Respect star Jennifer Hudson brave enough to admit that she likes Cats unironically
The much-mocked musical Cats has become a cult favorite, but Jennifer Hudson thinks it’s “misunderstood”
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The lifecycle of a cat as portrayed in the film Cats is hard to pin down. They’re born, they live in trash, and after a talent show/orgy, one is selected to take a spaceship to something called the “Heaviside Layer.” The lifecycle of the movie Cats was even stranger. Released to overwhelmingly negative reviews in December 2019, the film was one of the first in recent memories to get a software update after producers realized that some of the effects weren’t complete. Within weeks of the patch, the film, though still largely disliked, became a cult favorite, with rowdy screenings of feline fans openly screaming at and mocking the movie Rocky Horror-style. There was also allegedly a “butthole” cut, but that’s a story for another day.
However, there is one person brave enough to admit that they liked Cats unironically: the film’s star Jennifer Hudson. Speaking to Total Film, the Respect star reassured the dozen or so sincere Cats fans that the film was “misunderstood.”
“It’s unfortunate that it was misunderstood,” Hudson said in an attempt to get viewers to understand what the hell a “jellicle” is better.
“I think later down the line, people will see it differently, But it is something I am still very proud of and grateful to have been a part of. Yeah, I got to be Grizabella the Glamour Cat!”
One thing that Hudson is on the money about: she definitely played Grizabella the Glamour Cat. In the movie, she sang the showstopper “Memory.” Writing for The A.V. Club Ignatiy Vishnevetsky said of the number, “[Director Tom Hooper] directs ‘Memory’ more or less the same way he directed ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ in Les Misérables: handheld close-ups, lots of snot.”
Regardless of what we think of the movie (this writer kind of loves it), Hudson should be proud of her work in it. She certainly belts the hell out of “Memory” in one of the strangest circumstances possible of an actor. Not to mention, there are plenty of forgettable movies, and Hudson’s been in quite a few of them. But no one’s going to forget about Cats anytime soon.
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What did she say about what “jellicle” meant? Wikipedia says it’s originally from an unpublished T.S. Eliot poem “Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats,” which were corruptions of “poor little dogs” and “dear little cats.” Quite droll, I say.
Jellicle is just their slang for angelical. They believe because they are jellicle cats, they can ascend to something greater than they are currently and strive to reach this.
It’s actually short for evangelical. Grizabella is their Jesus.
I can see this, but I like my shrooms translation better.
Eliot was mocking a bunch of snooty people he knew who, each and every time, preceded their cat’s name with “dear little.” Though you’d think that would be “dellicle.”
Jelly icicles.
She’s right and she should say it. Cats (2019) is delightfully unhinged in the big swings it takes. I know I’m gonna be in the minority here, but I love me an interesting, ambitious failure. Even if it lacks the fine polish of even a lower-tier Marvel offering, it’s *trying* something, and I love it for that.
Not sure if I agree but your appreciation is contagious. There’s a great deal to be learned from watching movies that are considered ‘failures’.
Was it not the Jedi master Yoda who famously said, “The greatest teacher, Cats (2019) is”?
I can enjoy massive train wrecks frequently, but sometimes it’s just not even funny or grand enough for it to be enjoyable. Cats would be that. The other one that comes to mind immediately is Queen of the Damned like it’s just bad bad with no redeeming qualities.
I saw Cats at the Winter Garden in the early 90s, and it was a weird, wonderful, fun time. I loved it. I have appreciation for the actual musical. The movie version was essentially the same musical, but it mostly just wasn’t very well done. But keep in mind that I’m a person who has seen all the Sharknado movies, and I even enjoyed a couple of them!
Yep. Wilson and Cordon both sucked, and there are places where Webber obviously doesn’t get Eliot’s sense of rhythmic language (which were a problem with the play anyways), but all up it was a lot of fun. I wanted something that was a mixture of stupid and endearing, and that’s exactly what I got.
Wilson and Corden acted like they were above the source material, even though they were in fact two people hired to perform in Cats (2019)
For whatever reason, it bugs the hell out of me when actors mock the movies they’ve starred in, even when those movies are actually terrible. So, good for you Jennifer Hudson. But, also, I’m pretty sure the Cats movie sucked.
Personally, I loved it. I was on shrooms, but I loved it. As I understood it, it’s an exploration of human spirituality/religion, but through the lens of cat behaviors. Which… I was raised going to church every Sunday (Presbyterian) and even though I am not now religious, I do still find religion and how people contend with things beyond their understanding interesting. And also I love cats. So it was right up my alley.
Shrooms and LSD put a delightful spin on tons of things. I legit worked through some complicated feelings about my dad while tripping and watching Road to Perdition (which was one of those LSD ideas that made no sense at the time until it made ALL THE SENSE IN THE WORLD).
I feel like a lot of the world’s problems could be fixed with acid. I’m a lot more familiar with it than shrooms. Cats remains the only time I’ve tried them.
