Hacker Cinema
Cats
2019 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Tom Hooper
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.
20 negative2 mixed10 neutralfrom 32 commenters
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33 comments on Hacker News
I rarely leave movies midway through, but this one was too much for whatever the payoff was supposed to be. I'd rather sit through Cats (2020).
Making a good movie is really hard and rare thing. So if they tried hard, it would not increase the odds much because there is no "formula" for making a good movie. Only exceptional directors do it and even they can't even do it all the time. See Ridley scott and director of disaster thing called Cats. Also Zack Snyder
> Humanity Has Stopped Producing Bad Art: After a century of trial and error, mankind has perfected the art of cinema, as proven by recent masterworks like Cats, Space Jam: A New Legacy, the live-action Snow White, Red One, and Joker: Folie à Deux. Critics, who were once joyless automatons thriving on takedowns of human creativity, now bask in this golden age of moviemaking, lavishing praise upon the timeless artistry of The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros. Discovery.
This really should appear in professional film reviews.
The fat lady has not sung yet - terrible movies often become cult hits once they are "rediscovered" for their badness and prices go down. I wouldn't be surprised if Cats eventually became a streaming staple.
I feel like it’s pretty easy to disprove. I mentioned Humane AI in another comment, so here I’ll use a different and more flamboyant example: the 2019 movie Cats.
After putting $85-110M into the production of the movie, Universal released a trailer that went super viral and had every person on the internet talking about how terrible it looked. When the movie actually came out there was a second viral wave of gawking. Did this drive tons of people to the theater so they revel in the movie’s epic badness for themselves? No, the movie (which had over a dozen stars and was based on a hit musical that is popular around the world) failed to make back its budget at the box office. For reference (in case someone tries to pull the “maybe it would’ve made less money without the negative publicity” card) Tom Hooper’s previous movie musical Les Miserables earned $442M on a $61M budget.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_(2019_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables_(2012_film)
"Sonic", "She-Hulk", "Cats", "Avatar"....
Maybe the industry will eat itself and we can go back to film making where it's the story that drives the film.
Edit: watched "Life After Pi" linked to here in the comments section. I feel my comment above is too abrasive now. The VFX guys don't deserve this crap. I still dislike the modern "Blockbuster" however.
“We used all of this technology to make a shitty movie about blue cats”
But… why!?
“Remember this adage developed by the U.S. Navy in 1960, KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid. Avoid unnecessary complexity.”
From:
KISS For Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Cats, Coca-Cola, And Documentary Movies That Show “Simple” Is A Force Of Good
https://moviewise.substack.com/p/kiss-for-health-wealth-and-happiness
Or more likely an over-worked compositor got the task of Camcorder-ifying 8K footage weeks or days before it needed to get shipped and chose a date at random among the dozens of other creative decisions for that single shot. Those in the review process had a mountain of things to review and these scenes shot 5 years apart didn't click in their minds.
In an industry where boom mics, guys wearing jeans in ancient Rome, the entire movie Cats, all make it onscreen then I really don't think we have to ascribe so much thoughtlessness or malice to this one.
Actual opera fans are frothing at the mouth right now at the suggestion that Cats is opera.
But this idea that opera is stuffy high culture is the same mistake people make with Shakespeare--it's pop culture, just removed from its context. Imagine upper-class twits a century from now screening an Adam Sandler movie.
He was a bit anti-semitic, and caused the film 'Cats' to exist.
Oh no no no, that won't do. Please send your SLA and NDA for me to sign, we can't be spending $12 willy-nilly! We could have almost bought one movie ticket to Cats for that money!
I was really disappointed when I saw this, but not because of the content, which is great, but because I saw Cats (Year) and assumed that the link was going to be explaining git using the _movie_ Cats. Sadly, the movie was Cats (2019).
That is a horrible suggestion for comparison, since the movie Cats is not government funded, whereas an f-35 5is.
Well, the F-35 is actually a useful instrument which maintains US hegemony. A better comparison would be the movie Cats, which had a budget of 95 million, and serves no purpose to society.
This needs a "Men Who Stare At Goats" style film, but with the cast of "Cats". It would be interesting.
Have you seen the movie "Cats" (2019)? I promise you don't want this dream to become real.
How about scene by scene commentary for cats on a youtube video. Sports have this and you can watch old sports matches on youtube. Right now youtube would block it and my use case extends the fair use by quite a mark. You have to understand that under DRM even seeing the movie with family and friends is illegal.
