For months when I have searched for cat news on Bing (my preferred search engine) I have been presented with page after page of updates about the movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. It was becoming frustrating because I wanted real cat news. Well now I have it because according to The Times film reviewer Kevin Maher the film has bombed. He has given it a one star rating.
The film, alas, is still a nightmare [after a re-imaging by the director]. It dies, almost instantly, under the weight of a monolithic narrative….
It is rare for Times reviewers to rate a movie with one star. He calls it ‘A nightmare of derivative ditties sung by tedious kitties’. A clever use of words as usual.
The film is chock-a-bloc with stars all CGI’ed up to the nines to make them look like cat-human hybrids. The director Tom Hooper was influenced by the mass of feedback to the trailer. Maher called the trailer ‘a Freudian nightmare waiting to happen’.
Hooper changed the film to make it work but it has not according to Maher. He believes that it is still a nightmare. For Maher it dies as soon as it is born ‘under the weight of a monolithic narrative structure’.
He writes that the film is ‘just not inventive enough’. Well, I was actually thinking of taking my girlfriend to see it. I had hoped that the presence of the star players such as Judy Dench, Taylor Swift and Idris Elba (he can’t act) was an indication that the film had quality but alas no.
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