Tag: film

Within the first ten seconds of You Won’t Be Alone, an intriguing-enough sounding movie with Noomi Rapace concerning a witch in Macedonia, a cat is eaten alive by some creature off-screen. I didn’t find out what the creature was because I turned off the movie after listening to its little bones get pulverized in the monster’s maw.

And ya know? I’m fucking tired of watching cats die in movies.

It feels like this piece has been a long time comin’.

On-screen cat deaths are usually a punchline, a mistake, or the product of a sadist’s gruesome machination. They are the animal equivalent of the dead prostitute who is merely a stepping-stone to catching “the killer”.

In Dogtooth, a criminally sheltered teenager stabs a cat to death with a pair of garden shears because his father told him they are evil.…

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Now that we have the Internet it is very easy to get at lists of the greatest things – movies, books, records, kings, criminals, snacks. Of course, we had such lists before, but now we have them in abundance and naturally enough they reflect the changing times. For example, while old lists of the greatest movies always included popular or Hollywood films alongside what we would call art house films – Gone with the Wind and The Godfather, E.T. and Star Wars, alongside Bergman and Fellini, Goddard and Truffaut – lists of the greatest novels did not, that is, did not include popular novels – no Gone with the Wind and The Godfather alongside Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Kafka and Mann. Now they often do, and even the Harry Potter books.…

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