Cats and Dogs Is the Kind of Kid Movie that Makes Your Head Hurt Real Bad

Some kinds of movies can feel like rackets. Kid movies, for example. There was a time when you could expect a couple of really bad kids' movies a year, a number of competently made ones and the occasional classic?an E.T., a Neverending Story, a Babe. Now it's mainly about the marketing?coming up with a concept that will get families into theaters during prime moviegoing seasons like summer and winter. As a result, it seems like only two kinds of kids' movies get made anymore: terrific ones, and ones that make your head hurt.

Daddy's head hurt real bad after Cats and Dogs. It wasn't as bad as Space Jam?a dumb, plotless, nearly laughless film that required the great Bugs Bunny to suck up to a mere basketball player?but it was a miserable experience just the same. The concept has potential (canines and felines secretly war against each other with high-tech devices), and the tv ads and making-of special did a devious job of suggesting the film might actually have charm. But the result is singularly joyless?hyperactively directed, with paper-thin characters and no internal logic, which even a kids' movie is supposed to have. (The plot has a mad scientist/suburban dad played by Jeff Goldblum targeted for kidnapping by an evil cat cabal because he's about to produce a serum that will cure humans of dog allergies. Anybody who's lived in a house with both cats and dogs can tell you it's cats that make people sneeze.)

Movie tickets cost so much in this city that when a whole family pays and the result is two hours of deafening mediocrity, they don't just feel disappointed?they feel bamboozled. Between the confusingly articulated premise and the chop-chop action, I didn't expect my four-year-old daughter to understand what was going on in Cats and Dogs (although she had no trouble understanding what was going on in Shrek, a much deeper and more complicated kids' film). But I figured older kids and their parents would fare better. Nope; Cats and Dogs has such a frantically choppy rhythm and such short scenes that watching it is like channel surfing between two or three bad kids' movies running concurrently on cable tv. At several points, the film's loud score shifts into heroic mode to cue you to applaud even though you aren't quite sure what just happened. An opening day audience at the Court St. Regal Cinemas in Brooklyn?maybe two-thirds kids?was too smart and too annoyed to buy into that kind of prodding; the stray handfuls of applause that did spring up in response to heroic music ceased almost immediately. Coming out of the theater, the audience seemed not peppy, pleased and talkative?the vibe after a good kids' movie; the vibe after Shrek all four times I went to see it?but strangely quiet and faintly relieved. The comments I overheard from young moviegoers were variations on my daughter's halfhearted, "The cat in the dresses was funny." Amazing how early kids start trying to talk themselves out of dissatisfaction.

It's also amazing how many Hollywood movies are put together as sloppily as Cats and Dogs. Films like Tomb Raider and Pearl Harbor and The Fast and the Furious?where the compositions, camera movements and editing choices are so haphazard that you often can't tell where people are in relation to each other?have become the norm. The easy thing to do would be to blame this on television?the knee-jerk bogeyman of some critics. But in order to do that, you'd have to willfully ignore the fact that top-of-the-line tv dramas like ER, The Sopranos, The West Wing and Six Feet Under are constructed with a classical devotion to craft; they display an attentiveness to recognizable human behavior and comprehensible narrative that Hollywood movies used to pride themselves on, but often don't anymore. The characters are arranged within the frame in dynamic, attractive, functional patterns, often in medium shot; the action unfolds systematically, elegantly, and when there's a cut, it usually means something. The general absence of such values from Hollywood films hints at a much deeper malaise. It suggests the transformation of movies into product?the endpoint of a marketing strategy?has finally come true, and pretty much everyone involved with the production process, from studio heads to filmmakers to technicians to marketers, no longer sees the point of resisting.

Ironically, some of the same critics who blame the decline of movie quality on tv came of age as critics complained that filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Robert Zemeckis were dumbing down Hollywood and turning everything into children's entertainment. But have you watched 70s and 80s movies by any of those filmmakers recently? I have?and I was pleasantly surprised to realize that compared to a lot of the glitzy, hyperactive trash that moviegoers are asked to endure today, they're models of narrative efficiency and wit, and the compositions, camera movements and editing choices work to advance the narrative rather than obliterate it.

