Cats is clawed open on This Had Oscar Buzz, a podcast about not-so-award-winning films
Aux Features Podcast
Power: The Maxwells
The Lady Ghislaine
As the world waits to learn of the secrets and fate held by Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, investigative journalist Tara Palmeri looks back at the weird, watery death of her tycoon father. Robert Maxwell was a politician and businessman so internationally famous in his own right that he was parodied as a Bond villain. By the fall of 1991, however, massive money problems forced the media tycoon to flee to a yacht off the Canary Islands to compose himself for the challenges ahead. There he disappeared from the deck of The Lady Ghislaine early one morning. His body was recovered days later naked and floating; many say (and dueling autopsies fail to make clear) that that condition means that he could not have drowned. Daughter Ghislaine spoke noncommittally at a rushed press conference, but five years later she told a U.K. tabloid she believed he’d been murdered. Decades later, details of his death and life remain shrouded in mystery. British press veterans speak now of their assignments to travel with the Maxwells at the time, and of Robert Maxwell’s surprise burial on the Mount Of Olives in a ceremony attended by the top brass of Israeli intelligence. [Zach Brooke]
The Pod And The Pendulum
Sinister
The 2012 film Sinister is not without its diehard fans. This week’s The Pod And The Pendulum guest, DeVaughn Taylor of the Bloody Blunts Cinema Club podcast, has seen it a number of times, and Mike Snoonian, who hosts this podcast alongside Lindsay Traves, has already analyzed the movie on his previous series, Psychoanalysis: A Horror Therapy Podcast. With an episode runtime of over two hours (longer than the film itself), there’s plenty of time to dig into not only Sinister but the general trends in horror surrounding its release. As a horror film, Sinister straddles the found footage trend and the more prestigious sort of scares exemplified by the studio A24. Discussion also strays into the validity of the “elevated horror” concept, the choice of Ethan Hawke in the lead role, and the value of unknown casts. The movie somehow functions as both a popcorn-horror date night movie and a family drama, which leaves plenty of runway for the hosts to discuss Sinister 2 in the next episode. [Jose Nateras]
This Had Oscar Buzz
Cats
In the crowded field of movie breakdown podcasts, entertainment writers Joe Reid and Chris Feil have carved out one of the more inspired and unmined niches for themselves: films that garnered high awards expectations early on, then had those hopes quickly dashed by audiences and the Academy after opening weekend. The result is a rich episode list of “autopsies” for a filmography of mostly forgotten or mediocre projects that, maybe counterintuitively, prompt some of the most substantive and fun movie conversations in the podcast sphere. In a film discourse that is becoming increasingly siloed on blogs and social media, This Had Oscar Buzz is a consistent breath of fresh air that delves into the sort of under-discussed deep cuts that fans of shows like Blank Check will likely appreciate, ranging from brilliant non-hits like Darren Aronofsky’s mother! to conceptual head-scratchers like Morning Glory to zero-cultural-impact features like The Death And Life Of John F. Donovan. This week, Feil and Reid (who have both contributed to The A.V. Club) satiate listeners with a long-awaited analysis of Tom Hooper’s 2019 adaptation of Cats, which features plenty of poking fun at “digital fur technology,” but also measured and thoughtful criticism of the film’s directorial missteps—plus one hell of a convincing case for fantasy casting Celine Dion as Grizabella. [Dan Jakes]
Travolta/Cage
Face/Off (with Jordan Morris)
For the past year and some change, film writers Clint Worthington (contributor to our sister site The Takeout) and Nathan Rabin (a notable A.V. Club alum) have taken listeners on a very particular, very unpredictable journey: into the film careers of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. (It’s a journey they once invited me to take.) It’s a road littered with highs, lows, cultural touchstones, Oscar-nominated performances, and so, so many bad decisions, as they spend every episode dissecting one film each from their respective filmographies. Everybody knows these two crossed paths in the 1997 blockbuster Face/Off, which Worthington and Rabin finally get to dismantle in this ep. Both hosts (along with their guest, Jordan, Jesse, Go! co-host Jordan Morris) agree it’s still one of the most exhilarating yet utterly ridiculous action movies ever made, with Travolta’s FBI agent and Cage’s rock-star criminal trading places by literally exchanging faces. Not only do they say it’s both Travolta and Cage’s finest action hour, it’s also the best film that John Woo—who famously churned out operatic bullet ballets like this back in Hong Kong—directed during his time making big-budget studio fare here in the States. [Craig D. Lindsey]
Under The Influence With Terry O’Reilly
Switch-Pitchers: When Spokespeople Change Brands
This episode of Under The Influence, a Canadian show packaged as the inside baseball of the advertising world, rattles off an anthology of spokesperson free agency, including a glance at the personal lives of the actors behind the product hocking. Paul Marcarelli, the “Can You Hear Me Now?” guy, found his catchphrase uttered by onlookers at his grandmother’s funeral, and the senior citizen of “Where’s The Beef?” fame got shitcanned by Wendy’s after she starred in an ad for Prego pasta sauce. But the podcast focuses mainly on the business calculations behind these campaigns. Cell networks, for instance, are an industry where almost all growth comes from poaching customers away from competitors. So after Verizon parted ways with Marcarelli, Sprint signed him up to become a powerful symbol of switching cell providers. And Ryan Reynolds was testing a novel theory about zeitgeist-based advertising when he cut an ad with the infamous “Peloton wife” within 72 hours of her Christmas commercial going viral. [Zach Brooke]
33 Comments
I want to like Under the Influence, but can’t get past how Terry O’Rielly talks like Curtis Armstrong on horse tranquilizers. Which is perplexing, because they’ve had him on 99% Invisible, and he can hit a more normal cadence. I assume it’s the downfall of trying to fill a time slot rather than let the content dictate the length.
