'CATS'......AND WE'RE TALKIN' THE ORIGINAL UNCORRECTED VERSION!

Cats (2019)     Just in time for Christmas, Universal Studios is gifting America with a present as enticing as your Aunt Mildred's 10 day old green bean casserole.........

                Prepare yourself, world, for the new, improved edition of the studio's already much maligned box-office trainwreck......."Cats".......

                 The curse of modern technology makes this previously unheard of feat possible......with theaters now projecting digital downloads of films, Universal can pump a re-edited "Cats" through their server or send out a hard drive to the smaller theaters......

                   The goal here is to fix the creepy, ghoulish CGI involved in transforming the actors into felines, which touched off a critical and social media avalanche of withering ridicule......as if the wretched CGI was what was keeping the theaters empty.......

                    Well, not completely empty.

                    BQ and family took it in this past weekend, making us among the few who can claim they laid eyes on the first version of "Cats"......

                     We'll not belabor or repeat the vitriol that 800 critics and bloggers have already heaped on this poor film. Simply put......the crummy CGI is the very least of the movie's many, many problems.

                     Its primary ailment is its director, Tom Hooper, who lacks imagination and real fundamental filmmaking skills. Turning the movie over to him murdered the project in its crib........if nothing else, this overrated culture-vulture hack insured the movie would end up as unwatchable as his last disastrous attempt at a  musical, "Les Miserables"

                     In over-accentuating every single moment, Hooper dialed up the bizarre quotient of the material, making the movie look like some awful extended dream sequence........directed a by ham-handed dolt who never supervised a dream sequence in his life.

                    The problem here........he succeeded in making the movie look grotesque and crazy......but not crazy enough. If the studio was so bound and determined to turn "Cats" into a film, they desperately needed an over-the-top director equal to the fantasy.

                    We couldn't help wishing they'd found a director like the late Ken Russell, the madman visionary who took the world by storm with his composer biographies like "The Music Lovers" and film versions of "Tommy" and "The Boy Friend".......

                    Ah, Ken, you were born too early.......we can only imagine the delirious, lunatic movie you might have fashioned out of "Cats".......we're guessing you'd find a way to amp up the Grand Opera theatricality of the show in a way audiences would embrace.....and not shake their heads in disbelief,....(as in the Hooper-ized version.)

                    So let Universal download as many versions of this film as they want........we don't think it would change our initial reaction to it one bit.......the same reaction Marlon Brando's Col.Kurtz has at the end of "Apocalypse Now".......'the horror.......the horror'.......

                   As long as they're doing this........they could improve the film greatly by digitally removing the snot dribbling out of Jennifer Hudson's nose while she warbles "Memories"......and maybe have Dame Judi Dench snarl "Put 'em up!  Put 'em up!" since she so resembles Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion from "The Wizard Of Oz".......

                     Nothing, we're sorry to say, will change BQ's rating......Zero stars (0).......Sorry, Universal......no hard felines, okay?

                      Happy Holidays to one and all.......as always, thanks for stopping in......we're off to family stuff, see you in a couple of days. Have a merry merry one!