Year 14, Day 235 - 8/23/22 - Movie #4,230
BEFORE: Still spacing out my August movies, which I'm hoping is the right move. I didn't want to speed through this chain of movies that's connecting my documentary block with the start of the annual ShockTober horror fest, because then I'd be left with two or three weeks in September with no movies to watch. But at the same time, I've been on furlough from one of my jobs while they conduct roof repairs on the theater - so, how to fill the empty time? Well, I've managed to catch up on some TV shows. Binging, as the kids say - I cleared the second season of "Tiger King" off my Netflix list, also something called "This Is a Robbery", which was about the still-unsolved 1990 theft from an art museum in Boston. I cleared both "Moon Knight" and "Obi-Wan Kenobi" from my Disney+ watchlist and started on "She-Hulk" - but I still have "Ms. Marvel" and "What If..." to go. I'm almost through a few months' worth of "Bar Rescue" and "Restaurant Impossible", but 60 episodes of "Chopped" are taking up space on my DVR.
Oh, yeah, and then there was Season 4 of "Stranger Things", that was a big deal - very scary, and I was watching it late at night, too, so good luck sleeping, right? And then I made it almost all the way through the latest season of "What We Do in the Shadows", which is produced by Taika Waititi, who carries over from "Lightyear" to tonight's film. Most recently on Sunday night I watched the first four episodes of "The Sandman", which seems to be an adaptation of the first story-arc of the famous comic book, and one actor from THAT show is in today's movie. My TV shows don't HAVE to connect to my movies, but it's a bit more interesting when they do.
I'm back to work at the second job today, so I'm going to be very busy for the next two weeks - but I should be able to schedule four more films into August, and then I can block out September, which I think can hold 21 or 22 films if I space them out right.
THE PLOT: English artist Louis Wain rises to prominence at the end of the 19th century for his surreal cat paintings that seemed to reflect his declining sanity.
AFTER: Well, it's kind of the Year of the Cumberbatch, isn't it? I mean, he's not going to catch up with Bruce Willis and Nic Cage, but he's been featured prominently in my 14th Movie Year - he was in two big Marvel movies, two spy movies, an Oscar-nominated modern Western, and a little TV movie called "Stuart: A Life Backwards" that I'm still trying to figure out. So you may be wondering, why not put all the Benedict Cumberbatch movies together, watch them all at once, why split them up like this? Ah, the chain kind of has a mind of its own sometimes, and over time I've learned to respect this. I came very close to watching this one along with "The Courier" and "The Mauritanian", but at that time I was also trying to figure out how I was going to connect the end of the doc chain with the start of the horror chain, and after playing around with some possible paths, I realized that I needed to split this one away from the herd in order to make an important linking connection. Sure, maybe I could have gotten where I needed to by another route, but this one seemed like the most efficient, and there's no rule that I HAVE to watch all the films with one actor together, I can move them around as I see fit - plus I had too many films in the chain anyway, if I was going to make it to my July 4 film on time the way I wanted to. Now I'm kind of in the same boat, I've got ONE too many films to make it to Christmas, so I need to cut one off the list between now and then, and there are THREE likely candidates, I just have to think about which one I can most likely work into next year's chain, even if there's no accurate way to predict that yet.
Anyway, I'm glad this film helped me make my connection today, but I'm not quite sure WHY this film exists - Louis Wain was a real artist who illustrated cats and those drawings seemed to strike a chord with people back in Victorian England, but so what? In the grand scheme of things, who really cares about this? I know a ton of illustrators working today, people who struggle to get their cartoons into The New Yorker every month, and I wish them well, but how is that helping society out, beyond entertaining people for a few seconds here and there? I'd rather watch a film about a scientist who found a cure for something, or a doctor who saved people's lives with a new operating technique, or somebody who brokered peace and ended a war or something - doesn't that all sound more important than drawing cats?
Besides, according to this, Wain only took the illustration job so his sisters would hire a governess that he fancied - again, great, I'm happy somebody found the love of his life in an unlikely place, and damn all those people who were shocked - SHOCKED - that someone from the upper middle class should want to marry someone from the lower middle class. They can all go screw themselves, because love is where you find it, even if there's some kind of real or imagined imbalance involved in it. All you had to do to create a "scandal" in Victorian London was sneeze, anyway, or forget to say "Bless you" when someone else sneezed. What was so great about this time period, anyway? Oh, right, something about electricity, or industry, some kind of revolution...which led to poisoning the planet, and we're still feeling the effects of that, so thanks for using all that coal, kerosene and whale oil, Victorians!
