Last night I sat and watched Tom Hooper‘s Cats (Universal, 12.20), but I paid as little attention as possible. I figured that was the wisest policy. Just sit there and tough it out and take what comes, and then tap out whatever comes to mind.

I knew Hooper’s film would have no story (as the musical play never had one) and I still haven’t the first clue what “Jellicle” means. It refers to a kind of cat fraternity or community of some kind, I realize, but it’s so bizarre listening to the cast sing “Jellicle” over and over and over.

Cutting to the chase, I just wanted to watch this calamity without feeling bored. Alas, that’s exactly what I was grappling with for 110 minutes. In-and-out, off-and-on feelings of boredom. But there were portions or more precisely slivers in which I wasn’t bored but half-diverted, mildly amused, placated, vaguely touched, etc.

Set in the Trafalgar Square region of London, Cats is never more than a fanciful and story-less medley of tunes and dance moves, performed by some CG-augmented feline impersonators, but — I’m slightly diverting from the scornful mob here — it’s not altogether awful. Some of it is okay. It’s mostly lame, yes, and probably not worth the price of admission, okay, but I didn’t completely hate it. It didn’t make me furious, and that means something.

I’m sensing that fans of Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s show (and remember that it opened in London nearly 40 years ago) may drag their kids or attend as families or whatever.

Then again the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate is now 15% and the Metacritic is 32%. Industry pally: “The biggest critical pile-on since Gigli?”

It really boils down to “how do you like this cat or that one?” Or “to what degree do you find the CG cat makeup alluring or fetching, and to what extent were you charmed and pleased by the various tunes and performances and whatnot?” That’s all you can talk about.

Example #1: “Oh, I found James Corden‘s obese cat more amusing than Rebel Wilson‘s.” Example #2: “Did they have to make their performances entirely about their beach-ball bods?”

My favorite cats were Francesca Hayward‘s Victoria (the pretty lead character) and Ian McKellen‘s Gus the Theatre Cat. True, Hayward doesn’t get you emotionally (she wears the exact same faintly amazed, obliquely smiling expression throughout the film) but she’s lithe and quick and pleasant to hang with. McKellen does get you emotionally, and I was feeling momentarily grateful that he was cast, at least. (If not given the greatest role.)

I was also down with Judi Dench‘s Old Deuteronomy as far as it went.

This morning a filmmaker who gambles wrote that he saw Uncut Gems last night, and that Adam Sandler‘s sports betting is inaccurate. “I just am shocked that Kevin Garnett would be in the film and that somehow the NBA allowed their footage to be used in the film,” he said. I asked him to concisely explain what’s wrong. Here’s his reply:

“The last bet Sandler makes is a three-way parlay. That means he makes three different bets, but they all have to happen for him to win. The good news is that if you win a three-way parlay you get paid six times your bet.

“However, in this particular parlay Sandler makes a ‘proposition’ bet. That means he is betting on the individual performance of a player (Garnett). The problem is that betters are never allowed to have proposition bets in the mix of a parlay.

“Casinos do not just smilingly give you over one million bucks, just like that. There is a long process that almost never includes cash. And there are tax forms and such to fill out.

“Finally, there is almost no such thing as a bookie who takes bets these days. Everything is online (outside of casinos). And the days of sending goons to beat people up is also anachronistic. This would have made more sense if the film was set in the mid 80s.”

Agreements or disputes from other gamblers?

SPHE’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood 4K Ultra HD/Bluray Collector’s Edition arrived a couple of days ago.

It’s pricey ($75) and over-sized, as the below comparison shows. Doesn’t fit on the shelf like the others do, but there’s the audacity. I’d previously leafed through the Mad magazine “Bounty Law” parody, but it’s cool to own it. I love the 45 vinyl record with the yellow plastic turntable adapter. And I love the additional 7 scenes. Thanks to the Sony promo gang.

Sidenote: I’ve seen OUATIH in theatres two or three times, I’ve streamed it on HD and now I’m watching the 4K version, and dp Robert Richardson chose to shoot with a strangely subdued screen-door or mosquito-net visual effect. And I”m sorry but my eyes are annoyed by this. Richardson never allows you to look at the images without this odd scrim in the way. It’s less evident in open-sunshine scenes (Pitt fixing the TV aerial on the roof) but it keeps returning.

