Spy Family S2 Episode 4
Added 2023-11-01 19:03:13 +0000 UTCComments
oh wow...
KCeeee
2024-08-07 08:40:17 +0000 UTCCats ends with Old Deuteronomy, played by Judi Dench, explaining to the audience that now that they’ve witnessed the Jellicle ritual, they should require no further explanation, no longer require an interpreter to the Jellicle ways. Few things could be further from the truth. I feel utterly unprepared to talk about Cats on its own terms because I- I don’t know these songs, I don’t know these characters, I’m not familiar with this story, and, very clearly, Cats has no interest in aiding the uninitiated. There’s a character, a stripy white cat, that is abandoned in a junkyard at the start of the film, who fills the space that would normally be occupied by an audience surrogate. I think her name is Liz? I should- and will- look it up, but it’s fairly incidental, and unlike most of the other cats, she doesn’t get an entire musical number that mostly consists of saying her own name repeatedly. She was definitely named after a queen. She is an outsider to the local culture of the cats who occupy this neighborhood, providing an opportunity for the locals to explain the way of things. Indeed, these explanations make up the bulk of the musical numbers, the show largely consisting of a series of cats explaining who they are to Liz and the audience. The problem is that the explanations, for the most part, are all nonsense. This is not accidental. The show is mostly Seussian nonsense-words and freeform absurdity, but one hundred and nine minutes of nonsense is, to say the least, a little unmooring. Maybe that’s the joke: Now you understand the Jellicle ways of Jellicle cats. But you don’t, and you never will because you can’t. You’ve been punked. What I have pieced together is that the cats have convened for a ritual where Old Deuteronomy picks a worthy cat who gets to be reborn. I don’t want to interrogate the metaphysics of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats because canon is an abyss deeper than the uncanny valley Cats lives in, but at some point I believe it was mentioned that this process, the balloon trip to the Heavyside Layer, erases memories, which strikes me as making this ritual-death not much different from regular death. Anyway, it turns out a lot of cats are really eager to die. The winner is a cat that everyone hates for reasons I was unable to parse. I guess at some point in the past, she teamed up with local villain Macavity, who is either a prankster or a serial killer. The closest thing to an evolving plot consists of Macavity kidnapping the various death-candidates, so that he as the sole remaining candidate can win by default. His plan is foiled and the cat that everyone hates wins and gets to die, but in a good way. What is happening is pretty simple, even if why remains beyond human ken. This stuff though? This is the easy stuff. This is just what you get when you sign up to see Cats. You aren’t really there for plot, you’re there for music and dancing. Dancing and film have an odd relationship, and it’s probably no coincidence that the prevalence of dance in film has become increasingly niche as cinema has grown more sophisticated. The beauty of performance dance is in the physicality that you are watching people do something with their bodies at the very edges of human performance. When we live in an age where cinema can effortlessly fake performance, it gets a lot more difficult to persuade the audience that what they’re seeing is impressive and it becomes altogether impossible when every human’s body has been replaced with a cartoon cat skin. And this is well and truly where everything goes off the rails. Cats is a film seated so firmly at the bottom of the uncanny valley that it has set up residences, sown and harvested wheat, raised children, and developed its own system of divine mathematics. In addition to the digital skin, the actual physical feets of dancers are coarsely blended with total cartoon replacements, having the two precise movements of a Fortnite emote. One of the first shots of the film features Robert Fairchild’s human face hovering in front of his cat head like a cardboard Halloween mask, an unfinished effect that crops up several times in the movie, most extensively in a sequence involving singing and dancing mice and cockroaches with human faces. Rebel Wilson eats several of the cockroaches. Speaking of Rebel Wilson, not once but twice in the film, she unzips her digital cat skin, and steps out to reveal the same cat skin, but now wearing a sequin vest-and-shorts combo like a Vegas cigarette girl from the seventies. The effect is so unsettling that I felt my own skin trying to escape. Cats has a very odd relationship with clothes. Some cats wear them, others don’t. It’s maybe a little weird, but a fairly innocuous theatrical convention that is far from the hardest thing in this film to adjust to. At least, until those cats take their clothes off. Idris Elba’s Macavity spends the majority of the film wearing a giant fur-coat, and it is impossible to describe just how uncomfortable it is when he suddenly apparates wearing nothing at all. Despite the plethora of cats on screen who aren’t wearing clothes, the act of disrobing shattered the convention. It becomes nudity, and a nudity that feels so bizarrely unintentional that despite it being deliberately recorded for all future human generations to see, the instinct is to politely look away in embarrassment and respect for Mr. Elba’s modesty, as though Director Tom Hooper had somehow managed to sneak up behind him and steal his clothes. These moments tend to have a knock-on effect that sharply calls attention to all the cats onscreen, and like an optical illusion, a switch is flipped in the brain and suddenly- they’re all naked. A room full of naked human-cats, writhing and yowling. The film is permeated with a subtextual horniness that is made unsettling by virtue of being subtextual, by virtue of a disconnect between the subject of the script and the subject of the camera. These are not songs about sex and seduction, but nevertheless cats thrust their Ken Doll smooth genitals at the audience, splay their legs, and end multiple musical numbers laying on the floor in a post-orgasmic heap. Everyone who sees Cats will have their own reaction, their own moment that becomes seared into their being for the rest of time, like prophets of old glimpsing the true face of God. I, for one, am unable to express in words the scream that emanated from deep within my soul when Judi Dench’s Old Deuteronomy spreads her legs wide and scissors them in the air to express her approval of another cat’s musical number.
The Egg Unhatching
2024-06-19 20:54:56 +0000 UTCIn Japan and Korea they do couple's things like couples rings, outfits, bracelets, necklaces, ect. So he probably meant couples rings lol
Chels
2023-11-07 18:55:34 +0000 UTCYes next episode, things are about to happen.
Siliyan
2023-11-01 19:30:23 +0000 UTC
