After Chris runs to his room and cries about girls, we see some more establishing shots. The beach. A house. And then we’re brought right back to where we just were. So we cut away from the house we were in back to the house we were in. That’ll soak up some of that screen time like a pancake soaks up vomit.
Then we have another establishing shot of Duffy, the talking cat who hasn’t talked, coming inside. So many doors are left wide open in this movie. Doesn’t Malibu have bugs or raccoons or jewel thieves?
Phil enters and sits down with the weight of a thousand suns. Retirement is weighing heavily on his mind. Suddenly, it stops weighing heavily on his mind and starts weighing heavily on his mouth. “So, this is what retirement is all about, huh,” he says to nobody. Retirement is what you make of it, Phil. It can be the long slow crawl to the grave or the entertaining waterslide to the grave. It’s up to you.
Then Duffy meows, startling Phil out of his introspective state. “That was random,” Phil says cheerfully. Eric Roberts, the cat, thinks to himself, “Not really, Phil. But I’ll give you another day before I spring that one on you.”
So the talking cat, who hasn’t talked yet, who we know is going to talk because the title of the movie is A Talking Cat!?!, is foreshadowing that maybe he’ll talk sometime in the future.
This scene between Duffy and Phil is here for one reason. To show that Phil is okay with letting a stray cat hang around inside his house. We already know that Phil is retired. We know that the cat has plans to talk at some point. The only thing we learn is that everything is cool.
Oh, one more thing. Eric Roberts as Duffy sounds like a drunken and more intelligible Popeye. There are these muttered lines thrown on to the end of his sentences that are so weird. And, unlike Popeye, you can understand what they are.
Example. Phil yells, “Chris, did you let the cat in?” Chris is in his room crying about girls at this point. Duffy, in his mind, replies, “I came in by myself, thank you very much.” Like it is an insult to be invited in. But then Duffy shifts his vocal register and grumbles, “Not that hard.” Really? “Not that hard” was the ad-lib you kept in to add depth to the scene?
Okay, it’s hard to explain. Just listen to it and speak up if you aren’t weirded out a little bit.
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