All through the arduous debate over whether or not President Trump deserves impeachment, Republicans have stood by a fundamentally revolting position or viewpoint, which is that the Constitutional provision for impeachment means nothing, that there is no rule of law, that we all live in a realm of haphazard moral chaos and that all U.S. Presidents have pulled slippery shenanigans so what’s the big deal?

This country is nothing without the rule of law, and only a sociopath would argue that standards for Presidential impeachment haven’t been satisfied by the facts uncovered and testified to about the Trump-Zelensky-Giuliani-Ukraine mishegoss. The President of the United States is a liar, a criminal, a would-be Mussolini, an instinctual bullshitter, a bloviater in a china shop and a flatulent animal governed only by arrogant self-interest and jungle-boogie instinct. The Ukraine thing became an impeachment issue because he got caught. It is what it is.

Updated on 12.18, 9:15 am: There have been seven Star Wars films since The Empire Strikes Back, which opened on 5.21.80. For 39 years I’ve been hoping for another that would be as good. None of them have made the grade, and that includes Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which I saw yesterday afternoon.

I was talking with a critic friend a few hours later, and he said something I more or less agreed with. He said “it’s okay.” That’s a fair way of putting it. And not a put-down.

I didn’t mind the classic fan-friendly stuff (echoes and replays of A New Hope, Empire and Return of the Jedi). There’s a whole lot of this in the second half, but the first half…yeesh. Director J.J. Abrams pushes the action along in such a crazy-ass, pell-mell, Mexican jumping bean way I had a headache within minutes.

Then again Rise is a somewhat better film than Abrams’ The Force Awakens. Or the last 45 to 50 minutes are, at least.

But that first hour is rough. “I don’t think I can take this,” I was muttering to myself. “If it doesn’t slow down I might have to…I don’t know, hit the lobby, walk around, check my phone messages.” But I manned up and toughed it out.

The Rise of Skywalker finally slowed down and became more or less coherent around…oh, the 75-minute mark, somewhere around there.

I took some notes after it ended and sent them to a friend. I won’t spoil anything important, I promise.

“There was a 50something fanboy sitting behind me going ‘aahwwww’ when anything the least bit endearing happened. Or “hah-HAH!” or “whoo-whoo!” when anything the least bit exciting happened.  He wouldn’t stop. It was all I could do to keep myself from turning around and giving him my death-ray look.

“J.J. levitated the [redacted] out of the water and used the exact same John Williams music…great!

“And he re-did the Return of the Jedi finale on the forest planet of Endor with love, joy, hugs and great relief. And he included a lesbian couple kissing and hugging. (A real quickie.) But he also brought back [redacted]!  I thought I’d seen the last of those guys. 

“And I loved returning to a certain desert-like planet…

“I still don’t get why Kylo Ren has to wear a face-shield helmet. Darth Vader did so because his face was disfigured; Ren has a huge schnozz but otherwise has nothing to mitigate.

“Who’s the overweight bearded guy who plays one of the rebel pilots?” It turns out he’s Greg Grunberg.

“Emperor Palpatine was thrown into a black void by Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi. Does anybody ever stay dead in these films? Back in the early ’80s dead Star Wars characters (such as Obi Wan Kenobi) would return as ghostly see-through figures with ice-blue lines around their edges. This happens again in The Rise of Skywalker but that’s all I can say.

HE to NYC journos (some at early afternoon Cats screening, two who’ve already seen it): “What’s the likely aggregate numerical opinion of Cats going to be? Straight from the shoulder….most people are likely to give it a 9, an 8.5, a 7, a 6…what?”

Journo #1 “I’ll say 45% on Rotten Tomatoes unless expectations going in are lower than expected.”

Journo #2: “Saw it last night. It won’t be a high number.”

Journo #3: “I’m here at 1 pm screening where they have real people ‘recruited ny marketing firms.’ And when I asked a prominent independent publicist, she said “I saw it last night…it’s the play.”

Journo #1: “I’m here too. Not sure why they need seat-fillers who probably will tweet about the movie while we can’t.”

Journo #4: “I guess you are all at Cats? Very good performances, but it’s an odd show. It was odd on Broadway. There is no plot, which is why Japanese audiences flock to it. They loved the music and the costumes. There is a slight plot line which makes no sense. Jennifer Hudson is amazing. Judi Dench is lovely. RT 75%.”

Journo #5: “I have a long-standing record of never having seen Cats. I don’t intend to break that now.”

Based on the bees-in-the-brain reactions to last night’s premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (or at least the first half of it), the word is that J.J. Abrams hasn’t so much dumbed it down as fanned it down — i.e., “course-corrected” some of Rian Johnson’s Last Jedi inclinations in order to appease old-school loyalists.

