Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat (Widescreen)

There are some good points to the film. Redoing the Dreamworks bit at the start of the movie in the illustration style of Dr. Seuss was a nice touch and the production design by Alex McDowell(currently working on "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory") is in keeping with the spirit of the beloved author and his cherished book. But then people start showing up and talking, at which point your mind is consumed with visions of frantic grave spinning. Adults love the book too and our fond memories of reading it for the first gazillion couple of times is what draws us here, not the promise of adult humor directed narrowly above the heads of the small fry.

I am not really all that concerned with how much of the blame has to do with Meyers and his presence, both in terms of ad libs and writing to his peculiar style of humor, and how much is because screenwriters Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer were trying to expand the story to fill up a great big movie like this one. The added sibling rivalry element is fine (he is compulsively messing up and she is a control freak), but letting Baldwin run around and be annoying was a big mistake while the bits with mom's job and the baby sitter were both unnecessary. The original story of "The Cat in the Hat" was about what happened between two kids and the Cat in the Hat while their mother was not about. There was an irate fish and the troublemaking twins Thing 1 and Thing 2, but that was it and if the people making this movie could not make it work with those characters then tossing in this other nonsense was not going to help.

The humor represented by what Baldwin's Quinn does and what happens to the babysitter Mrs. Kwan (Amy Hill) are both way beyond the pale. Dr. Seuss did not do potty jokes nor was he malicious. Theodore Geisel was creative and imaginative, while those responsible for this travesty are woefully bereft of those qualities. Dr. Seuss wrote stories to inspire children to read and here the goal is to make money (certainly they made a lot less than they thought they would: the film cost $109 million and grossed only $100 million domestically). I would want to draw some lesson for future reference having to do with never trying to turn Dr. Seuss into anything more than a half-hour television program and not a bloated 82-minute constrosity, but we all know that Hollywood is slow to learn anything. Apparently there are some people not even Dr. Seuss can teach.