That’s hilarious. You know, usually I tend to be more in the “if somebody enjoys something, who am I to say they’re wrong?” camp, but in this case… honey. Please. This movie is not misunderstood. This movie is actually pretty well understood, in that it is 110% trainwreck.Even from the most charitable of angles it is just one WTF moment (not the good kind) after another. Jennifer. Babe. You’re in denial. You cannot do this to yourself. You deserve better. You deserve to be in much, much better movies and you deserve to be able to face the truth.This movie was inexplicably made by someone who has not otherwise given us any reason to think that he hates movies (although I haven’t been a fan of any of his), but then went ahead and made this. Go figure.And I for one am grateful this giant dumpster fire exists, because it reminded me of everything I love about movies, by fucking up in every way imaginable and then some. Quite an achievement!
Cats is an off putting movie from the jump. Everything is just…wrong…to look at. I felt mildly queasy throughout.His version of Les Mis is probably the best filmed version and it’s still pretty bad
The best filmed, but, like Cats, definitely not the best recorded. There are some great shots in it, but a lot of the singing sounds simply horrendous.I feel like Hooper lacks a certain holistic vision, especially when it comes to the musical side of things.Lots of very fine actors in Les Miz, a lot of them not great singers/musical performers. Cats of course is all over the place in that regard. But even the great ones can’t compete against the bad music production and sound mixing.
Yeah, my hackles went up a little at “misunderstood”. I’ve had people tell me I “just didn’t understand” a shit movie that I don’t like. Uh huh. That’s not why. And now you’ve insulted me.But, she then goes on to nail it, with “I got to sing Mem’ry!”. So, yeah, what’s not to understand about her view that “People who hate it just don’t understand it as the movie where I got to sing Grizabella the Glamor Cat!” So, pretty on-the-nose, in its way. I’d probably feel the exact same way.
But even so, you’d think she’d be displeased with how badly engineered and mixed her performance was. Ah well.This movie is just about as close to “objectively bad” as a mainstream movie can get. If she doesn’t want to see that, her mind must most certainly be made up.
Jennifer Hudson’s problem is that she won an Oscar for a performance where she kills every song but recites every line in a blank sing-song. I think her perception of her own abilities is skewed. I think she was certain she was gonna get another nomination for this.
There’s genuinely a lot of fun stuff in the movie (mostly the music and sets), and Jennifer Hudson sang the heck out of “Memory”, but I cannot fathom why the director would use the takes of snot pouring out of her nose in extreme close up.
“They’re gonna look like if Snapchat filters came to life and had an extreme thirst for blood.”
Pitch Meetings are fantastic. I wish that Ryan would do more non-fantasy/sci-fi meetings though.
Jennifer, we didn’t misunderstand, Hooper did. Remember how the point of Memory is that you are desperate just to be touched by other cats because you got kicked out? But then Hooper has you TURN DOWN TOUCH during the song?? You sang great, but….
When are they dropping the “Butthole Cut?”
Prolapsing the butthole cut?
“It’s unfortunate that it was misunderstood,” Hudson said… “I think later down the line, people will see it differently.Yeah, that’s not gonna happen, Jennifer. The problem here isn’t that audiences misunderstood Cats the movie. It’s that Tom Hooper misunderstood Cats AND he doesn’t know how to shoot a musical (hint: You do not record the vocals first and orchestrate after). Here’s the thing: I don’t care for Cats the musical. At all. That being said, it often gets slammed for being largely nonsensical and about nothing. That’s not entirely wrong and the plot is thin, but there are also some things going on in the stage version that have a bit more complexity that viewers may see and absorb without knowing it. There is a structure and there are emotional beats, there are themes (however simple) that develop. Hooper destroys that structure and those themes in a way that basically makes it very clear that he does not understand the musical at the most basic level. He omits Jemima, who introduces a lot of the sympathy for Grizabella and who has several of the musical’s key emotional beats. He foregrounds Victoria without giving the audience an understanding of why she’s a protagonist, and that leads to confusion between the focus on her or on Grizabella. Victoria does not work as a surrogate for the audience. And, like in many of the songs in Hooper’s Les Mis, his direction of vocal performances consistently misses out on the thematic and tonal elements that make a song important and impactful. This (lengthy) YouTube video explains it in more detail than I can: If you watched Cats the movie and something seemed “off” about the sound and the orchestration, you’re not wrong. It’s fucked up. When you shoot the actors singing first, that sort of terminally fucks with the orchestra, who have to try to tailor their tempo and performance to suit the idiosyncratic performance of the actors, whom Hooper gave free reign to just fuck the tempo. Hooper thinks this is “real” and “organic,” when what it really is is a hot mess. The actors abandon any semblance of tempo, so what is the orchestra supposed to do? That’s literally how they navigate the music, and the vocalists are supposed to work within those constraints. But they don’t in Cats (or Les Mis). The result is an orchestration that never quite feels settled, that always feel like it’s half a beat behind the vocals because the orchestra is literally trying to respond in real time to that vocal performance. It DOES. NOT. WORK.That said, Jennifer Hudson is a lovely actress and she sings Memory beautifully. But Cats the movie is not misunderstood. It is bad. And it’s not bad because of digital fur or the uncanny valley or the myriad problems of scale (one can leave this movie and truly wonder if they’ve lost all sense of how big a cat is). It’s bad because of how Hooper built and shot the music. That’s its fatal flaw.
This entire “misunderstood” defense is nonsense when you have people who are familiar (and are fans) of the musical tearing into it.Less has (surprisingly) been written about Hooper “degaying” the stage production – compare the 1998 version of Mr. Mistoffelees with the movie for reference.
Cats(2019) is one of the most baffling movies ever made and i love it