Cranky Laowai, thanks for pointing this out. I didn’t hear any of this. Was busy stayin gout of harms way below Taipei 101.
Wow, a USA movie knocks taiwan! I can see the cartoons and angry rebuttals in the local newpapers tomorrow. A big commentary in the TT by some senior editor somewhere who says, SCREW HOLLYWOOD, WE’RE TAIWAN!
Universal’s The Cat in the Hat, starring Mike Myers, is virtually certain to command the nation’s box offices over the weekend, even though most critics sound like so many Grinches in writing about it. Megan Lehmann in the New York Post calls the movie, “this atrocious hairball of a film, a nauseating splat of gaudy production design with a distasteful central performance by Mike Myers.” John Anderson in Newsday suggests that the movie belongs in “the litter box,” describing it as “charmless, pointless and all-but-witless.” Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe & Mail labels it an “abomination … Hollywood at its most risibly asinine: a $100-million-plus exercise in making a hash out of a first-grade reader.” The gentlest criticism may come from Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer, who quotes the book’s goldfish: “No, I do not like it, not one little bit!” Several critics, Rickey included, try their hand at writing Seuss-type doggerel to describe their reaction to the film.
Manohla Dargis begins hers in the Los Angeles Times with: “Why oh why did they make it like that/Oh why did they ruin The Cat in the Hat?”
Chris Vognar in the Dallas Morning News rhymes in: “The book’s charm is gone/And so is its grace./This Cat in the Hat/Really stinks up the place.”
“Poor Dr. Seuss,” mourns Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, “whose fragile wonderments have been crushed under a mountain of technology.”
Adds Ty Burr in the Boston Globe, using Dr. Seuss’s real name: “If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel’s body and hung it from a tree, they couldn’t have desecrated the man more.” More specifically, Mark Caro writes in the Chicago Tribune: “Can we agree on one point? You shouldn’t have to add burps, farts and dog pee to Dr. Seuss.”
Still a handful of critics find the movie tasty even though it may look like green eggs. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post pronounces it “so good it breaks your heart for not being better. It is kept from brilliance by a soggy climax and a clumsy central narrative device.”
And Bruce Westbrook in the Houston Chronicle suggests that it should be judged on its own terms: “Cat has ample comic kick, and it roars, if not purrs,” he writes. “It’s a barrel of lunatic laughs, less an homage to a classic than a contemporary product exploiting its source for name recognition. Forget loving tributes – this is all about the ‘wicked cool’ of guilty pleasures.”