“I think approaching any creative process with [making fandoms happy] would be a mistake that would lead to probably the exact opposite result,” Johnson said in 12.13 Radio.com interview. “What I’m aiming for every time I sit down in a theater is to have the experience [I had] with The Empire Strikes Back.

“I want to be shocked, I want to be surprised, I want to be thrown off-guard, I want to have things recontextualized…I want to be challenged as a fan when I sit down in the theater.”

Yesterday’s announcements of short lists weren’t exactly earthshaking. We all know Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite will win the Best International Feature Oscar…right? And that the Best Doc Oscar will go to either Apollo 11 or American Factory. I’m not feeling the suspense element. Is anyone?

It’s pleasing that six HE faves — Ladj Ly‘s Les Misérables, Pedro Almodóvar‘s Pain and Glory, Mati Dop‘s Atlantics, Kantemir Balagov‘s Beanpole, Jan Komasa‘s Corpus Christi and Václav Marhoul‘s The Painted Bird — were short-listed. Ditto doc faves The Edge of Democracy, One Child Nation, The Biggest Little Farm, The Cave, The Great Hack and especially Knock Down the House.

Continuing HE heartbreak: Once again A.J. Eaton and Cameron Crowe‘s David Crosby: Remember My Name, easily among the strongest and most penetrating docs of the year, has been completely blown off.

The reason for this is that mid-July dustup between Crosby and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, which ended with Feinberg throwing up his hands and Crosby walking out.

Yesterday’s USA Today presidential poll dropped me into a terrible pit of despair. The Beast, it said, is running ahead of all Democratic contenders. Trump is bettering “Typewriter” Joe Biden by 3 percentage points, Bernie Sanders by 5, Sen. Elizabeth Warren by 8, Mayor Pete by 10 and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg by 9.

This country has never been led by anyone as remotely horrific and diseased as Trump, and yet a majority of Average Joes prefer him to any or all of the Dems? Thoughtless swine. Reprehensible cattle. Diseased scum. Disciples of fascism.

This plus BoJo’s decisive trouncing of Jeremy Corbyn has me scared shitless. British Joe Bumblefucks couldn’t stand Corbyn, and our domestic variety can’t abide immigrant-embracing, big-government progressives and their general submission to the p.c. twitter narrative.

Better a strong sociopathic gangster with all his myriad corruptions and dedication to increasing the pace of climate change, they seem to be saying, than allowing the country to be overrun by immigrants, minorities and LGBTQs and operating on a general principle that white, under-educated, working-class people are bad news.

This is a living, gasping, bleeding nightmare. How can this be happening? The only thing Trump hasn’t done to defy decency and the general principle of lawful behavior is shoot someone in broad daylight in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and the bumblefucks are still with him. We’re living in a facsimile of Hitler’s Germany.

If anyone has a link to the new Black list scripts with a suggestion or two about which ones I absolutely must read, please pass along. I know nothing but I’d like to at least move beyond that a bit. Favorite title: A Magical Place Called Glendale by Sara Monge.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, 12.17) is a double-header on Hollywood Boulevard — J.J. Abrams‘ Stars Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Disney, 12.20) at the El Capitan at 2 pm, followed by a 7 pm screening of Tom Hooper‘s Cats (Universal 12.20). Cats runs 110 minutes; at 142 minutes, The Rise of Skywalker is over a half-hour longer. Both films will open on Thursday evening.

There’s also a Trump impeachment rally at 5:30 pm across from City Hall.

I don’t know when this was taken (roughly the early to mid ’50s) but the idea of paying $1.50 for a place to crash in midtown Manhattan is mind-boggling. The rooms were almost certainly shitholes but still.

East Coast critic (i.e., not HE): “I find it funny to see the entire media world tie itself into yoga knots pretending that Little Women is a good movie. Sasha is right about it — as storytelling it’s a mess, eager but muddled, and as a result it lacks cumulative power. The overpraise is ludicrous and sexist — it’s the empress’s new clothes.”

West Coast critic (ditto): “He’s right. Men are taken seriously and thus are given a decent and respectful critique. Women? People are ‘nice’ to them, forgiving and thus aren’t taking them seriously. Meet the new patriarchy, same as the old patriarchy. It’s a way of keeping women in a box or a gilded cage, so as not to be any kind of real threat. It’s infuriating. Women can never be taken seriously if they aren’t treated as equals.”