Cats is a fascinating movie because it's both so bad it's good and just plain bad at the same time.

There's generally a pretty clear-cut line between funny and unfunny bad, between, if I may use the official critical French vocabulary, the "nanar" and the "navet". It's an interesting movie for how much it muddles it.

Like, I feel like the most essential criteria to the Bad Movie experience is that there's a sort of sympathy towards the film, even though it's hilariously bad. There's a sort of acknowledgement of the humanity going on in the film process.

The Room is awful, and also really misogynistic trash, but there's a weird fascination for the figure of Tommy Wiseau, enduring enough that he's getting biopics now. There's a sort of beauty in the weirdness, which bad movie conoisseurs like to enjoy.

Cats, on the other hand ... I can't help but feeling like, when you laugh at it, you laugh AT it. Laughing at the ridiculous egos of Hollywood producers, at the cynicism and incompetence on display, at the straightwashing, at the stars getting kinda humiliated.

It still has the haughtiness of a good bad movie, that dead serious conviction of being High Art, but the kind of laughing it provokes is ... a lot more less kind and empathetic, and a lot more bitter and cynical.

Like, you see Tommy Wiseau, or Matt Hannon, or James Nguyen, on the bad movie nights circuit all the time. There's a weird sense of community there - whereas Tom Hooper ain't never gonna show up at one of those.

It might become a cult classic, but it'll be out of spite. It'll be people voluntarily queering and subverting the movie to make an aesthetic and political statement - not the innate qualities of the movie propulsing it to alternative stardom.

Which makes it unique.

And y'know. Uniquely bad.