> A majority of the movies would gain more by giving it away to the public domain because most movies fail.
What exactly about being in the public domain would help a movie "gain more" if it hadn't had a successful box office run previously? "GPL-based businesses making billions" does not strike me as a meaningful comparison here. ("Well, 'Cats' is a fiasco, but if we give it away for free we can make a killing selling enterprise service contracts for it!")
It didn’t really strike me as looking that terrible. I certainly didn’t have the visceral reaction the article describes. I had to watch the trailers again to understand what they were talking about... it’s a film about human-cat hybrids that communicate through interpretive dance and overblown songs, what the fuck do people expect!?
This was my reaction too. "Yep, looks exactly how a Cats screenplay would look."
I think these are all just people coming out of the woodwork who never liked Cats. Or people who haven't seen it on stage and didn't realize how silly and weird it already is.
I think the issue is that people are going expecting a movie version of a musical with an entertaining plot, and Cats in any form just isn't going to supply that. The casting is all over the place, and the way they animated the cats sealed the deal. I just don't think it should have been made into a movie, or if it did it shouldn't have been expected to do well in a mass market. Your watch case makes sense but seems like an outlier in the general population.
> I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically, or even replace that Audi car the hero is driving to a Mercedes. Product visualization/ads has had pipelines set up for this near drag and drop for static assets for a while now. Their assets are known before production, and have been decided by the agency that made them. Animation and Film VFX are setup fairly differently.
The ability to make changes like that already exist. Scenes and assets built procedurally can be altered with relative ease as long as they don’t encroach on other aspects of the shot.
> Specifically things like changing sponsor logos or animation models.
Logos and for the most part basic comp-only changes? Yeah that’s fine. Animation model is a completely different story. Changing the base model means the UV’s likely changed so the texture artists will have to either update (can be complex if they’re trying to maintain their original stack) or redo their work. It means the rig needs to be updated and modified. If it’s a muscle based system for precise and realistic skin deformation, have fun. If there character has fur, then the grooming team has to do another take on the asset as well. Animation then needs to make another pass on their scenes to make sure the animation actually looks good and lookdev needs to make tweaks to maintain the look they had before. And then you have to rerender, which will likely conflict with the rendering allocations (if using an on-prem farm) of the current deliverable unless the studio is in a lull point. And rendering takes time. Then comp gets to deal with the change and make sure it still sits in the shot. And we still haven’t discussed the time and tweaks to re-sim and cache any affected effects.
For a movie like Cats, this is going to be a lot of work, with a ton of anim, matchmove, and comp fixes.
> The original VFX team would just have to insert "markers" into the workflow which could then be replaced and re-rendered. Almost like changing build flags and recompiling a program.
That is a significant misrepresentation/and lack of understanding of how these pipelines work and function. No matter how much you can automate, this is not just data the way the typical HN user sees things. This is someone’s art and vision, and will always require a hands on approach with human eyes. If it was as simple as changing a few parameters or altering a few lines of code, there would be far fewer people in the industry.
It didn’t really strike me as looking that terrible. I certainly didn’t have the visceral reaction the article describes. I had to watch the trailers again to understand what they were talking about... it’s a film about human-cat hybrids that communicate through interpretive dance and overblown songs, what the fuck do people expect!?
Mind, I really enjoyed the Lion King remake. It didn’t tarnish my childhood memory of the original (which would be quite difficult, since my parents could only afford a poor quality pirate VHS copy, and not the cinema trip). Apparently people hated that too.
Cats looks surreal enough that it’d probably be a good date flick, nothing to actually take seriously. Definitely a memorable moment. Same as watching the Twilight films.
Reddit has a collection of reviews [1], that have some really funny quotes.
My favourite being from the Boston Globe [2], comparing the screening to a real-life springtime for hitler
> As Dame Judi carefully enunciated each verse, then paused, then started a new verse, the audience began to titter. Then laugh. Then roar. Because each pause seemed to signal — at long last — the film’s end, each new verse became a fresh source of hilarity. It was that rare occurrence: a packed theater going the full “Springtime for Hitler” and giving release to blessed, hard-earned mockery.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/eckx4x/cats_review_thread/ [2] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2019/12/18/arts/claws-out/
> A/B testing different versions of films with live audiences and tweaking.
Test screenings are a thing and they can very much influence the final product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_screening
I guess they didn't test Cats.