I think he’s just bad at reading from a script. He has a bit of a Shatner thing going on as well. Are you Canadian? Always wondered why this caught on outside of the smug/self important CBC universe. My wife and I have a running gag where we talk to each other imitating his voice.
Yup, Canadian. Listened on the recommendation of a hard-core CBC-loving friend (the sort who saw Stuart McLean live many times).
Jesus, they are disturbing looking.
I know it’s a different medium, but the video essay on Cats from Maggie Mae Fish is excellent- she does a great job pointing out the parallels of the play’s taxonomy with TS Elliot’s fascist philosophies. Caveat- I’m no poli-sci expert, nor have I really studied TS Elliot’s history or beliefs, but her video essay has a lot of sourcing, so there’s that.
i can’t get over the disturbing fact that the scale of the cats is all wrong. unless all the cats are teeny, tiny miniature cats, (which they are clearly not), it hurts my brain to even look at them.
The worldbuilding is a fever dream. The proportions of objects to cats constantly are at odds with the previous scene, the mice are all little children, the cockroaches are performers that the cats are entertained by and then sustained by, the cats have slightly appropriated the roles in the real world into their internal caste, the caste in itself is cultish and freakish (why the hell is Grizabella an outcast? Did they slutshame her?), it’s so easy to find things that just are absolutely bizarre. I’m just going to maintain that it’s a Jacob’s Ladder situation for a dandy fascist.
Does the background actually move? Every still I see from this looks like they’re in a 90s CD-rom game like Myst.
Fuckin insane to keep mentioning podcasts about Jeffrey Epstein related topics and never recognize TrueAnon
Yeah and the woman hosting the podcast works for Politico Playbook so I certainly don’t expect the kind of treatment that Brace and Liz give it.
I can haz Oscar?
Through all the Epstein news over the past few years, and the accounts about her complicity and attempts to flee, it somehow totally escaped me that Ghislaine Maxwell was Robert Maxwell’s daugher (who, yes I remember from his days in the news as a sort of Murdoch-level asshole rich guy).
He was a very weird guy, conservative like Murdoch in many ways, but with a weird obsession with Communist dictators which didn’t quite fit that mold. His “Pergamon Press” published a series of glowing biographies/autobiographies of Eastern European leaders; I have the ones about Honecker (East German dictator) and Ceausescu (Romanian dictator).
Sideways, who did the excellent video essay on why the music in Hooper’s , has a similar one (but for different reasons!) about why Cats doesn’t satisfy musically. It’s not a hateful polemic, he goes into considerable detail about what makes the live show work, not as a fan of the show but as a fan of musical theater. You learn a lot about how show business professionals work. Yes he is driven to hysterics but he also appreciates the parts that succeeded (Munkustrap and, well, Munkustrap.)
I figured Cats the stage musical works in part because it doesn’t even try to convince you these are cats. They were Broadway stage singers and dancers, wearing impressionistic cat costumes, doing a Musical For You. When I was a kid in NJ, the commercials looked to me like PBS childrens’ theater. As a result, there was no uncanny valley. You know and accept these are Broadway performers, singing and dancing clever cat-themed songs, and so, of course, naturally, they costume themselves as cats, kinda.They didn’t try to CGI themselves so that you recoiled and cried out, “Aaaah, A HUGE HUMANOID CAT, GET IT AWAY!!!”
I saw Cats on Broadway as a kid and enjoyed it. It might have been more to do with the fact that I was a kid and seeing a musical on Broadway.As an adult…eh, it’s not my thing. It’s not the abomination the CGI adaptation is, but it’s not one that I would really care to revisit.
