![]() ![]() But she snots through the whole movie, and that’s the key to good acting, right?Īnyway, after Griz squats down and crawls away on all fours (weird), in bounds “Bustopher Jones,” a fat cat in white spats (James Corden - duh). I mean, she’s even sporting a fresh manicure on her blatantly human hand. But a hot Griz kind of defeats the purpose (as if anything in “Cats” has a purpose). It’s as if Grizabella has severe age-dysmorphia, and the cats who make fun of her are just jealous of how fly she is. Nothing about her is “grizzled,” which is particularly apparent when she’s acting alongside Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, who are some truly old-ass cats. When other young actresses played the scraggly, old-ass cat, they were generally aided by ratty costuming and haggard makeup (but which still included a cat-nose - why, oh why, do all these CGI cats have human noses?). Hudson as Grizabella is an interesting choice. I think I’ll chalk this up to an all-white makeup team’s bizarrely misguided attempt at political correctness. Even the iconic shabby grey coat normally worn by Grizabella (played by a hella-dramatic Jennifer Hudson) looks in this version like it may have been designed to match Hudson’s skin tone. ![]() His regular fur is brown, just like the fur covering all other cats played by African-American actors. Rum Tum wears a collar (ironically?), and a red fur coat (which is made from, I don’t know, the cat that was sacrificed last year?) over his regular fur. Then “The Rum Tum Tugger” bursts onto the scene a “curious cat” (I’ll say) played by a stilted Jason Derulo, who is clearly plagued by the bitter awareness that he is, in fact, in this movie. ![]() I’ve never done LSD, but after watching this Gumby Cat scene, I don’t see a need. Some people-faced beetles trot out next, and they dance and sing with aplomb, but maybe one messed up the choreo or something, because Jennyanydots swiftly grabs and eats it, even as its tiny human face cries out for mercy. So, all Jellicle Cats, even Jellicle Kittens, have adult faces - and all Jellicle Mice (I assume they’re “Jellicle Mice.” I mean, there’s a “Jellicle Moon,” so I’m pretty sure everything in Cat Land is “Jellicle” plus, I’m starting to suspect that “Jellicle” just means “trippy as shit”) look like toddlers? Is Jennyanydots keeping a box of toddlers in her basement? See, these CGI mice - much like these CGI cats - have entirely human faces. Well, once J-Dot opens up a box of mice, the zipper conundrum becomes quite trivial. So, is what we’d assumed to be her fur really just fur-shaped clothing, and is the vest really just clothing-shaped fur? Or does that vest-fur unzip, too? Are Gumby Cats layered, like onions? Can they stack inside one another, like Russian dolls? (If you’re having trouble following, just imagine a naked human suddenly ripping all their skin off to reveal a sparkly tuxedo underneath.) And underneath that fur is (drumroll, please) more fur! But this fur has a vest over it. (Munku doesn’t phrase it quite like that, but that’s my takeaway.) This Gumby Cat (Rebel Wilson) is named “Jennyanydots,” but that’s irrelevant because she’s only ever referred to as “The Gumby Cat.”Īll this is straight from the source. So, after the Jellicles explain to Victoria what a “Jellicle Cat” is (spoiler: they explain nothing), Munkustrap the tour-guide cat whisks Victoria away to observe some sort of Jellicle subspecies called a “Gumby Cat:” a psychotic beast that pretends to be a lazy lump until nightfall, when it races to the cellar and forces its rodent hostages to perform for its pleasure. Eliot’s poems about cats, featuring cats singing about cats - and if I tried to unpack everything that’s cuckoo about the musical itself, this article would never end I’ll try to stick to the ways in which the movie miraculously manages to outweird the musical. Now to be fair, the “plot” of the movie isn’t much of a divergence from the source material - Andrew Lloyd Webber’s operetta about cats, based on T.S. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |