weekly digest: the cat got my tongue (or, well, my pen) this past week

the very little that happened at Flick Filosopher from Monday, April 22, to Sunday, April 28

As if I don’t have enough trouble dealing with my own nonsense, this past week a lot of distraction and worry came in the form of this fluffy ding-dong: Mister Moo, my housemate’s 15-year-old Persian cat, to whom I have gotten ridiculously attached in the four-plus years I’ve lived in my current home. (He seems quite fond of me, too.)

One morning early last week he was suddenly very wobbly in his back legs, and either couldn’t or didn’t want to put his weight on one of those legs. My first thought was maybe that he’d had a stroke. We took him to the vet, but there was no definitive diagnosis: it could be an arthritis flare-up, or perhaps he’d injured himself somehow. He was clearly distressed and in pain, and it was absolutely heartbreaking to see.

Since then, poor Moo has been mostly confined to my room, to keep him away from the stairs in the house, away from the marauding puppy who is desperate to be his friend, and actually in the house (he’s got a flap that in normal times he uses to come and go as he pleases, though these days he doesn’t go further than the small back garden). He’s been on an anti-inflammatory and an opioid, and he is, at least, now more his old gentle, cheerful self, and getting frustrated being imprisoned. He seems not to be in pain anymore, though he is still very wobbly, and it’s difficult to see if what’s going on is something that will heal, given the opportunity (another reason for the confinement), or if it’s something — like my own hip issues — that cannot heal without serious medical intervention. And at his age, such intervention would likely be more stressful than he should be put through.

I was prepared for the worst. I still am. I’ve been through this so many times in the past with my own pets, and it never gets easier and it’s never not horrible. And when I tell you that it slammed me right back into the grief I’ve been through in the past two years, with the deaths of my mom and my uncle (who was like another parent to me)… well. As I said to my housemate — who is a psychologist! — I’ve clearly got a lot of unresolved trauma rattling around in me.

I feel another of my essays about my mental health coming on, but I’ll save that for another day.

—MaryAnn

PS: Things aren’t always this slow chez moi, and maybe you just want to get the Weekly Digest roundup and none of the other emails I send out during the week? Your subscription is totally under your control! Got to your Substack account settings, then My Subscriptions > Flick Filosopher > Edit > Email notifications, then uncheck whichever bits you don’t want to receive by email. (No matter what email settings you choose, you can always read stuff at the Flick Filosopher Substack site or in the Substack app. And of course everything is always at the homebase of FlickFilosopher.com.)

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new at flick filosopher, Apr 22–28

the beautiful 2021 British film ‘Nowhere Special’ finally gets a US theatrical release [pictured]

• A good reason to sign up for either my Substack or my Patreon, to get a heads-up in situations like this… [read more]

curated cinema: because Harvey Weinstein can go f**k himself for a change

• 2020’s The Assistant is on Kanopy in the US, BFI Player in the UK (and on lots of other services on both sides of the Atlantic, too). [read more]

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what I’m watching and bingeing

• The Good Place [Netflix US/UK]: very my enjoying my rewatch…

• Star Trek: Discovery S5 [Paramount+ globally; via Prime US, Prime UK]: it’s feeling a bit rote, and the whole 900-years-in-the-future thing doesn’t get enough play — like, it doesn’t feel much more futuristic than 23rd/24th-century Trek, and how is everyone not deeply traumatized to be so out of time? — but I love the cast and I’ll keep watching

• The X-Files [Hulu US/Disney+ UK]: did not get back to this in the past week

• Slow Horses S2 [Apple TV+ globally]: still haven’t gotten back to this…

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coming up at Flick Filosopher…

• tennis triangle Challengers

• action romantic comedy The Fall Guy

• road trip drama Bleeding Love, starring father and daughter Ewan and Clara McGregor

• queer parody The People’s Joker

• Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man

• lesbian crime romance Love Lies Bleeding

And I have not forgotten about these:

• Ava DuVernay’s Origin

• Paleolithic thriller Out of Darkness

• Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers

• the absolutely brutal The Zone of Interest

• Paul Giamatti in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers

• Wonka, finally

• Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction

• based-on-fact family wrestling drama The Iron Claw

• Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon

• Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn

• Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in May December

• Priscilla’s problematic romance with Elvis

• teen comedy Bottoms

• Barbie, finally, for real, promise

• murder mystery Anatomy of a Fall

• tween classic onscreen Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

And more!

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