Milo

Apparently the review embargo for the film lifts on February 12th, 10pm PST / 2am EST....two days before the film's wide release. Needless to say, that's cutting it a bit there. The studio seemed pretty proud of the new design's reception enough that I thought they would had let reviews come out earlier, especially with the marketing campaign in full force. Guess not though.

Starting the new year with some stuff actually related to Sonic. A few selections of some level gimmicks I came up with for a conceptual airport-themed Sonic level (Adversary Airline Zone)l. I may return to this with some more ideas. A Rose Gone Rogue "You're not getting any of these files until you give me my jewels!" Based on this Sonic Adventure 2 game mod by Speeps Highway that's been making the rounds on Twitter over the previous week. I liked the concept enough to jump on the trend.

I saw the movie earlier today. ...oof. That was kinda mostly bad. And not in the so-bad-its-good/fun-to-watch-bad I was hoping for when the (more) vitriolic reviews come out, it's just mostly-weird-and-kinda-uncomfortable bad. It looked like had the chance to go the former route because the first-third is honestly kinda surreal with some of the performances (although that's marred by some really painful cat puns and attempts at slapstick with certain characters), but that melts away into a kinda fun second-third, and a final third that has one actually good performance but comes full circle into a bizarre fourth wall-break packaged into a final song that was hard to sit through. The CG/appearances of the cats I was mostly able to tolerate (although I think my screening was the original, I'm pretty sure I saw plenty of hands that were missing fur textures in the cut that I saw), the bigger culprit was that this crew literally tried to film a stage play (a near-ceaseless string of assorted songs without much, if any, of an underlying story) as is and projected that on the movie screen. There are some attempts at some sort of arc (Victoria/the new cat wanting to belong) and conflict (Macavity wanting to become the chosen Jellicle cat and ascend, and kidnapping other characters to achieve this goal) but none of them are honestly developed beyond their most basic motivations. It feels like the most literal and worst-case example of taking something from one medium and bringing it to another without making any meaningful changes to properly translate it. This is like if Robert Zemekis's mo-cap animation studio didn't die after Mars Needs Moms! bombed at the box office and a musical was their next project. Somehow it made the new Star Wars film look like a competent movie just for the sheer fact it tried to tell a story, even if it was a completely scattershot and thrown-together-at-the-wall story. Maybe there's a way to make an entire film that virtually has no real story and make it work, but Cats definitely wasn't it. In regards to ratings, this movie is just barely skimming by on a rental; some of the songs/performances and the sets are just barely keeping me from dismissing it as trash.