10 Terrible Movies With One Incredible Scene
4. Grizabella Sings "Memory" - Cats
Cats is one of the most widely and justifiably mocked blockbusters of the last few years - a woefully misguided attempt to adapt Andrew Lloyd Webber's wafer-thin musical into an epic, lavish, CGI-slathered tentpole.
From the moment the first trailer dropped, audiences were left unsettled by the dubious decision to have the film's all-star cast be digitally composited into CGI cat costumes.
This resulted in a deeply queasy uncanny valley look, with the characters appearing neither quite human nor feline, but rather an eerie hybrid of the two.
Beyond this, Oscar winner Tom Hooper's direction is shockingly lacking throughout, and so Cats largely lives on today as a fascinatingly atrocious curio, of how so many wrong decisions can get the sign-off from a major movie studio.
There's a single scene that manages to (mostly) break through the nauseating visual effects and deliver something approximating the intended emotion of Webber's source material, though.
When Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson) belts out the hauntingly elegiac tune "Memory," it's such a profound rendition of unarguably the musical's best song that you might temporarily forget how execrable the rest of the movie is and maybe even get a little teary-eyed.
In a film where so much effort is being made in the wrong direction, Hudson at least brought her A-game and managed to turn in an affecting performance, even while fighting against all the distracting VFX.