Star Wars was blasted in an Esquire column by David Thomson a few years ago as the beginning of the end of movies, and it periodically pops up in film reviews as a shorthand for everything that's wrong with popular culture; but compared to Tomb Raider and Cats and Dogs, it seems a model of mythic purity and visual grace. The characters move deliberately through cleanly composed Cinemascope frames; the short scenes deliver exactly as much information as you need and no more. The characters are as simple as the people that populate fairy tales or dreams; yet they have desires, and they go on journeys?which is more than you can say for the "characters" in some recent summer movies.

I recently watched all of Back to the Future on one of the Turner Channels recently?a three-hour commitment, considering how many ads Turner Channels splice into every film?and I found myself racking my brain trying to think of a recent summer movie that was half as witty or a tenth as enamored with the pleasures of narrative. I must have seen Future four or five times the summer it came out, and every time, the audience burst into applause repeatedly?not just after big action setpieces, but after funny moments, or moments where a character confirmed what you suspected about him, or moments where the film's interlocking narrative gears spit out a twist that was both surprising and inevitable (like the moment where Michael J. Fox's character "introduces" rock 'n' roll to Chuck Berry's cousin). Did you ever think you'd read the sentence, "They just don't make 'em like Back to the Future anymore"?

We seem to be going through some kind of prolonged lull in mainstream movies?a period where the most heavily promoted stuff is top-heavy, trashy and mostly indifferent to characterization and narrative. The (mostly) small movies that do care about such matters?Last Resort, The Anniversary Party, The Vertical Ray of the Sun?tend to be marginalized by the entertainment press, and by many film critics, as mere art-house curiosities. It's as if everybody involved in the moviegoing process?the filmmakers, the distributors, the exhibitors, the press and the public?has reconciled themselves to the idea that fascinating small films just won't make much of an impact on the larger culture. The sole recent exception to this is the art-house smash Memento, which earns its success by making audiences process narrative simultaneously in two radically different ways?a technique often thought to be impossible outside of literature. Seen backwards, it's about an active protagonist on a doomed quest to understand his predicament; re-ordered in the mind afterward, it's about a passive, myopic victim who only thinks he's the master of his own fate?a darkly amusing metaphor for life in the modern age, where self-awareness is often mistaken for self-determination.

Everyone wants movies to be great, or at least good?especially people who, unlike professional film critics, have to pay nine or ten dollars every time they set foot in a movie theater. That doesn't happen very often these days; it never did. The history of American moviegoing is marked by long periods of competence (or borderline mediocrity) punctuated by bursts of intense creativity. Sometimes the creative bursts are sustained; think of the period from 1945-'54, which birthed a string of great dramas and melodramas that were connected to the world; or 1967-'75, which saw every major genre (drama, comedy, propaganda, spectacle) produce not one but several influential and fascinating works. Other creative periods are compressed, fleeting?think of 1999, which disgorged so many noteworthy American movies, from Being John Malkovich and Sleepy Hollow to Boys Don't Cry and The Limey to Fight Club and Toy Story 2?that even exceptionally active film fans had trouble keeping up.

When a moviegoing climate that rich dissipates, you can't help missing it; and as a moviegoer, you find yourself wishing it would return. When it doesn't, there's an enormous temptation to settle for movies that are deeply flawed and nearly incoherent in some ways. Critics are not immune to this temptation; depressed by the rising tide of summer manure, they insist that worthy, fascinating, deeply flawed movies are masterworks, and that artistically uninteresting but watchable Hollywood movies are horrible, rotten, an affront to taste. Those who refuse on principle to be bullied into bandwagon thinking find their objections written off, by some critics, as evidence of callousness or stupidity. The emotional connection between Hollywood and moviegoers?and for that matter, between critics and the handful of moviegoers who still care what they have to say?gets more frayed by the year, and nobody seems especially interested in repairing the bond. Hollywood just wants to move product; critics want to justify their existence any way they can; moviegoers want movies to be interesting and engaging, challenging yet accessible?even though they're usually not.

