Bonus film review: I'm having a reaction to CATS

I was expecting -- hoping for, really, a rum tum train wreck but I actually liked it. I liked how they tweaked the story to have Macavity be a bad guy, trying to cheat the contest. I liked how they had Victoria, the outsider, draw Grizabella back into the Jellicle ball and thereby gain her admission to the group. I liked when Judi Dench, without even a trace of camp, delivered a line to Macavity that was something like "You'll never get to the heaviside!" thereby making it campy AF -- like in another movie when she said of Lizzy, "Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?"

The show has persisted for decades because of Memory. The creative team here crushed it. They built a beautiful structure around Jennifer Hudson's incredible (snots notwithstanding) performance of the song, especially including the coaxing Grizabella needed from Victoria. I said out loud "sing it already!" two seconds before Victoria said the same thing. I also liked the way they made parts of it a duet between Victoria and Grizabella.

I think they were trying to make a big star out of Francesca Hayward. I hope that works because she was so good, wide-eyed wonder and all. Finally, TSwift flies in on the half-moon, spraying catnip over the other performers. How can you not love that?

Addendum, January 14, 2020 

So why did so many film critics hate it?  I think, unlike say Les Miserables or Chicago or some of the musicals that have been done for TV like The Sound of Music, Rent and others, CATS has too many theatrical devices, like singing and dancing mice and cockroaches, giant whimsical sets and so on, for film critics to handle. Even the concept of costumes (it's not really the CGI) seems to have freaked them out. So they don't know what to do about it.

I love it when films use the creative, imaginative tools of the medium to to distort "reality" and take me to different places the way that Midsommar, or The Big Lebowski or Mulholland Drive do.  More of this -- and more things like CATS, please!

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