The Worst Idea Of All Time - MWWC7: “You are responsible”

Episode Date: February 2, 2020

We end as we have begun. Just Tim and Guy. Minus about $400. As the boys round the end of this perilous journey (dressed in shabby rented cat costumes) they ponder the effect their daily watches have had on the box office success of CATS (2019). Some true upsets in the Jellicle stakes and Guy has damaged his eye. This was a regrettable endeavour. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So what are you looking forward to tonight, seeing the final product? Um, seeing it finished, because I finished this film at 8am yesterday morning in London after 36 hours without sleep. So this will be the first time that I show a completely finished film to an audience. So to see it finished will be like, very cool. Meow meow, meow meow, meow meow, meow. Hello and- We fucking did it! Bitch! Welcome. You thought we couldn't do it. Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. Hello. We fucking did it, bitch.

Welcome. You thought we couldn't do it. You thought we shouldn't do it, but we did it. Seven cats over seven days. To the seventh episode of Our Week with Cats, the only podcast that I know of where Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery watch cats once a day for a week. It's all over.

Red Rover, I feel free. I feel free. Today, shut up for a second. Today we wore cat suits, which you had rented from a costume hire facility. Good on you. And they were very uncomfortable and very worrying because they were a thin sort of a fabric, very stained, and they looked like they had led long lives at a lot of office parties,

Christmas dooms. Well, Tim, let me ease your mind by telling you the woman from whom I rented the costume said, and don't wash these before you return them. Do you think she's trying to collect as much jizz as possible? Is that the goal? She specifically didn't say, don't worry about washing these. It was as though it was an instruction to maintain the legacy of the catsuits.

I respect it, but it is still revolting to me that I was wearing that on my person. We drove there in the catsuits. We entered the cinema in the catsuits. We approached a woman who we have now bought tickets for cats from three times in a row who did not bat an eyelid. She strikes me as the manager. Yeah, I think so. There's an authority to that person.

She asked us if we were going to cats. We said yes. She said, do you know that you are responsible for cats still screening? We were impressed by ourselves. Yes. Apparently, because of the number of tickets and times we've seen Cats, it's skewed the numbers ever so slightly that Cats is more likely or has been more likely to be playing.

Playing at Rialto Newmarket. They've bumped other films as a result of our escapades. Or at least that's what she said we've uh we've played the numbers and i don't think we won if anything we lost we made a grave error today by not bringing a guest and it was probably the stupidest thing we've done inside of this singularly stupid format because we've seen the film six times prior and each time we bring a new guest we're able to be combination invigorated by sharing a bit of their first reactions or second reactions in the case of some of our guests and we also have to play the role of host and be energetic friendly respectful to the film and be present so that we can enjoy the film alongside our guest. But because it was just Guy and I, and that was it,

no such commitments were made, to the point where both of us had a little bit of kip inside the film. I quite simply couldn't help myself. By the way, $330, that's the amount of dollars we have spent on tickets for ourselves and our guests to see cats uh yeah sometimes you wonder how you got into quite so much debt and then and then you break down the math on this kind of stuff and it's like yep i get it okay tim i hated all of the cats today yeah there's no jellicles in the bunch not one and maybe you've slept through more than 50 of skimble shanks yeah that

is testament to what we're going through well but can you imagine my delight when i got to wake up in the throes of skimble shanks performing his signature number in the cinema cinema for today by the way a cinema that as of yet we had not been uh sat. We've had twos. We've had sevens. But I feel like my relationship, or perhaps our relationship to the cats today, speaks to the attitude of ordinary moviegoers when they see cats, which is knowing that they will in all likelihood never see the movie again. And so you allow yourself to feel the appropriate responses as they're coming up. Interesting take.

I think that's probably right. But in our case, it's a bit different because we're anticipating every single move. And that allowance just means that we fell asleep, I think. Yeah, certainly. Before I fell asleep, I was furious. Anger, anger, anger, anger, asleep. Yeah, almost. And I do attribute that anger to like,

I think some of the positivity that you might pick up echoes of earlier in this miniseries might be the sound of people who are making their peace with many more screenings of cats. Whereas now we've said our farewell farewells i have a pretty i mean it's probably not the most totally accurate response but i have a sort of a more righteous view on the cats is this analogous to when you're in a bit of a toxic work environment or a relationship for that matter and it's not until you have said out loud and started to make a plan to bounce that you allow yourself to notice all the

all the bad things that are going on the effect it's having on you absolutely it feels like that i also sent tim a message this morning because of our hard work uh there are now i think another six consecutive screenings of cats at the very same cinema and i just sent him the screen times for cats tomorrow and the next day with a question mark and tim said no i said absolutely not yeah i'm almost having a stroke as it is initially i wrote fuck you but i i backspaced it i didn't send that one because i thought that was a bit and you're right because if you'd written fuck you such as the way we communicate with one another i would have interpreted that as a soft yes. Yeah.

Understandable. That is how I talk to you on occasion. And you know what? That's no good. That's no kind of a friendship. I shouldn't be treating you like that. Hey, if I wrote to you, do you want to get breakfast? And you wrote back, fuck you.

Actually, even then I'd be like, oh, he's probably going to get breakfast. Yeah, I think so. I was going to say it's unique to just this professional if you can call it that element of our lives but i would you don't think i'd tell i'd say fuck you if you were like do you want to grab brunch you uh yeah you might but it's less likely can we talk about your eye i'm having a little bit of trouble with my right eye can you tell tell? Yeah, I can see you working some angles at the moment, trying to figure out what's going on.

So do you want to just describe what's happened? This is just since we got out of the cinema. Since we got to your house, I just noticed it when we were walking up to the studio. So if I'm looking straight ahead, on the periphery towards the bottom right corner of my field of vision in my right eye it's sort of it's not that everything's out of focus if i could compare it to something which

only you would understand him when uh buster for jones finds himself at the bottom of a garbage can yeah and jason derulo's the runtime tug is pouring champagne into his mouth and the way that they've animated it it's not just flowing down the side of his cheek. It's sort of just like... It phases in and out on his cheek. It phases in and out. I've just got this constant sort of phase. It's like a very small portion of my field of vision is being scrambled.

Do you want me to get an eye patch for you? Would that help? Turn it off for a bit? No, it's okay. You know what they do with kids is they actually put an eye patch on the good eye so the bad eye has to correct itself? I did know that i hope it's true i think that's true that sounds right because if you put a patch on the bad eye yeah you'd be you'd be pretty much shutting down an eye yeah exactly it's like well good night yeah not very good prince and speaking

of eyes because this is, I think, one of the great moments in the film. That doesn't mean anything. Saying that doesn't mean anything. Here's a sentence that is meaningless. One of the moments that a person looks most like a cat, and I boiled it down today to her eyes, is when Grizabella, Jennifer Hudson,

at the end of the song where everyone says she's the Grizabella, Glamour Cat. Grizabella the Glamour Cat. And she goes... And she sort of scrunches her eyes up in such a way that it contorts the entirety of her face to look as much like a cat as anyone in the entire movie does. And I think it's the shape of the eyes which really pushes it over the edge.

She's gone the rest of the way. She's got a great foundation. The CGI work that they've done on Jennifer Hudson's head, very cat-like. She's got a very feline face in this movie. And it's not just that, but also the movement that she makes with that swipe at the camera. It's very cat-like. the whole thing's catty from woe to go it's all cat yeah it is the most cat the i think the biggest attempt at being a true cat is from ian mckellen and it misses by a mile for me where he opens the curtain when he's at the egyptian about to perform and he's just

sneaking a peek for what on stage looks like and And as the light hits him, similar to when a cat would pull back a curtain at a window, he goes like that. There's a moment he does before that where he says, after he says, no, it's all practice, practice, practice, and nothing can go wrong. Touch wood. And then he rubs himself. Yeah. That is very cat like.

Also not. But okay. Well, hold on. Let me throw this one at you before you go on. What about in the middle of a song where he just goes, meow, meow, meow, meow? Yeah. No one else does it in the movie.

That is one of the best bits of the movie. At one point, they just cut to Zuma and Callan looking off into the distance going, meow, meow, meow, meow. Can you... I'm sorry I've railroaded what you're about to say. It's okay. But we're somewhere else now. Can you think of some great cutaways in this movie?

