!
sometimes idris elba just turns cats into dust! mr mistoffelees makes shit float! idris elba teleports! he’s naked and teleporting and it’s never actually explained!
judi dench sings at the camera for like 5 minutes at the end while three of the other cats react to what she’s saying and it activated my fight or flight response. i couldn’t hold eye contact
i don’t know why DAME judi dench and SIR ian mckellen did this to themselves. idris elba too. i have too much respect for them and i can’t reconcile that in my brain
despite being a main character, munkustrap’s name is not mentioned once and it wasn’t until i was looking into the stage musical to see if i was right and it’s better that i found out what his name was. before that i was just calling him “the MAIN CHARACTER without a NAME” to my girlfriend, who also saw it with me
the people sitting in front of us were very clearly experiencing the same emotions that we were
people clapped when it finished, and not in a good way. everyone around us was either in a state of shock or loudly asking what the fuck that was and why it was so bad
jennifer hudson being sent away in an unexplained hot air balloon to go perish in the sun is exactly how i felt at the end of the film
all of that being said, it wasn’t entirely horrid. it doesn’t translate well at all from stage to screen and making it like a regular hollywood film rather than a pro-shot type thing was bound to go poorly from the start because it doesn’t seem like the sort of musical you can do that with, unlike stuff like les mis or hairspray.
there were a handful of scenes that were okay onscreen:
mungojerrie and rumpleteazer, other than the bit with the cutlery from the trailer, was fun and really well performed
skimbleshanks’ song absolutely slapped and the dancing was impressive even if it suffered from cgi once again. also skimbleshanks was like. bizarrely sexy. and once again that was a tom hooper choice and not from the original musical so i have no clue where that came from
mr mistoffelees was good! he was by far the least bad looking of the characters and his song was entertaining!
the non-stunt cast performers were impressive and i’m sad they wasted their talents in this piece of shit film
all in all i don’t think i could watch it again without getting very, very drunk. i personally am banning tom hooper from making any more musical movies until he repents for his sins. thanks for coming to my ted talk.
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