I saw Cats last night and I still haven’t recovered. Here is a play-by-play of my experience
The movie begins. The audience is rife with anticipatory giggles. Some lady in the back row loudly says “can we be quiet now, please? let us watch the movie in silence” in a displeased Russian accent.
We will inevitably disappoint her
In the first 5 minutes, while crying with laughter, I decide this movie is actually about a human who gets genetically engineered into a cat and is exiled to a furrykin community.
5 minutes after that, I think about how good a movie this would be if it was hand-drawn animation and not CGI people-cats, and I become absolutely furious
Mice and cockroaches have human faces and bodies. The audience is screaming.
This film comes VERY close to having a dog on screen. I start sweating in dread of what it might look like. The dog is never shown.
None of the humor is funny
During the slow parts I start to imagine other celebrities in full cat CGI to amuse myself
Cat Idris Elba sexily Thanos-snaps another cat out of existence. Audible confusion ripples through the audience.
The cats do some extremely horny body work involving their tails. The audience is making disgusted noises. Several people yelp “oh NO” very loudly
At the end of a song, the throng of cats start “applauding” by slapping their hands on the ground and saying “meowmeowmeowmeowmeow”. This instigates a fight-or-flight response in me so strong that I nearly bolt out of the theatre.
During an awkward silence the camera cuts to a cat making a “yikes” kind of grimace and the whole theatre laughs because that is the exact emotion we are all feeling
A cat helicopters into the ceiling and is vaporized by cat Idris Elba. A man in the audience yells “GOTTEM!!” at the top of his lungs
Most cats are naked but somehow cat Idris Elba manages to be far more naked than all of them. The audience is screaming, again
Memoriiiiiiies. All alone in the moonliiiiiiight. “Please,” begs the Russian lady in the back of the theatre, sounding defeated, “don’t laugh. Not now.”
The actor who plays the main character gray cat who never gets a song explaining who he is (I am told he is Munkustrap) is DEAD SERIOUS about this role. He is a PROFESSIONAL. He is feeling being a cat so hard. Look at his face at literally any point (but especially during the final epilogue song) and I guarantee he will be having an intensely invested serious face journey. His shoulders must be aching from carrying this entire film.
110 minutes later, or maybe years: the credits roll. The audience cheers raucously. We exit the theatre in a daze. One of my friends goes home with a high fever. 10/10
Did you know there’s an outtake from the 2000 Grinch movie where Jim Carrey leans in real close to Jeffrey Tambor’s face and then rips off Tambor’s prosthetic nose with his teeth
Multiple people with professional bird experience that I’ve spoken with believe so! One noted that a some birds get so “into the scritch” that at times they will lose their balance or cease being aware of their surroundings (as you can see in this video) but that we don’t really know why. It looks like this owl was having a super good scratch, ended up leaning a little farther back that the human was in a good position to support, lost his balance, and recovered. It’s all good and yes, actually cute.
(It’s worth noting, of course, that this is an interaction that can only occur because the person has a strong history with the owl and a lot of previously developed trust. This isn’t something you should ever consider doing with an owl you don’t know and haven’t been trained to work with.)
As someone with years of experience with screech owls in particular, yes this is happy behavior. An upset/threatened owl would NEVER act so relaxed like that. And yes it is probably because that person has a very strong connection with the bird