Because I could think of fucking heaps. Jason Derulo's look after Old Deuteronomy fails to appear despite Mr. Mistoffelees' best conjuring efforts. It is like you could hear a pin drop quiet and it is nothing but Jason Derulo like a a cat center of the frame no one else is in there and i'm just going oh yeah that's an all-time cutaway for a long time it nearly always gets a laugh too uh my second favorite but for a completely different reason is it also in the middle of rum tum tiger this is jason derillo character, and his song where we cut to Reba Wilson,

the Gumby Cat, Jenny Enidots, and she says, did he, what did she say? She said, did he get neutered? Because those high notes. Oh, but. And then she does a snip motion, and then we stay on it for upwards of six, seven hours. The reason you like that is because it's a bad cutaway.

It's so long. I don't even want to say bad, because it is so long that it stopped being unskillful film work, and now it's interesting film work. It's art. That's true. If you're bad, if you miss the mark on being good at something, you're bad. But if you push through that, you're artful. Yeah, and what you do is after the fact, you just say, that was deliberate.

That was me. That was a stylistic choice. Yeah, yeah. I'm an auteur. It is pure art. What I was saying before we started discussing the cutaways is that the other most cat-like feature is not attributable to any one person. It's the biggest triumph of the CGI.

The ears. The ears. The ears. The ears. The ears. The ears. Can we talk about the ears? Everyone was screaming from the rooftop, you've got to check out this digital fur technology. They didn't even mention once the ears.

And the ears go beyond the fur. It's the movement. They're always moving. We've got like 12 cats in the back of every shot all their ears are moving and twitching independently as a cat's would you have to imagine that they had to build those ears from scratch as well or do you imagine that they've got sort of ping pong balls on the top of a motion capture cat suit it's hard to say here's what i know they no i don't know actually i've got a weird memory that one of them was mentioning in an interview

that they did have like a camera rig that they wore on top of their head you know like a gopro facing you yeah maybe that was part of it i'd like to see some of the behind the scenes green screen footage of them in their suits i have i don't think i've seen any i need to think of all the stuff that they had to do, that they bothered to do, instead of just sitting back down in the room with the script for another week and fixing it that way. This isn't the kind of film where the script, well, could be fixed or it kind of is the issue. It kind of is the issue.

It's just the show, more or less. Although it isn't, we've sort of learned, haven't we? And everyone who says there's no plot, there actually is a plot to the film. It's not big. It's little. Can you outline it for me? It's tiny.

It's the size of a cat. There's a bunch of friends, and every year one out of this collection of friends gets a second chance at restarting their life, and the leader of the friends gets to pick who it is, so they all compete. But there's one baddie who's sort of kind of in the friend group and he keeps kidnapping the friends so they're not eligible to be selected because he wants to have that renewed life all for himself

and also there is a pretty shitty magician who's pretty horny for the new girl and then he gets her in the end by rescuing all the kidnapped people but does he get this chance at the second life no that goes to grizzabella he wouldn't want it he's gotten what he wants he's asking for it though he's fucking asking for it is he is he competing it's they blur the line yeah they really If I was a genuine entrant I don't know I don't think you have to fill out a form I think you just show up on the night That's right and that's why it's confusing

Because I think your entry is a song But everyone does a song So it's kind of like Whether or not you want to enter it Here's who we know is competing. Buster for Jones, AKA James Corden. He wants it.

Jenny, any dots, AKA Rebel Wilson is competing. They're planning on competing. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, they're at, they're in it to win it. Gus, the theater cat is in competition. Skimble shanks. Now, how do you know Gus is?

Because Gus is the first, he gets a call time. Oh, that's true. He'sbleshanks. Now, how do you know Gus is? Because Gus is the first he gets a call time. He's specifically told it's now. Judi Dench makes a point of watching and lounging as he performs. Are Gus and Skimbleshanks the only two cats who get a proper audition? Macavity

does also get a... In spite of taking the opportunity away from other cats, Macavity does get a proper audition but his song isn't even presented by him it's presented by Taylor Swift

about him but it's part of the it's part of his song like Taylor Swift is doing it in service of Macavity we've gone too deep Guy Montgomery

absolutely not we're in too deep so whose songs does that leave that are outside of the competition most of the songs

anything by Monk You Strat how do you say it is it What songs does that leave that are outside of the competition? Most of the songs. Anything by Monk Ustrat. How do you say it? Is it Monk Ustrat? Robert Downey Jr. III III. Okay. You're that guy. Robbie Fairchild. Yeah, he's outside of it.

