Comes out in the US on Jan 20. If I could buy advance tickets for it already I would have.
Do want!
So cool that there’s more coming out of Turkey than just more bad news about Erdogan!
-Tom
I just made the mistake of showing that trailer to my gf. I was trying to cheer her up.
And myself. Since losing my own cat last year, I’m a sucker for stuff like this.
If it ever shows up here in Bismarck, I am now on the hook for it.
Wish this was available now. So need something charming like this.
I had the pleasure of seeing this in person w/ @ChristienMurawski and @fire
The pleasure was the company, alas. I was mildly charmed for about 20-25 minutes then my attention span dropped hard, and did not land on its feet.
The movie explores the personality of Istanbul, about a dozen cats, and their adopted owners. Surprise, cats all behave pretty similarly.
Eh, I loved the film, and thought it was just long enough. Right when my wife and I looked at each other to say “hmmm,” the credits rolled. The narrative was a bit thin but the cats carried it. No complaints here.
It’s about time they carried something!
I like the idea of the movie. I like how Istanbul is a character in the movie, but it was too heavy with the loving and languid shots of the city that mainly seemed to serve the purpose of showing us that the filmmakers had gotten their hands on a nifty filming drone and were very proud of it.
I don’t think the movie tightens its focus enough. To make something like this, that will have universal appeal, I think you have to actually get more specific, not more general. That may seem counter-intuitive, but we identify with the specific. I think Kedi is too in love with cats in general to really understand that. Watching the trailer above you can see that as well. “This is the story of seven of them.” And it spends way too much time, again, on pretty shots of the city.
One of the friends we saw it with has been to Istanbul, and she said the stray cat culture is definitely a thing that made an impression on her. So that’s a cool element that I think the film conveys. That and the fact that apparently cats communicate to God through humans. Or humans through cats. Or god through humans to cats. Or something along those lines. As much as I liked all the cool footage of cats running about, and am totally curious about how they got some of those shots following certain cats around, I think the movie could have used more focus.
One more thing, I found a gif of one of Bruce’s cats at home:
-xtien
This reminds me of a Nova (or was it a Nature?) episode that tracked this one set of ruins in Rome [edit: Torre Argentina]. It is absolutely overrun with feral cats.
And if that cat really were Brooski’s then it would be wearing an Iron Cross collar.
Witold Gombrowicz said the very definition of art is “the elevation of the particular to the universal.” So I agree with him. And you.
But WHOA! You wanna make this have more universal appeal? Why? I’ll bet you think My Dinner With Andre should have ended with them having a food fight. Just like in My Breakfast With Blassie! That would have made more people like it! Seriously, who cares about “more universal appeal.” Are you a game company’s executive now? “Put more boobs in level three!” This was a contemplative film for people who like cats and nice photography. Typical dog person coming in with your studio notes.
Wait, first you hated the movie and think it needs it needs to be re-shot by Michael Mann, and now you want a full Criterion Edition treatment with director’s notes and a “Making of…” disc? Dude, you gotta choose one or the other. Should Aguirre have had CG, or not?
I’sa jes buggin’ I totally hear ya. To a point. But I think you gotta let fans be fans and make stuff about the stuff they are fans of. Do I need to put Monopoly in my wargame vidéos so more people will watch? Not hardly. Sometimes people make films about stuff they love and it works for other people who love that stuff. If Istanbul thinks it got underexplained, it can get in the complaint line with everyone else. The filmmakers are my people. They get cats, and I get cats, and we get that we get cats. If you need a warning sticker on your movies that are too loving of their subject matter, see KW for an advisory rating.
And that can’t be a jiff of my cats, because my cats have been instructed not to lick their thumbs to turn pages as it totally bogarts the paper.
Post officially hearted.
Ha. Bruce thinks cats can be instructed.
Who is the dog person now, shee?
-xtien
I thought this was a perfectly cromulent way to spend 90 minutes, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone go out of their way to see it. There is a lot of non-cat photography, but that didn’t bother me. I excused a lack of more cat footage as, “Hey, they’re cats. Whatta ya gonna do?”
