Jellicle Cats, come out tonight...?

Ladies and Gent's this is the moment you've waited for.....

Happy New Year everyone! And as you can see, my first review of this new year (and decade!), is what has been called last year's Christmas turkey.... 

CATS! 🙀

The classic musical by Andrew Lloyd-Webber has now been adapted to the big screen by Tom Hooper, the same man who brought Les Mis to Hollywood, and has won an Oscar for The Kings Speech...! 

Since it came out in December, it has been panned by critics and audiences alike. And today I finally got around to see it. Is it AS BAD as they claim it to be.... Errrrr….. all I can say is it is a pretty bad film. My critics hat is well and truly on. 

The first thing to understand is that CATS is possibly the most marmite musical EVER, with people either loving it or truly hating it. For me, it is certainly NOT my favourite. I didn't watch the VHS until later in life, and so the first time I saw anything CATS related was when the tour at the time went to Manchester when I was about 15. And my thoughts back then were "Ok, the dancing was good, but where was the story?". 

You see, this is essentially the story of CATS:

1.  A group of cats gather together one night every year
2.  The leader then asks the group "Who wants to die?"
3.  Everyone else goes "PICK ME!!"

That's it. 

They tried to give it a different angle, telling it from the perspective of Victoria, a kitten who gets abandoned by her owner at the Overture - but giving someone the camera and adding a couple of sentences here and there does not mean the basic structure is going to be any different.... 💁 

Now it's not ALL bad. The world building is pretty decent for showing the junkyard these cats live in, and I need to mention all the talent involved in-front and behind the camera in turns of the choreography. Andy Blankenbueler (who also did Hamilton), choreographed the recent Broadway revival of CATS, and it blends a variety of styles from ballet to theatre jazz to hip hop and street dance, while trying to honour the late Gillian Lynne's original work - and the big numbers like The Jellicle Ball and Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat are performed well by the talent pool he's brought in from dancers working in all the different styles of dance he's used. 

Like I said before, this is more than anything a dance show - it is a dancer's or choreographer's dream.

What people also remember from CATS is the music, particularly Grizabella's big hit Memory. I cannot listen to Jennifer Hudson sing anything without getting goosebumps and she was belting/sobbing through the song as powerful as you'd expect she would be. I do get though what people are saying about Hooper trying to recreate what he did with Anne Hathaway singing I Dreamed A Dream. 

Vocally, a few others stand out, including Jason Derulo's Rum Tum Tugger, to Francesca Hayward as Victoria. 

But others got annoying very quickly, especially Rebel Wilson as Jennyanydots and James Cordon as Bustopher Jones - I had a family with young kids behind me and even they were laughing at how goofy and over the top they were.... 

I now have to address the 🐘 in the room..... they DO look weird! 

When the trailer came out last year, it was TROLLED TO DEATH and yes, the computer motion-capture fur on human faces is really really odd. You start to get used to it... until you see they still have human hands and feet!! 

What's weirder is that some characters actually look ok one minute and then bonkers the next. Take Idris Elba's MacAvity as a classic example of this. When I saw him in the trailer, I actually thought he looked pretty cool with his big coat and hat on..... But once he took them off.... 😬😬😬

If you want to see motion-capture done RIGHT, then go and see the work of Andy Serkis, or The Adventures of Tintin (which is based on the Hergé comics and is a really underrated adventure film!). 

If you want to check this out - then by all means go for it.... But it's not worth seeing it in the cinema. I may have done so for the blogging purposes, but if you DO want to see it with your most cynical group of friends and a bit of booze on the side, wait until it is on Netflix, Sky Cinema or another streaming platform, or rent it. 

The best way to describe this film.... is that it's utterly bonkers.... I think someone may have had a bit too much of Taylor Swift's catnip when working on this....