Mungo Jerry and Rumpel Teaser are outside of it. And the other baddie whose name i have desperately tried to remember across our watches and i can't who's that taylor swift mentions at once the one in the green beret yeah yeah fuck she annoys me it's i think that's a i think that's a feller cat it's a it's a woman i think we hear their voice it's not important it's really not what is important if that isn't you know like here we were watching cats seven times none of it's important guy you can't start throwing around concepts like it's not important that's very dangerous talk i yeah i do you know to be honest i genuinely don't know that i've got anything left to say about cats i'm coming through previous

notes to see if there's anything i didn't get to Well lucky for you I found a continuity error For the first time ever What a relief This is the first time that I've found a continuity error That wasn't CGI related Because there's plenty of mistakes in the effects But this one is When

Ramtam Taga is performing He gets his coat We're going to talk about the coats after this But he throws his coat onto the ground when he jumps up at judy dench to make a real horny dancing at her thrusting his cat where's his permission to party oh it's time i want to party with your permission of course and someone takes the coat away off the floor and then it cuts to a wide and they do it again. And I was like, gotcha, motherfucker. You did.

You said that to me. $100 million can't protect you, Tom Hooper. You're overwhelmed with excitement. I think it can. Maybe not from those sorts of criticisms, but in life. So the interesting decision about the coats is twofold. about the coats is twofold number one if you're going to commit to digital fur technology your coats that you put on three main characters should be not the exact same cat fur the other thing i want to bring up is i'm pretty sure that's edris alba's actual coat like he just brought it himself

and you think that because he said it on uh one of the talk shows i can't remember oh copier copier interview how much extracurricular work research time have you spent with the cats how much has the soundtrack followed you around if not out loud internally the soundtrack has been a real um monkey on my back it's not good because it's in it's in the quiet moments isn't it and you just hear this oh i'll tell you something funny when i was looking for interviews so the original well a previous broadway production of skimble shanks on one of the like properly filmed ones when they turned it into a movie.

And the top comment was, me today, cats makes no sense whatsoever. Me tomorrow, Skimbleshanks, the railway cat. Yeah, that song, it does get what it deserves, which is a lot of praise and a lot of people saying it's a belter. I have had a similar problem with the soundtrack. I have had it.

It's been running through my head when I go to sleep, when I wake up. Not necessarily the first thing, but my first action. I think, I don't know if this happens more because of watching the musical or if I do this anyway, but I realize in my head, or sometimes quietly out loud to myself, I'll sing a soundtrack to myself when i get out of bed or when i'm just doing an activity if it's not a narration of what i'm doing like i put the eggs in the bowl and i whisk the eggs it's like you know it's just something sure and every every step and it's all

of them it's juderonomy it's jellicle it's not even the ones i like it's the rum tum And it's all of them. It's Deuteronomy. It's Jellicle. It's not even the ones I like. It's the Rum Tum Tiger. It's Jenny Any Dots. It's literally, there's no rhyme or reason to it. It's not happening based on which songs I actually enjoy and want to know. No, no, no, no.

This is devoid from enjoyment. This is like a deep psychological reaction. It's totally outside of my control. It's made me enjoy. There's a cat at our home called Fig. It's totally outside of my control. It's made me maybe enjoy. There's a cat at our home called Fig. And Fig and I get along okay, but we don't spend a lot of quality time. But I've certainly spent more time with Fig this week.

And how do you address the cat? Have you taken Dame Judi Dench's advice and take off your hat and addressed it? Oh, cat. I've said oh, cat to Fig once, but Fig was totally indifferent. So I was just like, well. Well, did you give him the saucer of milk as Dame Judi Dench said that you must? No. Do you know the thing with Fig right now? You need to give it a token of esteem, guy.

