The Cat In The Hat Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)November 24th, 2003
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I really did not like The Grinch
It hurt just like a painful pinch
I would not watch it full of drugs
I'd sooner eat a billion slugs
Some things should be left as books
Not made, half-assed, by H'wood crooks
I like the spy with rotten teeth
But this looks vapid, like Yasmine Bleeth
I really hope it doesn't blow
It's still my job to frigging go.
The good news is that Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat isn't nearly as aggravating as Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Hat is almost a full half-hour shorter than The Grinch, which is certainly a step in the right direction for a film based on a book containing just over 200 words. The Seussified logos identifying the guilty parties involved (Universal, DreamWorks and Imagine) are pretty neat. And Hat doesn't feature Ron Howard as a director.
Those are the positives, and I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel just to find those few. Everything else, from the shameless self-promotion (of the film's soundtrack CD and amusement park ride) to the jarring cameos (Clint Howard and the suddenly omnipresent Paris Hilton...without the bored look of sex in her eye this time) are awful enough for theatres to be mandated into distributing barf bags at the door. Think Smashmouth ruined the opening to Shrek? Wait until you hear them cover the Beatles in Hat.
Here's the story with the story: Kelly Preston (What a Girl Wants) plays an Anville single mom-slash-real estate agent with two kids: The anal-retentive, super-motivated, PDA-toting Sally (Dakota Fanning, Uptown Girls), and Conrad (Spencer Breslin, The Santa Clause 2), who can't stay out of trouble to save his life. Mom has a big meet-and-greet dinner for work planned later that night and begs the kids not to mess up the house before ditching them with a narcoleptic babysitter (Amy Hill, Big Fat Liar) and splitting for the office.
The kids are menaced by two different forces. One is shady neighbor Quinn (Alec Baldwin, Pearl Harbor), who has been trying both to get into Mom's pants and send the unruly Conrad to military school (this thread is pointless and seems to be present only to pad Hat's running time). The other is, of course, the titular Cat (Mike Myers, Goldmember), who shows up, makes a huge mess of things, and gets it all cleaned up seconds before Mom comes home. At first, the kids think The Cat is a hoot, but then their nagging goldfish, who sounds a lot like Mom's germaphobe boss (Sean Hayes, Pieces of April), eventually drives the idea of severe punishment through their thick, precocious heads.
Now let's talk about The Cat. Myers endows him with the delivery of a flamboyant Borscht Belt comedian, which, combined with the matted fur and white makeup, makes him look like a shirtless Robin Williams trying to do a dual impersonation of Paul Lynde and Grandpa Al Lewis from The Munsters. I liked Hat a lot more when he wasn't on the screen, and that's a really bad thing. What is it about Gene Wilder's performance in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that remains perfect and timeless, while today's comic "giants" like Myers and Jim Carrey embarrass themselves trying to take characters that clearly should be left as two-dimensional drawings and making them one-dimensional?
As for the look of Hat, it's almost like Ted Turner hoarked his colorized vomit all over an entire cookie-cutter village (and he probably has, somewhere). This isn't the way Anville is portrayed in the book, and worse yet, it's already been done to perfection in Edward Scissorhands. Not so coincidentally, Hat is the directorial debut of Bo Welch, a former production designer who worked for Tim Burton on - tah-dah! - Edward Scissorhands. It's impossible to tell where the production design (by Minority Report's Alex McDowell) and cinematography (by Sleepy Hollow's Emmanuel Lubezki) end and the non-stop CGI starts, so it's difficult to praise them for their efforts. I will say this: Anville looks way more real than Whoville, even though it may, in fact, have been much less real.
The biggest blame stick should be shaken at (after being used to brain producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer) the writing crew. There are three of them credited, and they have a grand total of zero films under their cumulative belt. Two have written jokes for the Oscars, and the other for Saturday Night Live. Not so surprisingly, their work ranks among the worst of the year.
1:20 - PG for mild crude humor and some double entendres
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