Kitty Litter
If you’re hankering for a movie about an awkward yet lovable outsider who wanders into a pastel mock-up of Middle America and cajoles the straights to get saucy, you’re in luck. It’s called Edward Scissorhands, and it’s been available on video for years. Renting it will keep you from having to endure Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, which is, in essence, Edward with a queasy mean streak. There’s such a remarkable rift between the charming source material and this heinous cinematic realization that the producers may as well have skipped the hassle of securing licensing rights and simply called this mess Mike Myers: Asshole in Fur.
Now for some sloppy pop-culture film theory. Without stealing liberally from ingenious illustrator Edward Gorey, celebrated “visionary” director Tim Burton would be schlepping coffee for Michael Eisner. Burton — like most of Hollywood — simply keeps telling the story of the misunderstood freak over and over again. But at least his movies are whimsical, visually appealing and clearly made with love. Imagine a Tim Burton movie without Tim Burton, however — all mayhem, no mystique — and you have either the strangely successful Shrek (which also featured Myers as a gaseous ass) or this train wreck called The Cat in the Hat.
There are people around the world who work hard in manufacturing, health care, retail, public service, transportation, you name it. They need colorful, inventive movies so that their kids can watch something besides their parents fighting. This matters. And this is why Cat is so patently offensive. Yes, it’s digitally zany, but this attempted marketing coup is also poisonously self-congratulatory (a plug for the Universal theme park?) and disturbingly cruel (domestic violence). Fans of Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel really needn’t bother: His famous book is barely here at all.
Former Burton set designer Bo Welch makes his feature directorial debut with this Cat shit, and the somewhat surreal design (by Alex McDowell of Minority Report) is almost the only element one can recommend. The elegance of the book — and even the “revisionism” of the Allan Sherman-narrated cartoon version — are utterly blitzkrieged. On the way to a litter box bursting with disposable pop-culture clumps, we get Myers as the “6-foot-tall talking feline” (nice try; Myers is 5-foot-7) who appears rather arbitrarily in the home of hyper little Conrad (Spencer Breslin) and his prissy sister, Sally (Dakota Fanning). Their single mother (Kelly Preston) is a real estate grunt enslaved by a schmucky, germophobe boss (Sean Hayes, also voicing the viciously abused animated Fish). Their home must look picture-perfect for a company party later in the day — something that proves rather challenging once the Cat shows up for a day of “spiritually educational” destruction.
This project had loads of potential, even before previous Cat choice Tim Allen jumped ship. The writing here is unpardonably rotten (scatological, joyless), yet erstwhile Seinfeld hacks Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer made the most with their rewrite of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which actually worked. But credit Jim Carrey for that success; he knows that really impressive comedy has anger and near-madness behind it, not the cutesy, “look at me” crap that’s Myers’ stock-in-trade. Between getting whacked in his supposedly snipped cat balls (an unfunny incident that prompts surprising use of the Commodores’ “I’m Easy”) and beating the hell out of the narcoleptic baby-sitter (Amy Hill), you can see Myers struggling to ride out the shitstorm. And you can see him failing.
