It seems like a whole lifetime has come and gone since the Big News was about Cats, Tom Hooper’s absolutely deranged musical theater spectacle that crashed and burned last December. Everybody hated Cats: the critics, the box office, the cast, almost every single person in the theater who saw it with me, and now, Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Deadline reports that Webber, the addled mind behind Cats the musical, bashed Hooper’s film version. “The problem with the film was that Tom Hooper decided that he didn’t want anybody involved in it who was involved in the original show,” he told The Sunday Times in an interview. “The whole thing was ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous” is a pretty good way to describe Cats, a film whose highlights include half-finished CGI and a scene in which Sir Ian McKellen laps milk from a sink. On the other hand, Webber’s source material doesn’t exactly help. As a refresher, the plot of Cats is basically just that a bunch of dancing, singing cats in a death cult introduce themselves to the audience for several hours, and then a big cat picks one of them to die. It would be hard for anyone to turn that into a comprehensible movie, though Hooper somehow managed to even out-ridiculous that premise.
Anyway, add Webber to the pile of people who hate Cats, but keep in mind that I am trying very hard to get my roommate to watch it with me.