Cats In Review

Day 85: You might be misled into thinking I was showing off some of the newest kitty prints I've picked up for my next quilt, but in fact, I'm going to be reviewing a couple of movies (you can probably guess what one of them is). I am not a frequent movie-goer, so the fact that I actually went to the theater to see three in the last month is nothing short of amazing. First of all, I saw "The Rise of Skywalker" right before Christmas and...well, it went in the same niche as all the other "Star Wars" films, i.e., "been there, done that, don't need to do it again." It was disappointingly (but not unexpectedly) thin on plot and long on attempting to blast your eardrums out of your head. The second film I saw in the theater was "Fantastic Fungi" which I reviewed a few days back. It was not what I had expected, and fell woefully short in the science department in favour of the drug culture. Next came "Amadeus," which I had not seen previously and viewed on DVD. I was appalled at the blatant and unforgiveable fictionalization of Mozart's life (or Salieri's, rather), and although the costumes were showy, my fiber-Fascist's eye squinted harder and harder with every fold of undisguised polyester. The immaculately dressed wigs were equally bad, obviously synthetic. I will say that the music redeemed the film, but I cannot attribute that to any skill on the director's part. It was, after all, Mozart's work. I was shocked to learn that "Amadeus" took numerous awards. I though it was a piece of utter shash.

And now we come to "Cats," which I'd been looking forward to since seeing the early trailer. Having read a number of reviews, I was ready to be disappointed yet again but, like a dose of bad medicine, I was determined to get it over with, so I drove into Puyallup this morning to catch the earliest showing and was one of four people in the theater. After half an hour of truly obnoxious previews of things no one in their right mind would want to see, the movie started. With the critiques in the forefront of my mind, I immediately found fault with the CGI fur and muscle movement (think primitive Dreamworks), but the cats were so charming and so well-portrayed that my disbelief suspended itself with no particular conscious effort on my part, and only occasionally when the scale of cats vs. scenery was overly different from one scene to the next did I think about the technical flaws. That said, I wish the computer mavens had studied how real cats' ear muscles work (all 32 of them). The singing and dancing was superlative, and Grizabella's magnificent presentation of "Memory" had me in tears. I do think that the storyline might be lost on anyone who hadn't seen the musical or read the book ("Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats"), but I found the film version easier to follow than the play. Maybe I'm just feeling contrary, but "Cats" rescued the winter movie season for me. Go figure.