![]() (I’ll always be proud to have been among the early adopters who got to catch a glimpse of Dench’s furless human hand, complete with wedding ring.) Cats’ failure to fill theaters may serve as a corrective for the big studios’ recent tendency to invest in large-scale adaptations of stage musicals, but I suspect it will live on as a cult classic on home screens, purred over and batted about like a ball of yarn by stoners and drama teens of all ages.Īnother viewing with the same family group the next day-of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, watched at home on DVD screener-made me regret not putting that singular murder mystery on my ten-best list. It did abysmal box office over opening weekend, and was additionally humiliated by Universal’s announcement that they’re pushing out a new digital version to movie theaters with corrected special effects. As Alison demonstrates in a hilarious and thoughtful review in which she declares the film, “in all affection, a monstrosity,” Cats is not only critic-proof but meaning-proof, existing in a place beyond good and evil. And my brother, who has the envious ability to fall asleep in any situation, used those two hours as an opportunity for a wholesome nap, awaking just in time to benefit from Judi Dench’s fourth-wall-breaking reassurance that “a cat is not a dog.”Īmong the five of us we had at least three distinct experiences, but walking to the subway afterward we were already recombining them into a common language, boisterously conjecturing as to the meaning of “jellicle” and assigning each other distinct feline alter egos with laboriously whimsical names. My niece and sister-in-law sat through it in a more neutral state of befuddlement-I didn’t detect any laughter coming from their side, but nor did they seem on the verge of getting up and leaving. And Karen nails my reservations when she mentions the nihilism of the ending, though it’s true it’s tough to imagine things turning out any different than they do for Howie Ratner. (This year it also brought us The Lighthouse, Midsommar, Waves, and The Farewell, which Alison wrote about so movingly in her last post that I can only respond by sending people back to read it.) I hear what Bilge says about the characters’ behavior in Uncut Gems being true to the laws of that movie’s chaotic world without ever quite being recognizably human. What are the odds that, out of four film critics in late 2019, fully three of us would be indifferent to the appeal of Uncut Gems? As of this writing its critical rating sits at 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and though it’s rolling out slowly on an indie release schedule it’s been reigning at the box office too, breaking the per-screen opening weekend record for its very of-the-minute distributor A24. I Hope Every Moviegoer Climbs Into the Speeding, Spinning Cars of Ford v Ferrariĭear Mistoffelees, Rum Tum Tugger, and Skimbleshanks (up to you to figure out which one of you is which cat, or which cat is which in the first place): Let Sharon Tate Exemplifying Tarantino’s Love of Cinema Be a Lesson to Us All Netflix Makes Sublime Films Like Atlantics Widely Available-but Only if You Know How to Work the Algorithm ♫ These Are a Few of My Favorite Scenes ♪♪ ![]() Read the previous dispatch in the series here. In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics-this year, Bilge Ebiri, Karen Han, and Alison Willmore-about the year in cinema.
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