Holy Cats! This Broadway adaptation terrible!

Francesca Hayward and Robbie Fairchild in Cats. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Reason and sanity are not things to be found in Cats. Rather, the loopy, unfortunately and mildly enchanting Broadway adaptation is all things and no things at once. Somehow, despite a brilliant lack of cohesion or basic plot logic, this film drew a bunch of famous folks – Idris Elba! Taylor Swift! Judi Dench! Jason Derulo! – to lend an air of respectability to the lunacy. Perhaps I'm missing something indelible about a show that ran for many, many years on Broadway. Or maybe the film adaptation is the fever dream of ego-driven idiots.

 

I think Cats is about a talent show in which the winner is reincarnated or something along those lines. Aside from the stars mentioned above are Jennifer Hudson, Ray Winstone, Ian McKellen, Rebel Wilson, and James Corden. Ballerina Francesca Hayward serves as the audience surrogate exploring what tries to be a mystical world of feline majesty. Everyone is dressed like a cat, they have weird cat names and do quasi cat things that are far sillier than ever intended. There are many songs tossed in because this is a musical, including a song Swift sings that is well outside her capabilities. Then everything ends on a rather banal shot meant to mean something important to director Tom Hooper and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Cats is an audacious calamity, wrong on almost every front and on nearly every level. Sometimes the film is bizarre and accidentally enchanting, littered with impeccable scenery devouring by Elba, McKellen, and Wilson. It tries to hit so many tones and have so many layers it misses all of them, dashing through emotions at unimaginable speeds and with no control. Cats is madness with a $90 million budget and a director with no clue what to do with it, the perfect recipe for an expensive cluster best viewed on hallucinogens.

With two hours of screen time to fill though Cats can't keep the insanity rolling. It's in those moments where the film's legitimate incompetence comes to light, bringing the terrible fun to a frustrating halt. Like the CGI, which looks dreadful and incomplete, as if they gave up about three quarters of the way in. Hooper fails wildly staging the musical numbers, most notably in the two renditions of Memory. This is the showcase song, and the film has the very experienced Hudson on hand to sing it. This should be the easiest win for this film, but it ends up completely mucking the whole thing up. The emotions wrought from the song land with a thud, due to a mix of Hooper failing to establish the right tone, strange choreography choices in the second version, and general framing and editing flaws that fail to convey the song's melancholy. Hudson is game and tries her best, but it's hard to succeed when everything around you is en fuego as it is in Cats.

If any one thing kept this film going though, it was the audience at the screening I attended. I've never sat with an audience as splendidly sincere and sarcastic as the one who soldiered through Cats with me. Every little cat pun or dumb, awkward cat movement garnered a wicked groan or one of those “I cannot believe this is happening” laughs. Some folks applauded after a few of the musical numbers – Memory was not one of them – because somehow applause is the only acceptable way to appreciate insanity, even if no one behind it is around to hear it. It was a hoot to watch it with folks, a shared experience that will be difficult to replicate in the future. Too bad this five-star audience had to sit through a one-star film. 

Review: One out of Five Stars  

Click here to see the trailer. 

Rating: PG

Run time: 110 minutes

Genre: Musical 

tl;dr  

What Worked: Audience 

What Fell Short: Everything Else 

What To Watch Instead: Singing in the Rain, Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Messy Jojo Rabbit misses the sweet spot between farce and gravitas

Taika Waititi and Roman Griffin Davis in Jojo Rabbit. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

Jojo Rabbit is a mess, albeit a mess made with affection and care. Writer/director Taika Waititi sometimes gets across some of the points he wants and landing a couple of effective punches, but ultimately cannot maintain the gravitas he wants and needs. Jojo Rabbit is disappointing, but in a fairly interesting way. 

The film stars Roman Griffin Davis as the eponymous Jojo, a 10-year-old wannabe Nazi living in a quiet German village with his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson). After an incident with a grenade ends his dreams of serving Hitler, Jojo volunteers to work around town for the insouciant Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), his assistant Finkel (Alfie Allen), and Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson). Jojo is prone to an active imagination and many misperceptions about the Jewish people, which are spurred by frequent conversations with an imaginary Hitler (played by Waititi). Jojo's life shifts dramatically once he finds the young Jewish woman Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding from the Nazis in his home. Elsa's presence begins to shift Jojo's perspective on everything he knows, just as the war winds down and his village succumbs to chaos. 

There's a fair amount going on with Jojo Rabbit, and Waititi does pull some of it off. The film is fine as a coming of age story, even though the main character is a stone's throw away from being a Nazi. There's a nice little theme about finding heroism in the small moments, whether it's secretly placing anti-Nazi propaganda around town or expressing oneself amid tyranny. Waititi has some good points about how little effort it takes for outright stupidity to evolve into commonplace evil; it's easy to make fun of folks who believe Jewish people have horns, at least until they start slaughtering them based on that belief. The film's farcical nature cuts deepest with this point, due in part to the timeliness of such ideology. 

It's difficult for films to shift between absurdity and seriousness given how far the gap is between the two. Waititi, to his credit, sometimes succeeds at doing exactly that. One sequence in particular, a sequence where Jojo Rabbit takes a “heil Hitler” joke and turns it into a menacing moment for Elsa, is quite striking. It's a really stunning moment in which the films reminds viewers the initial the joke comes from a rather dark place and comes with terrible consequences. When Jojo Rabbit makes contact with its target, it hits with precision and force. But the film's batting average is right around the Mendoza line, failing more often than not to square up on those little moments of insight. The final battle scene, the moment when Jojo witnesses the consequences of his dreams, lacks the effectiveness found in the far smaller moment below. It's more silly than stern, suffering from the Life is Beautiful problem of taking an atrocity too lightly. 

