It’s just not the cat’s meow

On screen Cats proves strange, monotonous and furry.

Although Cats became one of the longest running shows in Broadway history, I have to confess that the popular Andrew Lloyd Webber production remains unknown to me.

I understand that Memory, perhaps the musical’s best song, has attained stand-alone status. And for a show to have run that long, it must have struck a chord with those who shelled out to see it.

Now, Cats arrives on screen with a large cast of human actors who have been subjected to a digital process that coats them in fur and gives them tails that can sway as languidly as laundry in a gentle breeze.

I’m sure it’s not true, but something about the way the cats move made me think that the whole production had been filmed in slow motion.

So let me get to the point. Without a frame of reference — i.e., other performances of Cats —- I didn’t quite know what to make of director Tom Hooper’s big-screen version, aside from telling you that once I got past the movie’s major gimmick — singers, dancers and actors covered in fur — I was mostly indifferent.

I do know that Cats derives from a T.S. Eliot poetry collection entitled Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. It seems odd to me that Eliot, author of The Wasteland, would refer to himself as Old Possum, but I don’t believe Wikipedia would lie.

The movie’s high point: Jennifer Hudson’s version of Memory broke through the stuporous spell under which I had fallen. She practically cried the song. Spoiler alert: Hudson plays a cat who is selected to begin a new life that’s better than the one she has been living. She ascends into some sort of cat heaven — or something like that.

I could have lived for another 100 years and not regretted having missed Ian McKellen delivering a monologue as Gus, the Theater Cat. McKellen, of course, nails it, but seeing McKellen in mangy looking cat fur tended to diminish the scale of the theatrical accomplishment — at least fo me.

But the greatest cat transformation award goes to Judi Dench, who plays a character called Old Deuteronomy — or, for short, Old Deut, perhaps the worst nickname ever imagined by anyone for anyone.

With luxurious skeins of fur draping across her shoulders, Old Deut looks like a woman who hasn’t gotten the message. Fur is out, baby. Somehow, though, Dench projects an air of regal authority and dignity, proving that it’s impossible to make Dench look ridiculous no matter how hard one tries.

Other cast members include Idris Elba, Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson and James Corden. Elba plays the bad cat who believes he should be selected to ascend into cat heaven. I mention them for want of anything much else to report.

All this takes place in a society of Jellicle Cats. We meet the Jellicles when Victoria (Francesca Hayward), a kitten, is tossed from a car, lands in their company, and provides the movie with its beginning.

Hooper, who directed the screen version of Les Miserables, photographs the dancers stretching and preening with such great care, I wondered if each movement contained secrets that I was being invited to unpack. If so, I missed them.

Evidently, lack of plot is a Lloyd Webber signature. Maybe that’s why Cats doesn’t so much progress as it presents a musical number here, introduces a new character there or wanders about its set.

I suppose all the cat slinking and rubbing is meant to be sexy, but it also seems a bit kinky, like a Halloween party in which everyone wore similar costumes and, late in the evening, started thinking about behaving badly.

So, in conclusion, I say to Old Deut, you have not convinced me. I remain resistant to conversion. I am now and forever, a dog person. Hiss if you will, but to you I say, arf or maybe arf and one half.

Spike Lee issues call to disarm

A showy Chi-Raq breaks genre boundaries. Some of it even works.

Say this about director Spike Lee: At 58, the man's no less risk averse than when he was a much younger filmmaker.

Lee bravely models his new movie, Chi-Raq, on Lysistrata, a comedy by Aristophanes that dates back to 411 BCE, not exactly a period known for its hip-hop atmosphere.

Aristophanes' central conceit involved the efforts of Lysistrata to persuade women to stop having sex with their husbands and lovers as a way of forcing them to bring peace to a society enmeshed in the Peloponnesian War, a conflict that lasted for about 27 years.

Lee, who wrote the screenplay with Kevin Willmott, finds his Lysistrata (a dynamic Teyonah Parris) conspiring to withhold sex from Chicago gangbangers who are contributing to the horrifically high rate of homicide among young black men.

Using a splashy graphic (a map of the U.S. composed of drawings of rifles and revolvers), Lee opens the movie to Nick Cannon's Pray 4 My City, a harsh but hopeful rap anthem.

Chi-Raq, of course, is the name given to Chicago's mean streets, not the city of great architecture, abundant culture and commercial bustle, but the city where gun violence reigns and even the youngest children aren't excluded.

Lee effectively makes this divided-city point by contrasting images of stately downtown Chicago with neighborhood scenes that focus on a far less affluent kind of life.

Lee reduces the Greek chorus to a one-man show put on by Dolmedes, a dapper and sometimes sarcastic Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson's Dolmedes puts the story in perspective.

That perspective includes information presented early on about how fatalities from Chicago's murders outnumber American lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. The story, we'll learn, will be focused on Englewood, one of the city's more dangerous neighborhoods.

What unfolds is a movie of desperate parts, some successful, some less so. Part agitprop, part melodrama, part broad comedy, and part soulful lament, Chi-Raq exists in its own world. You'll either enter that world or turn away.

