A Talking Cat!?! - The Movie - The Blog

All about the movie A Talking Cat!?!

Swimming

1313 Entrance!?!

The next scene in our journey through A Talking Cat!?! starts with Chris opening the front door…wait a second. How did Chris get downstairs? I didn’t see him go down the stairs after he went up. The director can’t leave simple minded people like us to make assumptions about getting from one place to another.

What was I saying? Oh yeah, Chris comes through the front door with phone girl, who he is going to tutor. Boy, I hope they have a conversation about how he got downstairs from upstairs or I’m going to be totally lost.

Tutored phone girl (Tina or Frannie or something) starts by complementing Chris’s house. Because she’s poor. We didn’t cover that earlier, but she can’t pay Chris much for tutoring because she’s poor. And dumb. So she gawks at his house.

Chris says “follow me, we’ll go outside” and leads Girl outside. Lucky for us, they show all 10 seconds of “going outside” action so we don’t get confused, like with that whole upstairs/downstairs thing. Damn, that’s going to bug me. I wonder what happened.

More complements about the house. Then Chris ushers Girl past their study table to stand in the middle of his patio. Why wouldn’t you stop at the place you’re going to? Because we need to establish another subplot.

But before we get to that, Girl see’s Duffy (the talking cat who hasn’t talked yet). “Is that your cat,” she asks? Chris says “no” like she’s stupid for even asking. Without missing a beat, because she is dumb and poor(?), Girl says she likes cats. This causes the lecherous sound of Eric Roberts’s voice to say “cats like you too.”

Oh, right. There are multiple subplots with Girl. Number one, she has trouble “reading…books.” Her words. But she’s also in honors classes. So she’s actually dumb? She’s acting dumb? She wants to get close to Chris? She’s a gold digger? It never becomes clear. But there is one thing that’s very clear.

Girl!?!

Girl states she doesn’t read. Multiple times. In different ways. But maybe they can make tutoring fun! How? Chris can tell her about the books while she swims in his pool.

And now, the Pandora’s Box of swimming has been opened. From here on out, Girl will never stop talking about swimming. She is very concerned about the pool going to waste. Because you can waste a pool?

This conversation about swimming makes Chris very uncomfortable, so he grabs Girl’s summer reading list and runs awa. He doesn’t stop at their study table take a look at the reading list. Oh no. He runs and hides in his room, leaving Girl alone on the patio.

Wait a second. Isn’t Chris’s room upstairs? Oh God, how did he GET there? C’mon, movie! Either show all the stairs or none of the stairs!

Cut to…The Same Place

Establishing Shot!?!

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?

Retired Phil

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 the the grave, or the entertaining slide 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 round 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.

Warning! If you have not watched A Talking Cat!?! yet (it’s streaming on Netflix, dummies), do so now. Otherwise, you might miss the unintended twist!

Did you watch A Talking Cat!?! yet? Good. I didn’t realize that the pictured actresses were two different characters until 60 minutes into an 83 minute movie.

Sure, side by side it is easy to tell these two ladies apart. But these characters could have been (and should have been) squished into one character.

You see, Tina (on the left) won’t shut up about business college. Frannie (on the right, I think) wants to go swimming. That pretty much sums up their character depth.

So why one person can’t be both of these things is beyond me. I mean, I don’t want to go swimming and also don’t want to go to business college. That’s two things that I am right now. It’s easy and not at all confusing to want (or not want, in my case) two different things.

Oh, did I mention they are both poor and smart? So two of their three major character traits match. I’m not the only person that was confused by this. I know of at least three other people who have spoken up on this issue.

And I didn’t get confused because I wasn’t paying attention. Have you read the last 40 posts? Obviously I’ve been paying a lot of attention.

Tell me there are more of you out there that didn’t know Tina and Frannie were different people. I need to feel less dumb. Or I want to feel more smart. Which way do I say that to sound more smart?

https://atalkingcat.com/2013/03/06/warning-if-you-have-not-watched-a-talking-cat/