Cats

I have very little credit. With banks, department stores and with my wife, Mrs. Filthy. I have to use what I have very wisely, and I have to put up whatever collateral I have left, which isn’t much. I swapped my mint Biff Pocoroba rookie card for caffeinated gum. I sold my wallet on Nextdoor for beans that were supposed to grow until they reached the sky. They fucking didn’t. I am currently trying to raise a little cash by selling a video of me doing my jaguar dance in ladies underwear on eBay, but bidding has stalled out at zero.

I tell you this because the Harkins Arvada Theater has banned me from seeing certain movies without a chaperone. Apparently, I “scare” children and make “obscene” noises and “disturb” their more delicate guests. So, I had to spend what little credit I have left to get Mrs. Filthy to take me to see Cats. It cost me all my remaining credit; I promised not to roleplay sexy fetal alcohol syndrome baby for one year. One whole fucking year. Three-hundred-and-something days. As we all know, intimacy is hardly worth it if I can’t drool, hit myself in the face and babble.

Also, she wouldn’t buy me popcorn.

I don’t have a lot of experience with musicals. In fact, I’ve only ever seen one: I'm Takin' My Own Head, Screwin' It On Right, And No Guy's Gonna Tell Me That It Ain't! Check it out, it’s great, and Cats sucks the barbed dick of a tomcat and slices its lip open by comparison.

Honestly, this movie is one of the wooliest, weirdest things I’ve ever scene. I read a critic who said Cats was so weird it was impossible to review. That’s not true. It’s easy to review. It’s fucking awful. Even its weirdness is awful.

For the first five minutes, as humans in fur crawled out of fake abandoned cars and phony trash cans and started singing on a giant, weirdly lit soundstage I was slack jawed and muttering “What the fuck.” But then come 95 more redundant and dreary minutes. This movie’s got the charm, competence, sexiness and polish of two eighth-graders in headgear trying to suck face under the bleachers. And it’s just as confused about what it’s trying to do.

Cats the movie is based Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shitacular musical, the one where people dress up like cats. He also made ones where he put people in choo-choo-train costumes and roller skates, in robes and sandals like Jesus, and as drunk Naugahyde reclining chairs. Far as I can tell, Webber made musicals like Thomas Kincaid made paintings: unimaginative, mass-produced gaudy shit that appealed to people who mistake loudness for quality.

In Webber’s Broadway musical, people dressed in furry costumes, licked their hands, swung tails and sang profoundly dumb songs about being different kinds of cats. The lyrics are so banal (“Macavity, Macavity, his name is Macavity”) can’t possibly appeal to anyone who doesn’t have a shitload of cats, including a few dead ones under mounds of old coupons in a back room. The music sounds like a synth in the organ store at the shopping mall was left in demo mode.

For this expensive-as-cancer-with-no-insurance big screen adaptation, director Tom Hooper doesn’t make the songs better or expand on the stupid-as-fuck premise. He doesn’t spend millions to tell a better story or to create a better world or immerse us in a vision. No, he spends the money making fancier versions of the stupid shit: furrier fucking cat costumes and bigger fucking sets. They’re just as dumb and creepy, just more expensive looking.

Cats still look like humans dressed up like cats. Human faces, human tits, human hands and legs. Cat ears and fur all over. They look like the people in the site you’d try really fucking hard to avoid at Burning Man. There is nothing cute or sympathetic about them. They’re creepy and soulless, some naked but for their fur, others in clothes, prancing and crawling around on all fours among trash and broken shit. The main actors quiver somewhere between confused and scared, which is I think what Hopper wanted. Their performances were surely aided by the fact that the dumb story gives them almost no motivation. Seriously, there is no acting in this movie, just actors trying to survive despite not having ay idea what the fuck is going on around them.

Speaking of story, all these alley cats get together once a year for a ball where one very old cat (Judi Dench looking exactly like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion but wearing a fur coat. What the fuck is a cat’s fur coat made out of? Dogs?) picks one to fly away in a chandelier/hot air balloon to cat heaven. Despite there being no defined criteria as to how get chosen and no description of what you get after the balloon ride, all of the cats want to go. Well, who the fuck wouldn’t? The alternative is to stay behind where all of the following happens:

• A very fat cat played by Rebel Wilson rolls around on her back, throws her legs in the air and scratches her crotch. She also bumps into things, which is supposed to be funny because she’s fat.
• A choir of very poorly CGI’d mice with sad, sad children’s faces sing in falsetto.
• Busty, hypersexualized human-faced cockroaches strut in a chorus line until they get picked off and eaten by cats.
• Very fat James Corden, looking like a rejected rendering of the Cat in the Hat, eats garbage for five minutes while singing about eating garbage, and then falls down and crushes his cat nuts.
• Ian McKellen is forced to drink milk from a platter.
• A magical cat with a top hat and glitter who specializes in the sort of tricks that come in boxes geared toward eight-year-olds flies through the air shooting playing cards and flowers from his sleeves.
• Idris Elba plays a bad cat who kidnaps other cats and makes them walk the plank on a river barge.
• Choo Choo cat escapes from the Village People in red coveralls, a conductor’s hat, a cat handlebar mustache and nothing else tap dancing his way through a regrettable musical number.
• Taylor Swift jiggles furry kitty tits as she vamps and rape drugs an entire roomful of cats.
• Adults hissing at each other and pretending to claw to no end.

The computer animation looks like shit. There are faces placed on background cats that look like a bad JibJab GIF. from your unfunny aunt There are feet that just disappear into the ground, and fur that does weird shit. Whenever a character flies through the air, the transition from natural motion to CGI is obvious and clumsy, like from human to Mortal Kombat for Playstation 2.

The sets are dreary and grim. They are dimly lit and cartoonish in their details. The movie seems to exist in this netherworld that is neither relatable as reality nor as cartoon and nobody who made it thought  to make it less awkward. You’d think the grassfuckers would know that people paying twelve bucks to see singing cats cannot handle the sort of sadness represented by fake alleys full of fake debris.

Cats is so damn eager to get to its bewildering musical numbers that it never bothers to give us any reasons to give a shit about any cat. Some are sad, some are happy. Some are silly and some are, sigh, horny. But I have no fucking clue why, or why it matters. The cats are interchangeable and dull. The protagonist wanders through the movie doing little but quivering and staring in awe at all the cat shit everywhere.

The humor consists exclusively of fat cats hurting themselves and terrible cat puns. It’s like they were going to get a bonus if they only wrote jokes they saw on coffee mugs in a Hallmark store. Shortly after almost knocking herself out with a chain, fat Rebel Wilson says, “Look what the cat dragged in,” and I guarantee the asshole who wrote that line thought was pretty God damn clever.

Cats is fucking awful. Not the fun kind, not the terrifying kind. Just the sad and dull kind. It’s like life itself, so existentially miserable that all you can do is hope it will end and you’ll never have to live through it again. One Finger.