The reviews of "The Cat in the Hat" are in, and they ain't good. The 900-lb gorilla of movie reviewers, Roger Ebert, gives it two stars and also had this to say:
It's been said you should never marry anyone you wouldn't want to take a three-day bus trip with. I have another insight: Never make a movie about a character you can't stand.
Okay, how about the New York Times?
I am tempted to say that this Cat should be tied up in a sack and drowned, but I wouldn't want to condone cruelty to animals, even metaphorically.
Ouch. Maybe the Miami Herald has something good to offer?
"Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat" is such a witless, unimaginative endeavor that it's tempting to cast its inadequacies as a reflection of the end of civilization.
That's cold, Obi-Wan.
Don't let any of this fool you, though. None of the negative reviews are likely to make a damn bit of difference in "The Cat in the Hat's" ultimate box office. Like the execrable "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," it stands to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars from parents who'd probably buy tickets to a seven-hour Teletubbies retrospective at Epcot if it meant their kids would sit down for one. Damn. Minute.
Still, it's nice to see a movie that's been so nauseatingly hyped in print media and TV commercials for the past month get so universally and unapologetically slagged. The lack of ambiguity in the reviews I've read mean I probably won't be duped into seeing it myself, a lesson I should have learned from "The Grinch" (shameless plug). And if any of you find yourself falling victim to temptation, this piece by Michael Atkinson of The Village Voice should cure you:
[...]"The Cat in the Hat" comes scarily close to being the most unendurable Hollywood creation of the last dozen years. Of course, the Seuss original was a compact treatise on prepubescent id run amok and the attending dread of parental wrath, but snake-oil-selling producer Brian Grazer hyper-extends it into a Gogurt splooge of competing plot motivations, the ugliest design work since, well, "The Grinch," and a free-associating Mike Myers done up as a kind of Dr. Moreau bastard spawn of Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion and Charles Nelson Reilly. The jokes, even the shit-dick-puke-balls bits aimed at titillating teens, are mortifyingly witless; the Things (1 and 2) look like face-lift-stretched actress heads on children's bodies; the story aches with preachifying (and distinctly un-Seussian) sanctimony.
You could read the film's two lonely moments of self-knowledge—when the Cat explicitly plugs Universal Studios' theme park and the film's own soundtrack—as salient irony, but amid this vomit they seem simply desperate. Thanks to Grazer's evil-genius demographic scheme, "The Cat in the Hat" isn't fit for preteens, and it isn't digestible to adults. Teens, it needn't be said, should have better things—drugs, humping, "Matrix" sequels—with which to squander their weekends.
Dude. My sword is yours.
Ugh. My wife wants to see this movie. And she'll likely want me to go with her.
My biggest gripe with the show thus far is that it seems to have been made for the primary purpose of endorsing consumer products.
Yep, that hat makes me think of Kirk's face purpling with rage as he shouts, "SHAAAAAAAANE!!!!", and it echoes through space....
Revenge is a dish best served with grits.
I never went to see The Grinch, but I've pretty much seen the entire movie in bits and pieces at family gatherings. Truth be told, it's a bad movie, but I've enjoyed select moments. But it isn't really The Grinch, now is it? The message was changed.
Similarly, I won't go see Cat In The Hat, but I'm sure I'll end up seeing it in randomized 5 minute increments over the next several years as it plays in the background on Holidays. I expect to chuckle at Myers a few times, but it won't really be The Cat In The Hat.
Personally, I'm dreading the inevitable movie of The Lorax that is no doubt in pre-production right now. I thought the cartoon was preachy (not wrong, just preachy) when I was a kid, so I can only imagine what it will be now that we're all so much more enlightened.
I once wrote a very angry Dwarf Druid for a D&D campaign that didn't get off the ground. He had a real name, but secretly, he was "The Lore-Axe"! When he spoke for the trees, people bled.
That would make a cool movie. Somebody call Project Greenlight for me...
And it was #1 for the week, and probably will be until the next celluloid abomination, "The Haunted Mansion."
Pete...promise us you won't become one of "those" parents.
Strange. When I first read the post title, I thought it would somehow be about this:
http://pbatey.tripod.com/william14.jpg