Eliot to the audience: “You’ve heard of several kinds of cat / And my opinion now is that / You should need no interpreter / to understand our character / You’ve learned enough to take the view / that cats are very much like you.”It’s heartening to think that someone, somewhere, might learn something from “Cats.” The Oscar-winning English director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech,” “Les Misérables”) and his cast and crew probably will emerge with the most valuable lessons of all, though I doubt many will be inclined to share them publicly. Played by Judi Dench under what looks like a computer-animated shout-out to Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion mane, she sings a few lines of T.S. There is a strange scene — OK, there are many strange scenes — near the end of “Cats,” the flailing feline phantasmagoria coming soon to a movie theater and/or shroom party near you. We checked in with six alumni to see how it’s working.To release the documentary “Rebuilding Paradise,” about a devastating fire in Northern California, the filmmaking team has put together a hybrid strategy that may become a new normal for now.Gemma Arterton and Gugu Mbatha-Raw star in “Summerland,” a British World War II drama with a fresh spin. Cast: Paul Walter Hauser, Sam Rockwell, Brandon Stanley Release Date: Fri, Dec 13, 2019 Rated: R You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Still, if you see this movie — and I offer that up as a hypothetical, not a recommendation — and arrive at the theater not excessively inebriated, you will indeed learn about several different kinds of cat, with stripe and spot formations as impressively varied as their personality types and domestication levels.There is a lazy, bumbling “gumbie cat” named Jennyanydots, who here takes the form of an orange-coated Rebel Wilson. Despite an Oscar-winning director and an all-star cast, the movie version of blockbuster Broadway musical “Cats” is a creative cat-astrophe. And just to round out this nightmarish anatomy lesson, Hooper often directs his actors to splay their legs and bare their flat, undifferentiated crotches for the camera, none more frequently than Dench’s Old Neuteronomy herself.But surely this is all (more or less) true to Lloyd Webber’s theatrical conception, you may wonder, perhaps recalling your own memories of stage performers in elaborate furry unitards, punctuating their songs and dances with purrs, hisses and other semaphoric feline gestures. Every so often it does paws — ahem, pause — to rise to the level of a self-aware hoot.You may have seen the best of it already. I would never ever watch The movie has been the long-tailed butt of online jokes for months, following the July release of Not quite, as it turns out. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. “Cats” insists that they are, and therein lies its problem — well, one of them. But much of it has been jettisoned for Andy Blankenbuehler’s (“Hamilton”) more organic street dancing.