A Talking Cat!?! • The Movie: The Blog

They Are Different People

Warning! If you have not watched A Talking Cat!?! yet (it’s streaming on Amazon Prime, 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?

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 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.

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 compliments 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 sees 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 away. He doesn’t stop at their study table to 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!

Worst. Orgy. Ever.

How to Night

It sure is night in here. Yup. Couldn’t be more night.

Filler

Being generous, A Talking Cat!?! is only 43% (or 37 minutes) too long. That means the movie has only 48 minutes of “content” in it, and even that number is probably too high.

I did a rough edit of the above scene (where it looks like everyone is dying from the flu, because it’s night?) and was easily able to hack out 37 seconds without losing any “story.”

37 seconds is 43% of the 64 second clip. Applying this percentage of waste to the rest of the movie, we’re left with 48 minutes.

The edited clip is in the larger window while the original clip is in the smaller window.

You knew A Talking Cat!?! was an amazing waste of time on so many levels, but math has shown you how many saltine crackers there are in this meatloaf of a movie.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

red-scout-desu:

ftmark:

transmutes:

anikicomplex:

i just spent one hour and 25 minutes of my time watching this movie. was it worth it? yes. i sat down for an hour and almost a half watching how a brilliant talking cat brought two families together. they literally use a moving mspaint black circle and a bad microphone recording to make the cat look like it was talking

okay BUT ALSO I THINK IT IS CRITICAL THAT YOU WATCH THE TRAILER AT LEAST because LOOK IT WAS MADE IN THE YEAR 2013 AND ALSO LOOKS LIKE YOUVE WALKED ONTO THE SET OF A LOW BUDGET TALKING CAT PORNO

OK actually IT IS THE SET OF A SOFTCORE PORN MOVIE

ACTUALLY

CHECK THIS OUT:

that’s the talking cat movie ^

and here’s 1313:UFO INVASION vvvvv

SAME DOOR

I LOOKED IT UP, SAME PRODUCTION COMPANY

1313:UFO INVASION IS LITERALLY TWINKY DUDES SWIMMING IN A POOL, GETTING TIED UP, AND GOING FOR VERY LONG WALKS

watch the trailer here

i like how that’s not even the cat in the movie

i also love the “other things that our actors were in”. holy shit! kristen debell from meatballs? NO WAY

A lovely Tumblr string of different people discovering the madness behind A Talking Cat!?!. More importantly, the string has gotten 9,000 likes. That’s 9,000 people on Tumblr that know about A Talking Cat!?! It doesn’t get much better than that.

https://atalkingcat.com/red-scout-desu-ftmark-transmutes/

It puts the 409 on the table or else it gets the hose again

Now it’s time for the scene you’ve all been waiting for. The “Phil cleans off the table” scene. Oh, it’s going to be so good! Action. Suspense. Drama. Comedy. This is will have it all.

Stay On Target!?!

So Phil heads to the table and…oh no! A distracting meow! Stay on target, Phil! The table! The table! Yes, good. Spray it a bit. That’s how you clean a table. Get in there! What is that, lemon scent? Nice choice. A real clean smell.

No! Don’t go over to the cat! Table, Phil! Table! How is it going to get clean? You don’t want to embarrass your son in front of whats-her-name, do you? Tina or something. I don’t remember. He only said her name twice and it was in scenes where she wasn’t present. It’s probably not important.

Dammit! Phil quit cleaning. Duffy, the talking cat, ruined everything. Sorry, everyone. The table is a lost cause. We’ll have to travel to where this scene takes us.

Duffy A Talking Cat!?!

Phil starts talking to a talking cat, and I know what you’re thinking. “Well, it’s a talking cat. It’s going to talk back.” WRONG! Obviously YOU aren’t the writer of Death Racers starring the Insane Clown Posse. Or, maybe you are. Hello if you’re reading this, Andrew Helm. Sorry for all the sentence fragments. I’m writing on a blog.

Anywho, Duffy isn’t about to start talking because…we don’t know yet. Sure, we hear Duffy’s inner monologue. And, sure, he’s responding to Phil’s conversation with his inner monologue. But Phil can’t hear him.

Duffy silently argues with Phil over the proper pronunciation of “Duffy,” each of them saying it correctly each time. Even if Phil could hear Duffy, it would be a pointless argument because there is nothing to argue about because they’re both saying it correctly.

I have a feeling that most of the cat’s inner monologue was improvised. And improvised poorly. They stuck Eric Roberts in a booth with a monitor, microphone, and nerve toxin and told him to comment on things as if he were the cat. “Who told you to stop scratching?” “I should probably follow him (cat doesn’t move), but…there’s nothing better than a cat nap.”

Oh, by the way. Fun fact. Duffy doesn’t remember his first owner. Because he is a cat and he will eat your face after you die. That’s how much owners mean to cats.

And now, the scene is over. With no new information gained, no table cleaned, and no talking cat. A Talking Cat!?!, ladies and gentlemen.

Now We’re Cooking

A Talking Cat!?! is made up of subplots tied together by other subplots. As the old adage goes, two subplots do not a full plot make. But maybe a whole mess of subplots will confuse people into thinking they watched something of substance.

Phil Cooking!?!

Subplots are like edible packing peanuts. It’s neat to try one or two, but don’t eat a whole box of them. You’ll get sick.

Phil, who is newly retired, is going to try his hand at cooking. Surprise! Phil is no good at cooking! In fact, he sets off the smoke detector.

The smoke detector! Holy smokes! Phil’s son, Chris, springs into action! You see, unlike everyone else over 5 years old, Chris still thinks a smoke alarm means danger and not “someone left a little crud in the oven when making a pizza.” This is lucky for us because we get to see Chris come all the way down the stairs from his room.

Stairs!?!

That’s a relief. I was beginning to worry about how Chris was going to get down from the upstairs.

Chris expresses his concern about this beeping fire whatzit, and Phil admits “I can’t make waffles” like a man finally coming up for air after holding his breath for the last forty years. They’ll have to get a new “waffle machine.” Now, this waffle device could very well be motorized. But I’m pretty sure everyone else calls it a “waffle maker.” Then again, Phil is bad at cooking. And words.

Outfit!?!

It feels like we’ve been talking about waffles for all of 10 seconds! Time to change the subject to what Chris is wearing. A blue polo and chinos. That’s certainly an unusual style of dress that sticks out and deserves mentioning.

It turns out Frannie is coming over. ANY MINUTE! Certainly a cause for khakis. But Phil doesn’t know who Frannie is. Phil! Don’t you remember the conversation you had about Frannie? Let me remind you.

Chris said “what do you do when you like a girl?” And then a cat came by and distracted you both. How could you not remember that and that Frannie was never mentioned?

Since the house smells like waffles, Phil suggests Chris and Frannie meet by the pool. This “Phil is bad at cooking” subplot will lead us nicely into the “Frannie only wants to swim” subplot. Genius!

Obviously, Chris is embarrassed when Phil offers to bring them juice by the pool. Which causes Chris to retreat. But how will he get back upstairs? I hope they show us.

More Stairs!?!

Cheese Puffs supercut

From @TheRealAlbrot, the A Talking Cat!?! cheese puffs supercut! All the instances of “cheese puffs” mentioned in the movie.

They’re mentioned quite a bit. You have to fill time somehow.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)