I feed Fig. I feed Fig, but I did give Fig a worming tablet because Fig definitely has worms. And Fig, the worming tablet obviously makes the food taste horrible because i crushed it up and put it in his food gotcha um and now does he think you're a tricky he did a pretty good job of eating around the powder but i mean it's certainly like it's added a certain dynamism like i i am more wary of fig and more invested i'm like what do you think about this fig and i sort of pause to give fig either time to response or i guess me to imagine what fig thinks of wow you got to let him get his costume in order maybe he needs to polish his boots off yeah doing a tap dance or something

yeah we don't know what kind of big number fig's got in store for you guys we don't know what a kutramon he requires and i do need a bit of time i see yeah i see why ts wrote these poems because i do sit there and I'm like what would you know like once you do one you can become I'm like

what would fig song be it's a fun thing to project human characteristics on non-humans and just just invent a whole actually it's fun

to project a story onto people walking around in the street absolutely I've had a real ball doing that have you got

you reckon you've got the measure of people pretty quickly it's not about that it's about just inventing a whole deep narrative about what's going on with them i couldn't care less if it was accurate would it be nice for you to go up to someone and tell them what you've just projected onto them no i think it would spoil the magic somehow it would like because it's like schrodinger's is that you say it cat yeah it's like it could be possible until i know that it isn't so i'd rather keep the mystery and the possibility that i've fucking nailed that's how i feel about using my potential don't want to exert all of it because then we know. Yeah, exactly. So instead I just quietly fritter it away little by little.

So before we go into that existential crisis, let me tell you how I felt at the start of this movie. The word is resigned. Yeah. I felt like now this is just me going to work, you know? Yeah. And it wasn't, this is the scary bit right when something that you hate doesn't um make you sad or despairing or anything anymore but you just kind of feel nothing

for it just just just nothing you okay you're staring at me pretty blankly i'm listening okay cool i'm working on my eye at the same time it's so terrifying because you weren't moving a muscle and i thought you might have just fucked out or something no no no i'm working hard over here sweet very i'm at work as well tim that's good it's very scary stuff um yeah and it's just that feeling of being in a dead-end job where you know there's no option to leave it and you're there and you're like well i can't interface with the emotions of wanting to not be here because it's not going to change the situation so i've just got to switch off any emotional machinery that i've got dealing with this movie and it felt kind of scary and

did you have the ability to do that what shut down yeah i did your emotional sleep for a bit yeah it's a pretty good indication that you've shut down successfully but a shut eye i think it's so good to show up you know fucking full of pomp and ceremony in the cat suits walking to the cinema and like all of the other cinema guys of whom they were probably 15 be like oh here's the ruckus yeah and then just watch these two cats kind of quietly sink into their seats and sort of be totally still for the entirety of it yeah um we did not we did not show up i mean we showed up but we did not show up to this watch and the movie paid us the same amount of respect the actors didn't show up to this watch there wasn't a single

um jellicle cat for me this watch do you know what my jellicle choice was out of the blue i i'm tom tugger yes yeah i had that too actually i had a moment of that and i couldn't i was like this song in a way kind of rips us yeah which tells me that we have been seeing it too much because that i know that that's not how i've within myself i know that's not how I feel about the song. I turned to Tim about 15 minutes into the movie when I was feeling physically ill because I thought the movie was actively trying to scramble my brains. And I said to Tim, it's not healthy what we're doing.

And you said, of course not, and just kept fucking dead-eyeing the screen. Yeah, it was, as I mentioned to you at a different point in the movie, a watch entirely devoid of joy this time. Cause other times we've said, I, and I actually, when you fell asleep,

I sang along a little bit. When did I fall asleep? You felt, well, it must've been leading into skimble shanks. Cause you were asleep for half of that song. Yeah. So what comes before skimble shanks?

Oh yeah. Gus. Gus. Well, yeah. Old Deuteronomy. Then I because you're asleep for half of that song yeah so what comes before skimble shanks oh yeah gus gus the theory well yeah old judo on a meeting i think you were asleep for uh i was i was 25 yeah i'd come i'd go open and closed yeah and maybe that's what's going on with your eye you're just waking up no because it's only one eye and it's still happening oh oh no oh no it's both eyes't worry. It's only one eye. I think it's better now. I mean, you really don't want to have this going on with your eyes as a rule. Yeah, yeah. If you're used to them both being ordinary, you just want to maintain the status quo. Yeah, I hear you.

Because any deviation from that, apart from a serious improvement, which is highly improbable. Imagine if that happened, though. You had no idea how good things could be. Maybe this is the start of it. You ever seen the first Spider-Mans with Tobey Maguire? Yeah. That's what he has. His vision gets a bit blurry, and then it gets real fucking good.