I thought the soundtrack was good. I’m glad to have this song in my life now:
I enjoyed it, and so did my wife and kids. Admittedly, I’m an architecture fetishist, but I can’t imagine why anyone would complain about the images of Istanbul! What a fascinating, beautifully textured place, and the cat culture there is just one fascinating part of it. I loved that this movie about cats revealed a lot about the city and about some people who live there.
Because it throws the movie out of balance. This doesn’t make me a philistine, for goodness sakes. It just means that I was interested in the story the movie was purporting to tell, but was instead distracted by how obviously in love the filmmakers were with their pretty drone pictures. Your word “fetishist” kind of perfectly encapsulates this. It’s very nice, for what it is worth, and one of the first things I say above is that I like the fact that Istanbul is a character; I think this is an important element of the movie. I just think the amount of slow let’s-fly-over-the-city and here’s-a-pretty-shot-from-the-water footage takes away from the point of the movie. Which is supposed to be much more about how the culture of stray cats is specific to Istanbul. Which doesn’t just signify architecture, btw.
I also think the movie lightly touches upon how this is changing, and how this scares some people, and that aspect is fascinating to me. It hits on an aspect of the politics of development and modernization, but it barely gives it a whisker’s brush. I think that aspect and the actual social and practical impact of having those colonies of cats all over the city are far more interesting to me than long shots of rooftops where I’m constantly looking for cats and instead seeing birds.
Oh good lord. Did you really just say that.
Perhaps I made a mistake in using the term ‘universal appeal’ in my post. I don’t mean bland and I don’t mean mass appeal. I can’t believe I have to actually explain this. I don’t mean you need to put Candyland in your ultra-fidgety board game about the Battle of the Dardanelles. What I mean is, these filmmakers are trying to expose us to something unique that we probably don’t know about–at least that seems to be their thesis–and they are trying to have us identify with it because they believe we can. That is universality. Whether I am a cat or a dog person, I can identify with this on a personal level, and have an emotional connection with it.
Fans can be fans of whatever they want and make stuff they are fans of, but they also have to do more than be self-indulgent if they want to actually communicate their fun fandom.
I get cats too. I’m the rare cat and dog person. And I think this movie’s subject deserved more focus.
Just to be clear…No.
To further be clear: No. I don’t.
-xtien
I get it, Christien. I think Brooski has made you a bit overly defensive. The drone shots, I felt, were just usually used for transitions. A pretty bog-standard device, but the skyline of Istanbul made it a win for me. I agree that a truly great documentarian might have been able to capture something like the shifting economic milieu in Turkey; these guys aren’t that great yet. But I like that the movie showed me more than it had to. Sounds like maybe you liked it less for that same reason.
You’re probably correct, Nightgaunt. But to be fair to me, he did call me a games executive and suggested I only wanted more boobs. The latter thing is true, but still.
I do see your point, and I think you are on point as well in your final summation. Because I think it showed me less by taking that time to supposedly show me more. If that makes any sense. Just as I think “This is the story of seven of them” may seem generous, but it’s actually not. Not to me. I want more depth, and less surface. So that’s why all the shots of rooftops skip off of me. Because I’d rather, quite frankly, see more about what’s going on underground between that cat and that rat. And more about the raising of the kittens by that one mom cat. And, as weird as this sounds, a sense of how the humans and cats deal with all the feces and the smell of urine that must be ever present.
I love cats. In fact, I supported a little feral family in the backyard of the first house I bought in California. For years. So I’m fascinated by the minutiae of how those colonies are structured and how they survive, and their future, much more than I care about those shots I’m going on about.
Again, however, your point is well taken.
-xtien
“A dog is very easy to break, but cats make you work for their affection. They don’t sell out the way dogs do.”
Just to be clear … yes it does.
Hey man, as Frank Black would say, don’t let your mind chase you like a hound. You said something completely uncontroversial and accepted about how the specific related to the universal, so kind of like when I call Tom a communist, I riffed on a deliberate conflation of universal themes and mass appeal. I did not mean to imply that you shouldn’t put more boobs in level three. I totally get what you’re saying. And I’m agreeing with you, but saying that I was totally fine with it being a fan movie, and not having more philosophical exploration of the fall of Constantinople and how it relates to cats eventually ruling the world. But I also understand what you said perfectly, and you don’t need to explain yourself. We’re cool.
Philistine.
Wait. What’s a philistine?
-xtien