5 Things We Learned from the New CATS Trailer

by Chris Feil

After meow-ny long and empty weeks, we were finally treated to another trailer for Tom Hooper's Andrew Lloyd Webber's T.S. Eliot's CATS. And you might say that it was a little bit of a disappointment after the first look sent the internet into a giant flame of gleeful schadenfreude (or maybe we're all still waking up from the release of its catnap-inducing original song candidate "Beautiful Ghosts"). This quick tease featured no singing and was a bit too fast-paced to glimpse any of the dancing. But the final trailer did give us a few bits of new information to be both earnestly and ironically excited about:

1. It's apparently the "Most Joyous Event of the Holiday Season". Like the previous "You Will Believe" tagline, this also sounds like a threat.
2. LOTS more dialogue than expected highly suggests that the film will try to lean into some semblance of a plot or overexplain its "new life" conceit.
3. The cats have boobs and love to shake them.
4. The trippiest element may be the proportions of the cats to their environment. See: kitty door flap, trash cans, shoe sizes, entire miniature ice cream parlor, etc.
5. Idris Elba might be the slithering, villainous, sexy (?) MVP.

Did you notice anything new that made you more (or less) excited for Cats next month?

"Garden Left Behind" Trailer

Check out the trailer for the indie trans drama The Garden Left Behind. This directorial debut from the Brazilian filmmaker Flavio Alves been wracking up numerous best of fest awards at film festivals this past year -- we told you about it once before -- so check it out when it arrives in theaters in early 2020. We basically demand just that in text form in the trailer. 

Doc Corner: 'The Kingmaker' and 'On the President's Orders'

By Glenn Dunks

Disingenuousness is a disaster for a documentary. I recently watched two documentaries about St*ve B*annon and while it’s obvious he is a despicable human and despite whatever I may have felt about the movies themselves, one thing you can never call that man is disingenuous. He truly believes every that he says.

The same cannot be said for former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, who is the narrative thrust and central subject of The Kingmaker. Something of a natural progression for director Lauren Greenfield’s whose earlier films The Queen of Versailles and Generation Wealth have each dealt with the lives of people with too much time and money. Marcos is foregrounded for the documentary’s first half and listening to her seemingly endless self-aggrandising about beauty, love, and this idea she holds so dear of being a mother to the Filipino people is – to be perfectly honest – a complete bore.

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Soundtracking: Yentl

by Chris Feil

Some might reduce it to simple star vehicle, but Yentl does something quite uncommon within the musical genre: through song, it places us in the mind and isolation of exclusively one character. All of the songs belong to Barbra Streisand’s protagonist Yentl, locked in the chamber of her mind, until it triumphantly breaks out in her reality. It might seem criminal to have the likes of her costar Mandy Patinkin going songless despite being at his Evita and Sunday in the Park with George-era peak, and maybe more condescending viewers would chalk this up to ego on the part of Streisand. But the effect gives us something that quietly defies musical convention, turning song into metaphor and providing richer payoff to the character arc. It’s only a musical inside the head of our heroine, a way of reflecting the strictures that limit her voice.

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Review: Charlie's Angels (2019)

Box office and reviews have been tough on the new Angels. I guess today the contrarian corner is a theme here at TFE. Tony likes it! - editor.

by Tony Ruggio

We'll start with where I'm coming from: I’m no fan of the original series. The early-Aughts adaptations were mostly forgettable save a dance or two from Cameron Diaz and Sam Rockwell. But these 2019 Angels are surprisingly fresh and fun. It’s an IP brought back from irrelevant hell and updated with verve.

About the three new Angels. Elizabeth Banks is clearly in love with Kristen Stewart, and who can blame her? Stewart is a charisma machine as the weird, spunkiest Angel of the bunch. She's so good you almost wish she took movie star roles more often. You also forget there was once a time when she got gruff for playing mopey all the time. Those days are long gone...

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