Is that what happens? I don't remember. I think so. Who cares about Spider-Man? No, I told you to stop introducing the concept of not caring about something in this podcast. It's a very dangerous concept. You're going to burst the bubble, okay? I'm sorry, man. I'm back

at the notepad. No, look at me. Look at me. What did Judy Dench do for you this time? Did you think she was sexy? Do you want to have sex with her? With due respect to Dame Judi Dench, I have never found her as Deuteronomy specifically to be very sexy. And today was a continuation of that feeling.

I had no desire to have sex with Dame Judi Dench or the cat she was playing. Who do you want to have sex with in the film today? The Rum Tum runtime tugger. Yeah, boy. Oh my gosh. And that's what he wants too. That is kind of what he wants. Until I offer it to him and then he doesn't want it anymore.

It doesn't mean that he'll have sex with you, but he wants you to want to have sex with him. Yeah, of course. It's kind of his one thing. He's a pretty one night cat. Yeah. Wow. I don't know where this came from. I really was

against the rum tum tugger all week and then today i was like yeah maybe it's something about the way jason derulo has approached the role of rum tum tugger i was watching videos of rum tum tugger and it was someone who i don't think was but looked and sounded very similar to tim curry and i just thought man i hope he has played the Rum Tum Tugger at some point because he would be fantastic and a lot of fun. But you feel like that about Tim Curry portraying any of the cats. That's true.

He's a fun actor. Yeah. Put him in any role. All right, let's recast cats. All right. This is happening. I want Michael Keaton to be Mr. Mistoffelees. I like that.

I'm excited for that. Yeah. Who would I like to see? I would love to see Sarah Jessica Parker as Grizabella. Oh, that's actually pretty good. Yeah. I'm not convinced she can hold a tune, and you've got to absolutely have phenomenal lungs to pull off memory.

That's part of why I want to see it. Yeah, okay, cool. Use the real voices. Very cool. I would like to see Sir Roger Moore portraying Gus, the theatre cat. Oh, no, that's Sean Connery. Is he British, Roger Moore? He is.

Yeah. Acts with his eyebrows. Think he British, Roger Moore? He is. Yeah. Acts with his eyebrows. Think he might have died. Well. 100% sure. Dig him up, put him in the film. This is a fantasy. Actually, Pierce Brosnan could do a turn in Cats.

I could see that. He could be Monkey Strap. Pierce Brosnan, as evidenced by both the Mamma Mears, also guilty of not being able to hold a tune. Oh, truly? Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's difficult. Can he move?

Is he a natural mover? He's not an unnatural mover. Do you know who's not a very good dancer? It's Taylor Swift. Oh. I don't think she's got great control of her body. And Chelsea specifically actually pointed out to me her legs. I assumed that as a pop star, one of the world's preeminent pop stars,

it would be part of the package. But I guess if you put yourself against a cast of people who's dancing as their main vocation, you know, you're not going to be revealed, but it's a higher bar to clear. Yeah, that's true. I didn't notice that. I haven't noticed that in my seven watches Over the last week Of Taylor Swift

And Cats What's her character called? I've got no idea I don't even have a clue I've heard it said before Is it said in the film? Or just in peripheral It's said in the film

Okay I'd like to see Brinley Stent As Jenny Anydots. Okay. To punish her. All right. What about someone famous, though?

As Jenny Anydots? Yeah. As opposed to Brinley Stent? Yeah. Someone that people outside of the studio in America listening maybe might know. Or in Iceland. Bjork. Bjork should be Jenny Enidarts.

Continue your march towards... Do you know who's going to direct it? Salma Hayek. Werner Herzog. Oh, fuck. Yes, bro. And he's also in it. As?

He's invented a character. I like that. Yeah, he's sort of this voice of god narrator because you know how they reference a couple of times in the songs that there is some sort of cat god that's and it's now being told from his perspective he is this feline eternal energy in the sky looking down with bemusement at his worshipippers a kind of cold indifference toward their plights he doesn't care about the

Heaviside Lair, he made it one afternoon and forgot about it but it's treated as this paradise, this sanctuary for the cats that they're all scrambling over each other to try and get to he's like Dr. Manhattan the struggles of these mortals means nothing to. He's like Dr. Manhattan. The struggles of these mortals means

nothing to him. It's like organized religion. What is? The Heaviside Lair. Yeah. The whole thing's a cult slash organized religion. It is. By the way, Taylor Swift's cat, Bombalurina. Oh yeah, true. It is never said in the film, by the way.

