• 24 Posts
  • 279 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle






  • Wouldn’t say really enjoyed, but Cats didn’t deserve the hate it got. I saw it with my (then) girlfriend about five years ago when Frozen 2 was sold out and we had the choice of seeing this, Star Wars Episode IX, or Jumanji: The Next Level instead. We chose Cats.

    I’m gonna ignore the elephant in the room that’s the atrocious CGI, and say that Tom Hooper didn’t do a terrible job besides that. Most of the movie adaptations of each song were at least on-par with the musical. ‘Jellicle Songs For Jellicle Cats’, ‘Bustopher Jones’ and ‘Skimbleshanks The Railway Cat’ were the three that stood out as the movie’s best songs.

    Only three songs were far worse than the musical, and they were big ones…

    The Old Gumbie Cat was awful. Rebel Wilson absolutely butchered Jennyanydots by portraying her as a fat lazy glutton, complete with awful voice, awful ad-lib jokes thrown around the song and a part where she literally starts munching on CGI humanoid cockroaches marching around the dinner table. I mean… as much as I hate James Corden, he at least played the role of Bustopher Jones (a literal aristocratic fat-cat) really well, and unlike Wilson, his ad-libs were actually funny. I’d keep him in the cast, 100%.

    The Rum Tum Tugger is another bad one. Jason Derulo’s vocal performance was really weak, but I don’t have much else to say about it.

    Magical Mr Mistoffelees was the worst though. Hooper legitimately took the most iconic song from Cats and massacred it by portraying the titular musician who ultimately saves Old Deuteronomy as a nervous wreck. This is one that the Rum Tum Tugger should have sang, like in the original West End/Broadway musical. I got what he was trying to do with this decision but it just didn’t work.

    If I were in Tom Hooper’s shoes, there are four things I’d change:

    1. Redo the CGI
    2. Replace Rebel Wilson with Lea Michele. She is probably one of the best actresses who could play Jennyanydots.
    3. Replace Jason Derulo with Brendon Urie. Imagine Panic! At The Disco’s frontman singing the Rum Tum Tugger and Magical Mr Mistoffelees. 'Nuff said…
    4. Redo the three bad songs listed above to make them more like the musical.




  • Mastodon just sucks as a user experience. Your average Joe doesn’t give a fuck about federation, yet it’s the whole Fediverse crap that harms the UX.

    I made the mistake of signing up to a smaller Mastodon instance. Place was virtually empty aside from the lead admin (bit of a pretentious asshole) and a few other guys, and if you decide to browse the All Instances view, you’re flooded with posts from hentai reposting bots. And when I saw the #loli hashtag in one of those posts I immediately noped out.

    Threads is still in a really bad state well over a year later. Meta still haven’t implemented hashtags and trending topics (even Mastodon has these), and my feed is full of thirst traps.

    Bluesky has it all, and was created by Twitter’s original founders.


  • A mutual friend of ours got into an argument with him because he made some new friends at his local pub and was buying pints for them left, right and centre. He took serious offence to the suggestion that they were using him for his money (he got about £120k in inheritance after his mum died) and cut both of us off, even though I never said anything to him.

    I don’t want to elaborate on his backstory but he had a lot of mental health problems and past trauma. After a lot of bad things happened a few years ago, he decided that he was done with life and vowed not to outlive his cats. Have tried to talk him out of it but he’s set on ending his own life after his cats pass away.

    I presume he’s still alive, but I can’t get in touch with him as he nuked his phone number and blocked me on all socials.