Happy Birthday to Shu Qi's Cat

Shu Qi just held a fifth birthday party for her cat, MayMay. Sang to him and everything. Your favs could never. 

Still shook about "Cats" becoming a movie

by Nathaniel R

Betty Buckley in her Tony-winning role as "Grizabella, the glamour cat"By now you've heard the comic news (oh no wait, they're serious!) that "Cats" is being turned into a movie. The news took me so off guard that I was silent for five days. Cats got my tongue. (I'm sorry). The Andrew Lloyd Webber megahit from the 1980s was based on T.S. Elliott poems and as such it has no real story to speak of. It's basically a very successful song cycle (albeit with only one famous song "Memory") elevated by utter nonrealism in the form of humans pretending to be cats in campy makeup, tights, and acrobatic dancing. It's so hard to imagine as a movie that they made the potential of the making of one into a running joke in the play turned movie Six Degrees of Separation (1993). 

Grizabella the glamour cat is the marquee role but, in fact, it's a "featured" role since it's truly an ensemble show...

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Q&A: Actors Who Should Be More Famous, Broadway Crossovers, and Animal Horror

Hello everyone!

Nathaniel, eternally cat-sittingWe haven't done a Q & A in so long so let's jump right in. In order to actually do these more often I'll answer just five or six questions at once. Hopefully this will stir up more focused comment parties, too!

PAR: Julianne Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Annette Bening enter the thunderdome. Only one leaves. Who? - par

A: LOL! I hope you aren't being cruel and just making me sacrifice two of my all time favorites at the altar of, well, my Pfavorite. But if we're talking about cage matches in post-apocalypse desert landscapes my answer is The Bening. Moore would break down into crying jags in no time, becoming too vulnerable. Pfeiffer would seem like easy prey put up a very spirited and scary pfight but you know that The Bening is all wile and steel and surprise maneuvers. How else did she conquer Hollywood and Warren Beatty and continue to become even more incredible as an actress the older she got despite being brilliant right out of the gate?

STEVE G: What film out of Cannes 2018, that wasn't previously on your radar, are you most excited to see?

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1970: The Aristocats

Our year of the month is 1970. Here's Tim Brayton...

From the standpoint of 1970, we find ourselves at the dawn of what is almost certainly the least-interesting decade in the history of American animation. Television screens were then dominated by the flat, cheap nonsense of Hanna-Barbera while Warner Bros. and MGM had abandoned their short film programs. Just about the only person trying to do anything with the medium was Ralph Bakshi, whose vulgar cartoons for adults were very often "fascinating," but almost never "good." The problem, in all likelihood, is that for 40 years, American animation had been primarily a matter of people reacting to the things Walt Disney had done; and in 1970, Walt Disney had been dead for four years.

This left his namesake studio in a state of full panic and confusion, looking to find any sort of project that felt like it might be "what Walt would have done." The first of these, released for Christmas, was The Aristocats, based on the last story (by Tom McGowan & Tom Rowe) that Walt had briefly glanced at and given his vague blessing to before his death...

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"Orangey"

by Nathaniel R

This week I accidently learned that Breakfast in Tiffany's famous "Cat"  was also "Butch the Cat" who terrorized the title character in The Incredible Shrinking Man. The brilliant feline actor, who went by "Orangey," also cozied up to Eartha Kitt's Catwoman in the Batman TV series!

What stories that ginger tabby could have told if he deigned to speak our language.