The biggest issue with Jojo Rabbit is Waititi himself. His imaginary Hitler shifts the film's otherwise absurdist tone toward twee and cute, adding more layers to the film's constant tonal shifts. The violence meant to jolt the audience loses its effect because the tone is already too far above the grand for viewers to land in the midst of the horror. Having Hitler as an imaginary friend is the film's selling point, yet it's a joke doesn't go anywhere of interest. And his Hitler isn't an interesting take on the character; Mel Brooks took a similar approach around 50 years ago to much greater effect. Making Hitler flamboyant is also an easy choice, a simple way of converting a horror villain into a silly little thing. Jojo Rabbit has a lot of these uninspired decisions as lazy shorthand to the audience. Captain Klenzendorf's motivation for casually ignoring Nazism starts off as a really interesting study of a warrior no longer allowed to fight, but ends up as a gay joke. The soundtrack is uber literal, ending with the most obvious David Bowie song imaginable because lazy thematic resonance. This film is, or at least should be, more interesting than these choices. It should challenge the audience more often than it does, give them room to reflect a little about why they're laughing at the jokes. Jojo Rabbit ultimately loses its focus and can't deliver the knockout punch it winds up to strike.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 108 minutes

Genre: Comedy

tl;dr

What Worked: Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, Some Themes

What Fell Short: Taika Waititi's Hitler, Tonal imbalance, Banality

What To Watch As Well: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Producers

Rebel Wilson shines in funny but inconsistent Isn't It Romantic

Rebel Wilson and Adam Devine in Isn't It Romantic. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

At its best, Isn't It Romantic is a funny, charming little deconstruction of, and a homage to, the romantic comedy. Like some of the best rom-coms, it features a charismatic lead character and a winning sense of humor to keep the audience invested in its lead's romantic foibles. Even as it points out the genre's flaws, the film can't quite escape some of the more troubling romantic comedy trappings, eventually succumbing to one of the most harmful clichés without completely realizing that it did so.

Isn't It Romantic stars Rebel Wilson as Natalie, a low-level, put-upon architect trying to navigate the complexities of life in the big city. A vociferous hater of romantic comedies, Natalie takes a knock to the noggin trying to escape a purse snatcher and wakes up in her own romantic comedy. In this world, Natalie is the star architect in her office who unwittingly charms her firm's big client Blake (professionally handsome Liam Hemsworth). Her neighbor Donny (Brandon Scott Jones) is her sassy, obsessive, gay friend. Her real-life assistant and friend Whitney (Betty Gilpin) is now her main rival in her firm. And her best friend Josh (Adam Devine) stumbles his way into a whirlwind romance with model/yoga ambassador Isabella (Priyanka Chopra). Natalie is eager to escape the perfect vision of New York she's conjured and must complete her story arc, learning a valuable lesson about herself as she critiques numerous rom-com tropes along the way.

There is a fundamental issue with Wilson serving as an anti-romantic lead. The film explains why a woman like Wilson's Natalie can't be the star of her own romantic comedy while featuring her in a romantic comedy; the meta nature of the comment doesn't absolve the film from commenting on it so frequently in the first place. Despite the frequent jokes at her expense, Wilson is a pretty solid, and sometimes excellent, rom-com lead. Her inherent sarcasm and self-effacement doesn't overwhelm the character; Wilson finds a skosh of sweetness and charm to veer Natalie away from misery. It's a shame Wilson has to take this route to showcase her rom-com chops, but at the least it gives her a chance to reinforce she can be more than a supporting actress. 

 

Wilson is good enough that, like the best rom-com actresses, she could carry some otherwise lackluster material. Fortunately, she doesn't have to do that for Isn't It Romantic. Despite the premise's snarky overtones, the criticism it has for the genre is more loving than cruel. The film is generally careful on what it targets for criticism, hitting the weaker aspects while using the important notes – the tender speech, a solid musical number – to build out its message. What is left is a film that mocks and embraces the idealistic nature of its genre, using the familiar beats to tell a story of self-fulfillment

 

Then again, Isn't It Romantic can't escape some of the pratfalls it mocks so heartily. This is a flaw for meta comedies, as the line between calling out a flaw and featuring it is very, very thin. Take, for example, the gay best friend stereotype. The film calls it out as a regressive depiction, yet the jokes about Donny's character are rooted in the stereotype itself – the humor is directed at Donny, not from him. Then there's the battle between Natalie and Isabella for Josh's affection. The love triangle is another well-worn rom-com trope, a plot that exists solely to pit women against one another – the man at the center is rarely, if ever, held responsible for his role in the conflict. Isn't It Romantic ultimately steps away from basing its finale on some resolution to its love triangle, but it still uses it as a crutch in Natalie's journey of self discovery.

The message the film ultimately has is a pretty nifty one, at least until the ending when Natalie puts her lesson into practice and takes a rather awkward step backward into the very dangerous nice guy trap. The ending to Isn't It Romantic validates some rather toxic behavior from Josh, while at the same time having Natalie take a step back in her personal growth. Given the amount of time the film spent getting Natalie to a point of independence, the decision to strip that away in favor of convenience and one of the more hazardous clichés is a major downfall for this film. That last choice dampens the film's cheerful message, ending a very sweet film on a remarkably sour note.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

 

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 92 minutes

Genre: Romantic Comedy

tl;dr

What Worked: Rebel Wilson, Script

What Fell Short: Ending, Stereotypes

What To Watch As Well: Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally, Enchanted