I’m not even an actor and if someone said they wanted me to have a bit part “in a movie with Judy Dench” I’d be like yeah okay. Poor Idris. I want to love him but he’s in so, so many bad movies.
You get a couple of names on board based on an early draft of the script, they took a chance on you or they had a moment of bad judgement. But your peers come on board because you did, and pretty soon you have an all star cast and... dreck.
Then it seems like everyone remembers that star power can’t fix everything and it’s a while before the same thing happens again. Cats just seems to be this cycle’s cautionary tale.
The musical is performed in costume. Yes audiences suspend disbelief, just as they do when, say, Romeo clearly isn't really dead in a typical performance of Shakespeare's play.
The musical is based on an existing work, a correction of amusing poems about actual cats by T S Eliot.
Probably the movie just shouldn't exist. An animated movie of the poems using some famous songs from the musical could have worked for example, but that's not what this is.
It could have turned out perfectly fine if they just used cats for the characters. Like, CGI cats that look like actual members of felis catus, instead of humans who accidentally drank a polyjuice potion with cat hair in it.
Alas, Tom Hooper has a habit of retaining stage musical-like elements when he makes movies based on stage musicals. He shot many scenes in Les Miserables in a way that felt more like a stage production than a cinematic one; the difference is stark if you compare it with, say, The Greatest Showman -- which is a movie about a stage production! But Les Miz wasn't too bad, it was just a bit awkward. This time it seems Hooper has gone one step too far, though.
It's completely normal for feature films to have cuts for different regions to handle censorship preferences. Consider Leon (released as "The Professional" in the US). Mainland Europe isn't as up tight about the idea that teenage girls crush on older men and so the edit released there includes scenes the US wasn't comfortable with and as a result fleshes out the middle of the film. Unlike that lesbian kiss we're taking about several whole scenes with dialogue which were shot but aren't in the US movie at all. And that's normal.
What's special about Cats is that they changed the movie after it "shipped". This is a watershed like when video games started getting day one patches. Super Mario Brothers had no day one patch, it was a physical hunk of metal and plastic, when we played Outer Worlds we set apart an hour the day before for the patches to apply, knowing there would be patches because all games do that now.
I've only seen clips of the movie, but those don't look very promising IMO. I read that this had a $95 million production budget, I can't fathom what they spent it on when looking at the end result.
Beyond that I'm quite a bit sceptical of choosing Cats for a movie adaption at all. It's nowhere near 'Phantom of the Opera' in terms of popularity, and the last (2004) movie of that musical didn't do particularly well at the box office.
I'm not suggesting they were going for furry, I'm just suggesting a lot of people look at the Cats movie now and make that connection (specifically the sexualization of non-human mammals).
I'm aware of the vore associations.
However, were the original characters in the Cats play actually humanoid cats? Or were they just humans dressing up as cats and the audience was meant to suspend disbelief that what they were looking at were just regular cats?
I ask because obviously a play can't get "live talking cats" without human actors but a movie can easily do so with CG.
Why did they decide to go with humanoid cats instead of regular cats with voice actors? Was it just to match the aesthetic of the play? Or does the plot actually involve the cats being canonicaly humanoid?
Are fiction books really that updated (in terms of the words, not formatting)? I'd argue that a movie's visuals are part of the experience, but something like the font or pagination doesn't change the experience of a book in a significant way. Movies have been changed, but it's usually due to where it's being watched (like different screen shapes) or in more minor ways.
And when movies get changed, people have problems with it. People want to see the original Star Wars, but can't. Did Han shoot first? Still, the changes in Star Wars seem minor by comparison. Yes, they updated the special effects and made some edits. This sounds like they're changing the whole visual effect of the movie because it's weirding people out. Like, imagine if they updated R2D2 and C3PO to be completely different; imagine if they changed Darth Vader to David Prowse's voice after initially being released as James Earl Jones.
I think we historically haven't seen this in theaters because of the cost involved. It's not like a streaming service where you just get Netflix to encode the new version you give them.
Yea, things have always been altered, but this feels like it's breaking the shared experience of seeing Cats. Whether Han shot first is subtle and I probably wouldn't have noticed the change and I think people can ultimately share in the common experience of seeing Star Wars even if they've seen different versions. I guess it's just a matter of how drastic the changes feel and whether it will break the shared experience we generally feel. We don't know what "improved visuals" really means yet and how that will change the experience.