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I went, so that you don’t have to.

I went, so that you don’t have to.

Last updated on: December 28, 2019 at 3:27 pm by Dan Peterson

I went, so that you don’t have to. 2019-12-28T15:27:04-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Gustave Doré, 1857 illustration for the “Inferno” of Dante Alighieri. Dante and Virgil stand at the Gate of Hell, on which is inscribed “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Both of them are genuine, passionate cinéastes, and one of their passions is bad movies. So they had been trying for days to persuade me to go with them to see Cats.

I wasn’t interested. I like funny-bad movies as well as the next guy. Probably more so. But movies that are simply bad? Not so much.

I said No. They persisted.

Finally, as a compromise, they suggested a really late showing last night of the latest installment in the Star Wars franchise. I reasoned that I would have to see it sometime, so why not?

The first clue that something was not quite right was my wife’s sudden bowing out. She claimed that she didn’t feel well.

Once we were in the car and on the road, I realized that we were, in fact, headed to a showing of Cats. Among other things, they were hoping to be able to buy Cats t-shirts.

At first, it seemed that fate was on my side. A fog descended upon the driver’s mind, and he drove us to the wrong theater. Cats had already been showing for more than thirty minutes, and they didn’t want to miss one exquisite moment of this new cinematic landmark. So they decided not to go in.

By the time we got to the right theater, nearly half an hour of the film there would have been shown. So that wasn’t really an option.

I uttered a few expressions of gratitude for tender mercies and, since it was already quite late, resigned myself to my loss of an opportunity to participate in film history.

But alas, there was yet another theater screening Cats within about ten minutes’ drive. If we hurried, we could still make it.

Beneficent forces intervened yet again, causing us to miss a major turn. Even the driver himself began to wonder whether the effort was Worth It.

Still, though, we arrived in time.

The difficulty was choosing a seat. It was a rather large theater, and three seats were already claimed. There were, perhaps, only 297 empty seats remaining. It was an embarras des richesses. How could one choose? (In the end, two more people came in. After the lights were down, probably hoping to conceal their identities.)

My expectations were so rock bottom low, so Marianas Trench low, that I was actually pleasantly surprised by the film. For example, there were perhaps three minutes, halfway into it, that were okay. And, maybe two thirds of the way into it, the dim outlines of a plot began to appear and some parts of the film began to make at least rudimentary sense. Moreover, the CGI cat-bodies weren’t quite as repulsive as I had expected them to be. Further, I actually liked Francesca Hayward. Her dancing was remarkable.

There’ve already been a host of devastating reviews — see this one, for example, from my hometown paper, and these selected quotations (brought to my attention by John Gee) — and they’ve already made effective use of such metaphors as litter boxes and various senses of the word dog. So I won’t try to top them.

You don’t need to contemplate my suffering. Don’t worry about the loss of 109 precious minutes of my ever-dwindling life. Just shed a brief tear for me and make a memorial donation to Interpreter.

Posted from Richmond, Virginia

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December 27, 2019

"He Knows My Affliction"

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December 28, 2019 Seeing America with Amtrak

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