“Cats” (2019) Podcast Movie Review

By Daniel Barnes on March 31, 2020

Cats (2019) – Dare Daniel Podcast Episode 60

“Jellicle cats are simultaneously the most explained and unexplained things in the world.”

Daniel and Corky are sheltering in place, but the podcast goes on. For their first quarantine episode, Daniel and Corky review Tom Hooper’s wretched musical adaptation of Cats (2019).

Inspired by a book of poems by T.S. Eliot and popularized by cocaine, Cats was always a triumph of spectacle over substance. However, the film version ups the ante with nightmarish special effects that turn the actors into Humanimal hybrids straight out of Dr. Moreau’s laboratory.

A money pit of terrible ideas executed terribly, Cats (2019) stands as a monument to ineptitude and unimaginativeness. Everything looks disturbingly wrong from the very first frame right through to the very last. Meanwhile, the musty and forgettable songs nod to musical genres already outdated by the early 1980s. In other words, if you like mangy cat-blobs singing mangy song-blobs, this is the film for you.

Elsewhere, Daniel and Corky discuss pirate cats, butthole cuts, sexualized cockroaches and Chekhov’s catskin.

CATS (2019) FACTS AND FIGURES

U.S. theatrical release date: December 20, 2019

Domestic box office: $27 million (production budget: $95 million)

Critic scores: 20 on Rotten Tomatoes; 32 on Metacritic

This week’s craft beers: Urban Roots Brewing’s Isolate (Corky); Moksa Brewing’s Mostra 6 (Daniel)

IMDB synopsis: “A tribe of cats called the Jellicles must decide yearly which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new Jellicle life.”

This week’s referenced movies: The Lion King; Aladdin (1992); The King’s Speech; Les Misérables (2012); Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker; The Phantom of the Opera; Memento; Glass; The Island of Dr. Moreau; Raiders of the Lost Ark; Black Panther; The Identical; Sexy Beast; Waiting for Guffman; The Running Man; Feds