Not once. For Munkerst strap yeah i would love to see man i'm really having trouble conjuring the names of actors in my head do you know who they are can you describe them the actor i'm thinking of no no i'm like literally just scrambling for an actor i mean i thought matthew broderick just because it'll be a bit of fun to have them working together yeah i've always thought he's got a terrible voice. I want to see Nathan Lane. I desperately want to see Nathan Lane in this film, and I would like to see him be Mungo Jerry.

Okay, I'd like to see Richard Kind as Buster for Jones. Who's Richard Kind? He's on Spin City. He's in Kirby Enthusiasm. You'd recognize his face. He's a very revered character actor, largely comedy actor. I'm going to get a picture up for you right now so you can look at him. Who is he in Spin City?

He's this guy. This isn't helpful for people listening to a podcast guy. I think most people know who Richard Kind is and you're the exception. Oh, okay. Sweet as. And they've used the same amount of time to research who he is. Do you recognize that guy? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I can hear his very distinct voice as soon as you showed me his face. Yeah. He'd be good. Macavity, Gilbert Gottfried. Oh, yeah. No. Yes. He's got to be someone else.

No. He's Macavity. I cast it. He's Macavity. Can you imagine? Okay, he's Macavity. Macavity! Can you imagine?

Okay, he's Macavity. Macavity! And Bumblerina is Bobcat Goldthwait in like a real tight-fitting dress. It's just this powerhouse voices. What's his voice like? Bobcat Goldthwait. Yeah. You don't remember that?

No. Man, these references are really not going to be hitting for the listeners. Do you have any desire to ever watch this movie again after this is all wrapped up? I thought I would. I'd talk to friends about doing it as an extracurricular activity with them. Yeah. What, funnily enough, happens if you wind up watching Cats a lot of times

is people want to watch Cats with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't understand why. We've become a little beacon in our friend group of people who especially haven't seen the film yet who try to jump on yeah a vehicle through whom people can watch cats but much like moths heading towards a flame that they're attracted to without quite knowing why you will be burned if you join us in this eternal hellfire because the movie is not good and we knew that at the

start and we forgot it in the middle and now we know it is true again yeah it's not good i uh i feel like i could see the movie this time you know yeah it was like what you were saying right at the start i i really i could see what the reviewers were talking about i could see what the first time viewers were because me going in at the first time i was bringing a lot of what's the opposite of baggage helium balloons time, I was bringing a lot of, what's the opposite of baggage? Helium balloons? A lot of buoyancy. A lot of excitement about how, you know,

crazy and big and bad this was. Can you even remember what you said about the movie then? In the first watch? Absolutely not. No. I think I was excited to see it. And I was pleasantly, I think from memory,

I was not let down by the fact that it was every bad as bad as I thought it was going to be. Could you, if this is too challenging, that's okay, but could you rate your seven screenings of cats for me from best to worst? Best! Best to worst. First watch, second best, third watch, third best, fourth watch, then second, then fifth, then sixth, then today. Okay.

How about you? Best, third watch, second best, second watch, third best, first watch, fourth best, fourth watch, and then five, six, seven. Got worse. So from four it all goes sequential yeah really like the fucking ass fell out man i i felt invincible for a time doing this i know i was like i cats cannot defeat me i can consume as much cats as anyone in the world get you know i was playing the music at home. I was putting on performances. We were listening to it to and from the cinema. And now I feel like a shell of that person.

I am afraid for the aftershock or after effects of having done this. I know that it will not take much at all. I'm very vulnerable right now, but it will continue for the rest of my life, presumably, that any of these songs cropping up have the risk of derailing an entire day's internal thought. I can't remember if we brought this up on the podcast or not, but I got pretty blitzed the other night because I went to Flying Lotus and then some other stuff. And I messaged you at about 1.30am when I was in a dive bar and I said words to the effect of the good thing about us watching cats so many times is now that forever inside of our friendship we can put the cat soundtrack on

you know and I didn't articulate it beautifully but what that means is we now have this bullet in the chamber that if ever we're going through some rough times, shit is hitting the fan. If one of us just chucks on Skimbleshanks, the railway cat, I mean, that's going to cut through a lot of the grime, right? You know what? That is totally true. I'm glad that you articulated it because when I got the message, I was like, Tim's having a good night.

