MEOW MEOW MEOW (3/3 meows, a rejoiceful scarf flick, a puff of smoke)
There are many questions I could ask about Cats (2019): How did they manage to make Taylor Swift the least sexy cast member when she should have automatically been the sexiest? How did all four hired accent coaches fail so spectacularly that all the non-British cast members sounded like seven-year-old Americans who have just seen ’Arry Pawhtah for the first time? Why is there a human-sized bar that only serves milk on tap? Who decided how many times Rebel Wilson can unzip her catsuit to reveal another catsuit? Who was responsible for the army of tiny CGI-human-beetles?
But when it comes down to it, my main question is: what is left to say about Cats (2019)? The discourse has been raging since the trailer was released last November, setting the stage for increasingly over-the-top reactions, escalating in theatrical absurdity as each new review attempted to one-up the last. The result is a caricatured spectacle of performative reactions, and it’s exactly what I am absolutely fucking HERE for.
“It is tough to pinpoint when the kitschapalooza called “Cats” reaches its zenith or its nadir, which are one and the same. The choices are legion.” -Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. This is what death feels like. This is the worst ketamine trip. This is awful. This is not a film, this is chaos. This is the CGI from Scorpion King. I don’t know if I’m five minutes in or five hours. Nothing matters anymore. This is the death of all things. Fuck it.” -David Farrier, Twitter
“For the most part, “Cats” is both a horror and an endurance test, a dispatch from some neon-drenched netherworld where the ghastly is inextricable from the tedious.” -Justin Chang, The Los Angeles Times
“Instead of taking Sonic the Hedgehog’s route away from the uncanny valley, Cats buries its head deep in its human-cat hybrid world.” -Jennifer Bisset, C/Net
“Forget worst movie of the year: “Cats” is the biggest disaster of the decade, and possibly thus far in the millennium. It’s “Battlefield Earth” with whiskers.” -Adam Graham, Detroit News
“Cats is the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs.” -Edward Douglas, The Beat
“Every time these horny fur demons tongue a milk bowl and start moaning I was certain the FBI would raid the theater” -Kyle Buchanan, Twitter
“I Have Seen Sights No Human Should See.” -Alex Crans, io9
“Cats is a nightmare that won’t end.” -Jill Gutowitz, ELLE.com
“Watching Cats is like a descent into madness.” -Matt Goldberg, Collider
“Cats will haunt viewers for generations: This is middlebrow film-making at its most hubristic; too inelegant to coast on spectacle alone, it’s not subversive enough to be considered truly camp either.” -Simran Hans, The Guardian
“A sinister, all-time disaster from which no one emerges unscathed.” -Tim Robey, The Telegraph
“Cats is impossible to review.” -Adam Nayman, The Ringer
There is simply no way any movie could be as catastrophically atrocious, as world-endingly cataclysmic as online meme culture predicted Cats (2019) would be. But that’s the beauty of this story. Is Cats (2019) camp? Ultimately not, but the discourse surrounding it certainly is. The movie itself is merely unsettling and unmemorably mediocre, useful primarily as an illustrative example of the postmodern distortion of the space-time continuum. Linear time and normative geographies are discarded from the outset, alongside the cat-in-a-bag abandoned in an alleyway during the exposition. The bag, initially cat-sized, expands arithmetically into a human-sized bag while the set expands simultaneously, but at a different, exponential ratio. Physical and psychological perspective, it appears, will be malleable, unreliable, and constantly in flux for the remainder of the film.
Set in a time period that swings wildly between the 1970s, the 1890s, and 1795, the cats will sometimes be human-sized, sometimes be cat-sized, and sometimes they will resemble a one-foot tall marching band parading along in a room that suddenly and inexplicably transforms into a train bridge over a river. No matter where they are, they will manage to exude an atmosphere sinister in the way that only a vertical creature depicting a horizontal creature can be. The inability of human joints and proportions to ever successfully approximate the movements of a quadruped animal is representative of the film as a whole: doomed to fail—an inevitability stemming from the snowball effect of early online discourse, a self-fulfilling prophecy of epic proportion. In a world without meme culture, would Cats (2019) have been more successful? Probably not. Perhaps it would have faded into obscurity under the radar. Instead, it was fated to crash and burn; the scapegoat of the month for millennial angst, universally sacrificed as an outlet for our pent-up rage, something we can demolish without remorse, without guilt, without ethical consideration. Cats (2019) united us for one glorious moment in time, and though it may fade into memory, we are not alone in the moonlight.
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