Tag: Cats

Reader’s Block: When a Book Becomes an Endurance Test

This post almost broke my blog.

I’ll confess, I’ve long since run out of prewritten content, so now this site just idles between updates. Looking back, I could have bought myself some time by publishing my earlier stuff at a slower rate, but I thought my blog would gain more traction if I appeared to be a frequent poster. 

Algorithms are fickle things, though—so fickle, in fact, that I actually got more traffic after months of inactivity than I did during some periods when I was trying to steer people here. My dive into Curly Howard’s proto-moonwalk appears to be the most favored by search engines (probably because it doesn’t contain swearing, trash talk about AI, or summaries of movie scenes involving graphic human dismemberment).

But I digress. It’s time to discuss the biography of Louis Wain that took 7 years for the author to research, and what felt like 7 years for me to read.

I love cats and I love art. I should have loved Catland.

Why, then, did I struggle so monumentally just to finish it?

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Good Live-Action Cat Movies Do Exist

In his 2017 video review of Nine Lives (which is no longer on his YouTube channel but still exists on Dailymotion), Ralph Sepe Jr., otherwise known as ralphthemoviemaker, poses a challenge to his audience. “Name a good cat movie. You can’t do it, right?” He goes on to claim cats are too boring to carry movies the way dogs do.

Despite Sepe’s wide range of cinematic knowledge, his remarks reveal a feline-shaped gap in his film education. Live cats—not CGI abominations—have played central roles in a number of acclaimed movies, some of which may even qualify as classics.

Perhaps the best example is Harry and Tonto, a dramedy about a displaced old man who goes on a cross-country journey with his beloved cat. Starring Art Carney as Harry and a couple of orange tabbies as Tonto, the film is every bit as funny and poignant as the best dog flicks. At the Tokyo premiere, the audience reportedly cried so hard during the title characters’ final scene together that they drowned out the remainder of the film’s dialogue. Director Paul Mazursky attributed this to Japan’s great love of cats.

Continue reading “Good Live-Action Cat Movies Do Exist”