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When the first trailer for Tom Hooper’s film adaptation of the Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Cats” dropped in July, I screamed – partially in shock that the thing even existed, partially in terror at the digitally altered cat-human creatures that were on my screen.

And then I watched the trailer three more times.

And then I went on YouTube and watched probably a hundred different versions of performers singing “Memory” (my personal favorite being Mamie Parris in the most recent Broadway revival).

And then I sent a message to a friend: “we’re seeing cats opening weekend right???”

Oh boy, did I see “Cats.”

It was a fever dream of an experience and I loved absolutely every second of it and it was not a good movie but also as I walked out of the theater I thought… wasn’t it a good movie?

This could have been a legitimately good adaptation – Francesca Hayward is a beautiful dancer, and the vocals and choreography were surprisingly strong across the board (although the camerawork gets in the way of some of the numbers). Had everyone simply been in a costume instead of cloaked in “digital fur technology,” it could have been a strong movie musical. As is, the delineation between fur and real human hands and feet is….unsettling and distracting at best.

But isn’t becoming a weird, wild cult film somehow better? At the very least, “Cats” wasn’t forgettable. I’m looking forward to going to a midnight sing-along screening of this not-good-but-actually-very-good movie one day.

Anyway, I can’t stop thinking about “Cats” and I was deeply confused by “Cats” so this is a list of questions I had as I watched “Cats.” These are not related to the plot, as the plot already makes no sense, and you do not need to worry about understanding the plot:

  • Why did the cat Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson) UNZIP HER FUR AND REVEAL A SPARKLY DANCE OUTFIT? (This actually does happen in the stage version and somehow it’s less horrifying?)
  • Why did the dancing cockroaches have shoes?
  • Who told Jason Derulo to scream “MIIIIIIILK” at the sky?
  • How were Rebel Wilson and James Corden clearly allowed to improvise bad cat jokes that made it into the movie and how are those bad jokes worse than the digital fur technology?
  • Two of the cats can do magic apparently?
  • Oh NO why do so many of the cats look like they’re gonna make out?
  • Why is everything in this movie so erotically charged????
  • Is that the new song Taylor Swift wrote for this movie? You can tell because it sounds like….a real song with a real rhyme scheme.
  • Why did Ian Mckellen make me want to cry?
  • Skimbleshanks (Steven McRae), the railway cat, actually has a VERY good song but it’s a tap number set on train tracks and now ALL of the cats have tap shoes and they do NOT look like they’re actually standing on anything because the rendering is strange and kind of unfinished?
  • Why is Macavity (Idris Elba) naked all of a sudden?????
  • How is the sound mixing on “Memory” so bad? (the line “All alone with the memory” in the climax is completely swallowed up by the orchestration.)
  • Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson) is in a chandelier in a hot air balloon and she floats away to die and be reborn or go to heaven I think???
  • Why does Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) address the audience by speaking directly into the camera at the end!!!? (and then she directly states that “cats are not dogs!” I yelled in the theater when this happened!)
  • Also you can see Judi Dench’s real human hands and actual wedding ring? (At least until the “fixed” version starts playing in theaters.)
  • Did the family of seven wearing cat ears and Christmas sweaters in the row in front of me have a nice time?
  • How did Tom Hooper decide this would be a good idea?
  • Why are people trying to apply logic to “Cats” instead of surrendering themselves to this vaguely horrifying, confusing and wild spectacle that somehow got made?
  • Why do I want to see “Cats” at least three more times?

I’d like to direct you to a 1994 L.A. Times quote from Hal Prince, director of the musical’s original 1981 run on the West End: “Andrew [Lloyd Webber], I don’t understand. Is this about English politics? (Are) those cats Queen Victoria, Gladstone and Disraeli?’ He looked at me like I’d lost my mind, and after the longest pause said, ‘Hal, this is just about cats.’”

It’s just about cats. It’s based on a book of poetry that was also just about cats that T.S. Eliot published in 1939. The cats sing songs introducing themselves and each other, one of them sings “Memory,” which is the one song you know, and she gets chosen to die, and then it ends.

You should see it before it leaves theaters.