Louis was the only member of the family with a job, after failed attempts at creating operas and patenting inventions that didn't work, his illustrations supported his five sisters. And why couldn't any of them work for a living? Oh, right, women just didn't do that, give me a break. If you need money, you go GET A JOB, it's as simple as that - any of these five women could have learned to be a clerk, or a factory manager, or worked in child care or nursing, who cares if it didn't look "proper", get over yourselves, a job would have put food on the table. None of them could manage to get married, either, gee, I wonder why, could it be their savage or overly quirky personalities? Again, get over yourselves, get a job or a husband and stop being a leech. Pride and social standing be damned, what about gaining self-respect for earning an income?
Louis, despite all his eccentricities, marries Emily and they ignore the cries of scandal, and they're happy together, for a time. They take to raising stray cats, which I fully support - though this was apparently unusual in the Victorian era, I guess people kept dogs in their manors for hunting and companionship, and cats were only good for catching mice. But after Emily died from breast cancer, Louis threw himself into the work of cat illustrations, and despite an incredible amount of wrong information about cats being bandied about, slowly it became fashionable to keep cats as pets. Before this, cats and dogs didn't really fight in the real world, that's only in cartoons, but when it came time to compete for the affections of humans, oh, well, then the battle was ON.
Wain's illustrations appeared in the newspaper (mews-paper?) and on postcards, greeting cards - he was like the B. Kliban of his day, if you're of a certain age, you may know who that was. But Wain neglected to file for copyrights of his work, so he couldn't profit from any reproductions of his work, and he found it harder to profit from his drawings, essentially he was competing with himself. Meanwhile one sister got committed to an insane asylum, and the whole family got evicted from their home - again, I blame the other sisters who simply would not get out there and look for jobs. After his favorite cat died, Wain's own mental health started to decline, so he headed for New York, where I guess all the crazy people end up, sooner or later. But days after he arrived, he got word that his mother died from influenza, so he soon returned to England.
His newspaper editor, who was putting up the whole Wain family in his summer home, so the family gets evicted AGAIN, but moves to a small London flat at the start of World War I. Wain falls off a bus and goes into a coma, during which he claimed to have time-traveled and visited the year 1991 - and when he wakes up, he designs a bunch of futuristic cat-themed toys, I guess they look like robots or Hello Kittys or something, and it finally looks like he might turn a profit from this cat thing, but the whole boatload of toys gets sunk by a German U-boat. Yep, that seems about right.
Wain has greater mental breakdowns after the deaths of his mother, cat and a few more sisters, and is committed to a mental hospital, in the pauper's ward. An official inspecting the mental institution recognizes him, and starts a campaign, with the three remaining sisters, to raise money to put him in a better home, where he can have a pet cat. This was like the original GoFundMe campaign, perhaps - thousands of his fans contributed, and H.G. Wells assisted with the fund-raising drive, placing him in better institutions in Southwark and later St. Albans. I can't really say that's a happy ending, because honestly, this is a reminder that there's no such thing, but I guess it's a better one?
Wain was fascinated by electricity, as maybe many people were back then - but did he understand it? It feels like he used it for anything, any scientific process or even a feeling or an emotion that he didn't understand. Our bodies have static electricity, of course, but it's not what keeps up alive, right? And he thought that when a cat has stripes, it's because one of its ancestors was once struck by lightning, which is just flat-out ridiculous. He also posited that cats were in the process of evolving, and in a few generations they'd be walking on two legs and talking to their human masters in English. Yeah, this guy had more than a few screws loose - you can't just make up fantasy things and then call that science, you can have a hypothesis about that, but then things need to be tested with the scientific method before then can be taken seriously.
So I'm left kind of scratching my head about the why of it all - this film isn't funny enough to be considered a comedy, it's more of a drama but at the same time too overly melancholy, and as for the historical aspect, this weird artist really shouldn't be seen as more of a footnote to history. I mean, I guess if you love cats, you can thank this guy for making them popular and fashionable, but really, that's about it.
Also starring Benedict Cumberbatch (last seen in "The Courier"), Claire Foy (last seen in "The Girl in the Spider's Web"), Andrea Riseborough (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Toby Jones (last seen in "City of Ember"), Sharon Rooney (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Aimee Lou Wood, Hayley Squires, Stacy Martin (last seen in "Tale of Tales"), Phoebe Nicholls (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Adeel Akhtar (last seen in "Victoria & Abdul"), Asim Chaudhry (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Crystal Clarke (last seen in "Assassin's Creed"), Daniel Rigby (last seen in "Flyboys"), Richard Ayoade (last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Julian Barratt (last seen in "The Reckoning"), Dorothy Atkinson (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Nick Cave (last seen in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"), Fehinti Balogun, Jamie Demetriou (last seen in "Cruella"), Sophia Di Martino (last seen in "Yesterday"), Siobhan McSweeney (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Stewart Scudamore (last seen in "Dolittle"), Simon Munnery, Olivier Richters (last seen in "The King's Man"), Jimmy Winch, Cassia McCarthy, Anya McKenna-Bruce, Indica Watson and the voice of Olivia Colman (last seen in "The Father"),
RATING: 4 out of 10 National Cat Club meetings
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