But if you stay, you'll see a movie that, in addition to everything else, offers a vigorous display of female power, particularly as expressed by Parris, who comes closer than anyone else to dominating Lee's large ensemble cast.

Lee employs many talented actors in what often feels like a wild, theatrical experiment. In addition to offering the opening song, Nick Cannon plays the leader of a gang called the Spartans. As if to absorb all the city's misery, pain and fury, Cannon's character has taken the name Chi-Raq.

Wesley Snipes appears as Cyclops, the orange-clad, one-eyed leader of the Trojans, a rival gang.

Jennifer Hudson plays Irene, the mother of a daughter gunned down by a stray bullet; Angela Bassett plays Miss Helen, a woman who surrounds herself with books and serves as the movie's voice of sanity.

In an unexpected turn, John Cusack turns up as a priest modeled on real-life Rev. Michael Pfleger, an activist who works out of Chicago's St. Sabina Church.

In a lengthy sermon, Cusack rips through a monologue that excoriates the society from whose soil Chicago's violence grows, as well as the community that must rise up to put a stop to it. It's an impressive piece of work that sometimes sounds like a hortatory condensation of Michelle Alexander's important book, The New Jim Crow.

Not all of the bits work and some are ridiculously conceived, notably a scene in which a general wearing Confederate flag underwear (David Patrick Kelly) mounts a Civil War cannon as he lusts after Lysistrata at a National Guard armory. Lee's at his funniest when he nails character, not when he tries to create comic situations.

It's difficult to imagine that Chi-Raq -- the first production from Amazon Studios -- will shatter any box office records. It can be too didactic for its own good, and it's possible that a straightforward story about the impact of gang violence might have been more powerful than Lee's ultra-stylized shout-out of a movie.

But Lee and Willmott, who wrote the satiric C.S.A.: the Confederate States of America, have gone their own way in arguing that the U.S. needs to wake up and do something about violence that is ravaging places that -- more than ever -- need a sense of community.

And at a time when we're again despairing over another mass shooting, this one in San Bernardino, Ca., there's definite value in shining light on Chicago's overlooked carnage

Whether anyone heeds Lee's call to disarm remains to be seen.

A hearty helping of Stooges' humor

The Farrelly brothers manage a fine imitation of The Three Stooges, but the movie never quite comes alive.

The Farrelly brothers (Bobby and Peter) evidently are big fans of The Three Stooges, the hapless trio of idiots who -- in various incarnations -- had a long and storied film career as ... well ... a hapless trio of idiots.

Following the episodic form of the Stooges' films, the Farrellys serve up The Three Stooges, three short films separated by title cards but connected by a plot that calls for the Stooges to raise $185,000 to save an orphanage. (The first of these shorts is titled More Orphan Than Not, which should give you some idea about the level of humor.)

Maybe so much effort went into giving the movie an authentic Stooge-like feeling that The Three Stooges feels locked in a world of its own. An impression -- no matter how good -- is not the real thing. Watching The Three Stooges can be a bit like looking at something that has been traced rather than drawn from scratch.

The Stooges are played by actors who are largely unknown, probably a smart decision. Chris Diamantopoulos portrays Moe; Will Sasso appears as Larry; and Sean Hayes does his rendition of Curly. Each of these actors seems especially well cast, and the three of them do a commendable job of reproducing the terrible puns and brutal slapstick that defined so much of the Stooges' humor.

Perhaps to make the movie somewhat relevant to younger audiences, the Farrellys set the action in the present, including a joke about an iPhone and a strained bit about reality TV, notably Jersey Shore. The film, of course, is in color as opposed to the customary Stooges' black-and-white.

A wisp of a story calls for the Stooges to be hired to do some dirty work for a sexy woman (Sofia Vergara) who wants to assassinate her wimpy husband (Kirby Heybourne) and run off with her lover (Craig Bierko).

For the Farrellys, who specialize in gross-outs and raunchy humor, The Three Stooges seems a pretty tame outing. You won't find much by way of the trademark Farrelly humor, aside from a scene in which the Stooges stumble into a hospital nursery where they duel with urinating newborns.

Most of the movie is dominated by the Stooges, who receive some assistance from Jane Lynch (as mother superior of the orphanage where the Stooges grow up); Larry David (as the mean Sister Mary-Mengele) and Jennifer Hudson (as Sister Rosemary). Why Larry David wanted to appear in this movie is beyond me, unless it was to prove that even a nun's habit couldn't disguise the foul disposition with which he's become associated.

You can watch a lot of original Stooges' routines on You Tube, but older audiences -- where most diehard Stooges' fans presumably can be found -- may get a kick out of what amounts to a very good imitation. I'm not at all sure that younger audiences will take to the Stooges' cartoonish humor, which (not surprisingly for the Farrellys) ultimately takes a sentimental turn, appropriate, I suppose, for a valentine to The Stooges that doesn't so much tell their story as replicate their shtick.

A confession: I watched the Stooges on TV as a kid during the '50s and '60s. A guy named Joe Bolton, who dressed as a cop, introduced Stooges'films on a New York-based show called The Three Stooges Funhouse. I never found The Stooges as funny as some of the other kids -- and still don't. Sorry, Officer Joe.