When she posed for Time's 2023 "Person of the Year" cover wearing one of her three cats draped around her neck like a boa, Taylor Swift seemed to cement her status as, in the words of New York Magazine, "America’s foremost Cat Lady." But if you really want to pinpoint the 12-time Grammy winner's apex as a feline icon, you need to go back five years, to director Tom Hooper’s unhinged cinematic adaption of Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Cats." But don't think of the movie as "Cats." Think of it as "Cats: Taylor's Version." It's a lot more fun that way.

Her total and unembarrassed commitment to this legitimately goofy, unsettlingly CGI-enhanced production is a thing to behold.

Riding on a wave of acclaimed adaptions like 2012's Oscar winning "Les Miserables," 2014's successful "Into the Woods" and two "Mama Mias," the long awaited film version of one of the most beloved, longest running West End and Broadway musicals of all time seemed a solid bet back in 2019. But "Cats" is an . . . unusual show. For starters, it's based on a book of poetry, T.S. Eliot's "“Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats." And as such, it's about singing cats.

You know this, going in. Yet the cinematic adaptation is still really something else. I remember attending an early press screening of the then much-hyped, star-studded musical, and all of us in the audience were blinking back into the daylight as if we'd just emerged from a fever dream. It remains one of the oddest movie-going experiences of my life, and Taylor's number, "Macavity," is a showstoppingly bizarre highlight of a........

© Salon