Agreed. Plus the live-action energy of a stage show distracts you from the fact that none of it makes any sense at all. Without that, you’re just left wondering what the hell you are watching.
Tom Hooper just doesn’t get musicals on a fundamental level. He doesn’t enjoy them and he doesn’t know why people do. It’s very evident throughout Cats: the semi-realistic CGI that neither captures the trippy artificiality of the stage show nor does it make you more immersed, the truly unneeded plot that doesn’t fit together (even though Cats, by Lloyd Webber’s admission, isn’t supposed to gel into some coherent narrative and is just a series of funky-trippy vignettes connected through very loose lore), how he has no idea how to include the asides from Rebel Wilson’s character in a way that wouldn’t break the tempo of songs…However, his Les Mis exemplifies this even better with a plethora of stupid decisions. Adapting the songs word by word even when their tone and lyrics don’t make much sense within the realistic framing he wants, casting people who can’t sing, forcing Anne Hathaway to have her big solo in a position that doesn’t help at all with the singing…
I have no idea why they hire Tom Hooper for musicals. Dude is good with adapting history – which always includes, ironically, almost musical-like whimsical embelishments – and I hope Cats put an end to his brief musical stint.
I loved This had Oscar Buzz when it started and the conversations they have can be incredibly interesting.That said, I became deeply frustrated with it because of the addition of the constant quiz’s and guessing games which could drag out for 15-20 minutes and then leave the film discussion itself short.
The quizzes are terrible, I fast forward through them every time. It’s one of those things that are only fun for the people playing them.
It was the sort of thing that I found them dull and mildly irritating initially but at least they were only a few minutes. But it was when they stretched out to take up solid chunks of the episode and when there was more than one. I just got frustrated.I get it if they don’t have much to say about a movie or a certain Oscar year but fuck, just do a shorter episode instead of dragging out with incredibly dull quizzes.
One of the most baffling things about Cats to me is that Tom Hooper didn’t seem to actually read the lyrics to any of the songs, because there’s a running gag there that he utterly whiffs, and the gag is this: they’re cats. No, I’m not being an overly-obvious jerk. Hear me out.The cats aren’t lying, but… they’re cats. They’re full of puffed-up unjustified self-indulgence, and this is all over the damn lyrics. The railway cat says he’s super important and keeps the railways running perfectly, sure… by lying in the windowsill and “counting the trains” as they go by, to make sure no trains go missing. Riiiiight. The lazy housecat isn’t lazy, she’s actually working super hard when everyone’s asleep and nobody could notice, as she trains the rats and cockroaches to be productive members of society. Suuuuuure she is, and let’s all just forget that rats and cockroaches are precisely the pests that would not be present in a house with a housecat doing their job. The theater cat is actually just prowling around in the rafters. The crime cat pushes a glass off a table and then struts off, a Moriarty in its own mind. THIS. IS. THE. JOKE.And Tom Hooper just instead plays it all 100% straight, like they’re actually the amazing beings whom the universe revolves around that all cats are in their own mind. Goddammit.
You can tell these dum dums didnt ask any of my people. All they had to do was hire some verified furries and i guarantee the costumes would have hit much better. Most furry art guides deal with the uncanny valley portion really early in the material. Go hire some disney or pixar furries. They know the gig.
Please bring back Nathan Rabin. The man’s hilarious:https://www.avclub.com/tag/silly-little-show-biz-book-club- How else would I know of ‘Don’t Hassle The Hoff’?
The film version of Cats, if nothing else, gave us this wonderful junior ice dance program:
Who has time for podcasts? I mean literally. Even in my covid-induced limbo where a big week activity involves doing one load of laundry and getting two lattes, I still have no time to listen to this stuff.The “This Had Oscar Buzz” sounds interesting to me, but who wants to spend 2 whole hours on “Running With Scissors?” Podcast creators seriously need to edit themselves.
Yeah I can get behind that. There’s something to be said for a nice tight running time.
There are too many states nowadays. Please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot
Why stop at 3? There are plenty of useless states.
Cats the movie is a masterpiece of idiotic filmmaking and it’s one of my favorite movies to watch in amazement that anyone thought it was a good idea to release it
Please find a couple of OLD critics to do THOB for movies of the 70s and 80s. Movies that were Oscar buzzed at the time and even won critics awards but came up short at Oscar time. Three Women, Shoot the Moon, Citizens Band, and The Onion Field come instantly to mind. Just find two ancient film buffs and explain this podcasting thing.
The new cats was just a bit creepy. Had potential, but really missed the mark. Solid cast and on paper it looked good. But when you throw in weird looking, oversized cat people, it’s tough to take it seriously. Arborist.