But, yeah, it's nice knowing that we have that for ourselves and each other. We've never used the SpongeBob musical, even though that was a magical evening. The relationship's different. That was pure joy. Yeah, that was incredible. This involved some element of challenge. Well, I think it was nothing but. So, Guy, let me ask you this as we wander our way to the end of this very tiring uh lethargic episode in terms of the experiences that we've put ourselves through in the name of this podcast

we watch grown-ups two weekly and then we wanted to up the stakes so we watched sex in the city one twice weekly oh yeah yeah and now we've experienced a film daily there's real bad films done at different durations do you think if we had have committed ourselves to watch cats once a day for a month we could have pulled it off and do you think we'd feel differently today or do you think at some point we would have thrown the towel in if we were doing more we'd feel differently today if we if we knew we were watching more cats i think we would have thrown the towel in if we were doing more we'd feel differently today if we if we knew we were watching more cats i think we would have had an altogether more positive experience today i truly believe that uh do i think we could keep going it is prohibitively expensive and

uh an immense time suck and really makes just the ordinary living of a day incredibly challenging. But I still think we probably could have pressed on a month is a long time. I think a week is the right amount of time yeah even then I think it might have been long yeah but it's not you want to make it a no do a work week there's a there is a the immediacy of knowing it's done in a week made it a little bit easier I think than like stretching something out over a year it's like doing all of the work at once instead of being like oh I've got to get back to this you know like just staring down something work at once instead of being like oh i've got to get back to this you know like just staring down something that you're afraid of and finishing the job so you

can go to sleep knowing that when you wake up in the morning it's a new day and you've you've cleaned your slate yeah uh what do you think yeah i quite agree i agree with everything you just said and it sounds like a cop out because it is but, but it's also true. Would you rather watch Cats every day for another week starting tomorrow at home or Sex and the City for a week at the cinema starting tomorrow? Not accounting for the inconvenience of getting to and from. So we're just going to scrub the inconvenience factor. Sex in the City 1 or 2?

1. Because this will swing it. Sex in the City 1. Yeah. But if it was Sex in the City 2, I'd say Cats. Yeah. Okay.

How about you? I think I'd take Cats, but I don't know if this is a legal reason. For legacy reasons. Yeah. Okay. All right, look. I thought about today,

after you told me that we were not going to watch Cats anymore, I entertained the idea, and it's just not going to happen now, it's off the table, but of going to Cats by myself. Yeah, I could tell. I could tell that's where your head was at. I knew you were, and it's just not going to happen now. It's off the table, but of going to Cats by myself. Yeah, I could tell. I could tell that's where your head was at. I knew you were thinking about it.

You may yet do it. You've got the equipment now. You've taught yourself how to do it. It wouldn't surprise me if you took yourself off to the cinema tomorrow afternoon without telling me, and then at some point in my email, a file turned up that said, Guy Montgomery Cats Episode 8.mp3 and then i had to fang that up on somewhere and i'd be worried about you and i'd be worried about the contribution you're making to the cinema's box office success

oh that's the other thing it's all fun and games until you extend the run of Cats in New Zealand. What have we learned? I don't know. We learned that Cats is a confusing musical and that's okay. But some things

shouldn't be movies. Jellicle choice? Nah. Well, the mice again. Fair enough. Tim, there's no fucking way in hell you're a Jellicle cat I'm sure as hell not either

Do you have a Jellicle choice? Yeah, it was the Rum Tum Tugger You're standing by that? The Rum Tum Tugger is a fuckable cat I can't believe you've done this This is how you're ending the whole series So that is what your prints are all over now Your indelible mark has been left.

You'll vote cast for the Rum Tum Tugger. Best song, Skimble Shanks. Today's Jellicle choice, the Rum Tum Tugger. You heard it here first, folks. That has been our week with cats. I hope you've enjoyed it a thousand times more than we've enjoyed bringing it to you. It has been a delight experiencing this with guests.

It's cool to hang out, I guess, Guy. Why do we keep doing this? Huge thank you to our long-suffering partners, the staff at Rialto Newmarket, and Tom Hooper for creating something that is... bad? BED?