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If you're looking for a movie that the family might enjoy over the (American) Thanksgiving holiday, you would do well to avoid this week's box office champ. Instead, consider Pieces of April. Peter Hedges' short and bittersweet comedy about a family's efforts to get together and get along at a table of traditional turkey and cranberry sauce may have a few elements that are inappropriate for younger children, but for discerning adults, it's a moving and marvelous film. Here's my review.

They do not like it … not one bit!

Oops, they've done it again. Moviemakers have taken another beloved Dr. Seuss children's book and turned it into a "cat-astrophe." Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat, as directed by first-timer Bo Welch, is littered with lowbrow humor and things that are not appropriate for younger viewers … or for discerning adults, for that matter.

Nevertheless, families hurried happily to this big screen hairball, demonstrating disinterest in critical thinking about the film, and rewarding the film studio with an estimated $40.1 million, almost guaranteeing that more misguided Seuss adaptations will be made.

When Jim Carrey played the Grinch in director Ron Howard's Dr. Seuss movie, film critics were stunned to see the simple redemption story peppered with sexual references and behavior that was hardly admirable. There's nothing necessarily wrong with misbehavior in a movie, so long as it is portrayed as misbehavior in the context of meaningful storytelling. What troubled critics about Grinch was that Whoville, supposedly an innocent family-oriented town, was "updated" and turned into a place where parents went to "key parties" and where a post-redemption Grinch still went out of his way to belittle and mock his nemesis. It is likely that Theodore Geisel would have been displeased with Carrey's Grinch had he lived to see the movie. And critics are almost certain he would take Mike Meyers' version of the hat-clad Cat straight to the pound.

Of all the reviews I've scanned, my favorite was penned by Steven D. Greydanus (Decent Films), perhaps the first of several responses offered by critics in verse. Here's a snippet:

"The Cat in the Hat starts earning a smile
With studio logos in Dr. Seuss style.
In fact, the whole film has the right kind of look;
Trees, houses, and clouds seem right from the book.

"That's better than that Ronnie Howard could do
With his gloomy old Who-ville and misshapen Whos.
But production design alone isn't enough,
And The Cat in the Hat's nothing like up to snuff."

Michael Elliott (Movie Parables) says, "So much has been added to the story, presumably to stretch it out to fill its 80 minute running time, that Dr. Seuss's simple and imaginative tale kind of gets lost in the shuffle. Mike Myers … delivers to us an odd characterization that has little to do with the book. It is missing the primarily feature of the Cat's personality … A sense of fun."

"The Cat in the Hat is a good-looking film," says Bob Smithouser (Plugged In). "Unfortunately, that's as interesting as it gets. Barely veiled profanities and subtle humor involving sex, porn, urination and vomiting will unnerve parents wondering what rule Myers will break next in his tireless pursuit of 'fun.'"

David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) says, "Welch seems to totally forget why people love Dr. Seuss in the first place—his magical wordplay." He argues it would be better if audiences would just read the book. "In fact, a verse found on Page Two reads like a Seussian review of this movie: So all we could do was to sit, sit, sit, sit. / And we did not like it, not one little bit."

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November (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47