Rather than explain or justify the strange, puzzling or ineffective parts of noteworthy movies, some critics have chosen to fall back on exclusionary mysticism?a clubby, disdainful brand of criticism that substitutes assertions for evidence, and mistakes personal affinity for esthetic judgment; a brand of criticism that says, in effect, "I love this film, and I can't really justify why, so I'm just going to repeat, over and over, that it's a masterpiece, and that anybody who doesn't agree is dumb or corrupt."

Yes, I'm talking about A.I.?and A.W. Regular readers of this film section know that my respect for Spielberg is second to no one's?except that of Armond White, a die-hard auteurist who insists that anything made by a director he likes is art, and who consequently insists on defending intriguing misfires like Always, Hook and A.I. as misunderstood stealth masterworks. I put those three movies together because they feel like a trilogy, as surely as the Indiana Jones movies and Spielberg's Schindler's List-Amistad-Saving Private Ryan cycle feels like a trilogy. Always, Hook and A.I. represent Spielberg's ineffective and strangely cold attempts to investigate, in the most explicit and ham-handed manner imaginable, his own Spielberg-ness. He attempts to analyze his obsessions the way a great auteur is supposed to do, notwithstanding the fact that Spielberg, one of the most fluid, intuitive and sentimental directors of all time, is least original and least genuine when reflecting upon himself. All three of the aforementioned films were projects Spielberg had been obsessed with for years?respectively, a remake of the 1944 wartime ghost story A Guy Named Joe, a reinterpretation of Peter Pan and a high-tech reworking of both Pinocchio and the themes of one of his filmmaking idols, Stanley Kubrick.

One needn't stereotype Spielberg as a brain-dead action or fantasy director to wish he would interrogate himself in more imaginative and organic ways?ways that don't undermine the power of his story's emotions and shatter the delicate spell he strives to conjure. The story of poor little mechanized David is already a Pinocchio story (childless creator makes facsimile of son who isn't real and can't grow up). Yet Spielberg can't quit while he's ahead, and his blandly relentless hammering-home of Pinocchio allusions?including a virtually step-by-step reworking of the 1940 film's plot, from nightmare carnival to watery apocalypse and simplistic references to the Blue Fairy and wishes coming true?sucks the joy and cleverness from the movie. Spielberg isn't normally an elbow-you-in-the-ribs kind of filmmaker, but that's exactly what he does with fairytale mythology in A.I. The crisp performances, meticulously composed conversation scenes and complex emotions (empathy and distance, parental protectiveness and childish longing) draw you in, but Spielberg's faintly self-congratulatory way of underlining pop mythology?coupled with the third act's glacial pace and (literally) mechanical mawkishness?pushes away even devoted Spielberg fans.

The script presents a terrifically provocative, very Kubrickian chain of sci-fi events: Humans create thinking machines; one of these thinking machines is abandoned by his adoptive mother for nearly killing a human; in the future, the machines have evolved to the point where they, too, can play God, resurrecting the now-dead human race through DNA samples; the evolved machines can understand humanity only by reading the images contained in the supposedly limited mind of the machine-child, David. But this most rewarding aspect of the film's narrative?the notion of non-immortals playing God?is denied full articulation because Spielberg is so preoccupied with underlining, boldfacing and stick-on-labeling every Spielbergian trope that passes before his lens. (E.T. moon, anybody?)

Spielberg's historical trilogy was much grander, more complex and less affected. It stretched his talent and in the process analyzed the wellspring of Spielberg's power: his ability to make you understand, on a visceral level, situations you've never personally experienced, be they fantastic (encounters with extraterrestrials or dinosaurs) or historical (the Holocaust, slavery, World War II infantry combat). The technical virtuosity was rooted in human emotion and in the facts of physical experience. Spielberg's self-investigatory trilogy, in contrast, is abstract, unfocused, imprecise and academic in a rather high-schoolish way?as if he just picked up The Uses of Enchantment or The Interpretation of Dreams and couldn't wait to tell everybody about all the interesting stuff the authors had to say. As Peter Rainer noted in an appropriately skeptical New York review, A.I. is what happens when a director tries to will a classic into being.