I gave this film a 7 because of the emotional response to the cruelty demonstrated by the characters in the film.These characters destroyed the hope of an innocent being.I had more feelings for the poor cat than I did for either character. That their complacency and cruel disregard for the promise of unfulfilled hope they gave to this poor animal led to an innocent beings death.Truly despicable that they should allow such innocence to perish because of their stupidity and selfish disregard for life.Both characters should have perished in the end for the cruel ending they brought upon an innocent creature who's hopes were destroyed by an undeserved death.To allow to die through false hope is terribly cruel to an innocent creature.

The opening lines of Jason and Sophie is what this movie is all about. Sophie ask for some water because she thinks Jason is getting up and Jason states he is just changing position. Neither one gets the water, instead they play a game about mind control and stopping time.I so truly enjoy movies that offer up great symbolism for the viewer to contemplate when the story is over. In my opinion the relationship between Jason and Sophie has been over for some time and as Paw Paw says in the opening "Have you ever been in the darkness? Then you know this is something not appropriate to talk about". Jason and Sophie have entered the darkness of their relationship and neither one is willing to talk about it. Paw Paw is their collective conscience speaking to them internally.The remainder of this marvelous film is just showing how Jason deals with the reality and how Sophie deals with this reality. Sophie feels she needs to bury her inner child (thus the little girl digging the hole and trying to sleep in it) and jump into a full blown relationship with an older man. Sophie cannot do this and she crawls back into the womb of her relationship with Jason as symbolized by the yellow very stretchy tee shirt. Jason on the other hand seeks a less stressful path but must deal with the inevitable change when he realized he cannot stop time and continue with Sophie otherwise everything else stops with it. Their relationship has stopped growing and Sophie has damaged it.Sophie returns to find Jason resolved to the end of their love. Sophie goes to bed bringing us back to the darkness Paw Paw speaks of at the beginning of the movie while Jason stays in the light reading.

A retarded couple decide to adopt a cat and arrange to collect one from a sanctuary in a month's time when it has finished medical treatment. They are warned that if they fail to collect on time it will be euthenized. Realising that this awesome responsibility will mean the end of their old lives they decide to live the next month as if it is their last. He quits his old job and finds an even worse one, while she quits hers and seeks fame as an internet sensation, failing miserably. She either consoles or punishes herself for this with a shallow sexual relationship with an older creep who makes his young daughter dig her own grave then buries her in it up to her neck at night. Her depressed boyfriend consoles himself by confiding in an octogenarian philosopher, and the moon. They are both so absorbed by their own pathetic little problems that they miss the deadline and the cat is put down.The cat knows nothing of any of this, only that it is going to be adopted some time in the near future. In its occasional monologues to us it describes its joy at knowing that soon it will be taken home by a kind, caring couple and that it will never be cold, or wet, or hungry, or lonely ever again. After death it describes its surprise at finding itself, in spirit, still in the same cage, apparently for ever.I'm a cat lover and this broke my heart. As soon as the film finished I found my cats and made a huge fuss of them to cheer myself up. They thought I had gone soft in the head.Samuel Becket wrote plays about people like this, infuriating because of their inertia, their complete inability to move forward with their lives and find joy, or even authentic misery. His plays only make sense to me if I decide that these are not characters but thoughts inside someone's head. His plays are about unproductive thought, the ideas that stop us from finding the will power to seize control of our own lives and instead make us weak and passive. The pathetic 30-something couple are a circular internal monologue that cannot be defeated through discourse, an ego game that can only be abandoned altogether by an act of will. The cat is a baby, a better job, a better house, a move to another town, or anything that promises the possibility of change, unless it is forgotten about because the thinker cannot rise above his/her ego games.The cat is The Future.Cat lovers: does that help you to feel any better?

Controversial The Future is a 2011 film that tells the story of an eccentric couple in their mid 30s who lives in a Los Angeles tiny and bohemian flat. Narrated by Paw-Paw, the injured stray kitten that they have adopted, the film tells how Sophie (Miranda July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater)'s lives change dramatically during the month that they have to wait for taking the cat home. Its initial naiveté ends up being blurred by the shadows provoked by the protagonists' decision to break with their daily routine to fight for their own dreams as if they have been told they have only four weeks to live. Soon the adventure is over and in their blind and desperate search of their paths their steps grow more and more away.Heartbreaking, absurd, surrealistic, twee and bizarre at the same time, The Future is a piece of independent cinema that cannot be overlooked just because of the presence of disturbing elements such as the talking cat (whose high-pitched, childish voice rumbling in the dark is a powerful beginning by the way). Miranda July, director, writer and star of the film, is not just "being weird for the sake of being weird", but uses fantastic and bizarre images and situations to talk about our biggest taboos: the frailty of love, the futility of dreams, the anxiety about the passage of time and…the fear of death.With their scruffy curls and their apathetic attitude towards life, Sophie and Jason seem to be the perfect couple. By seeing them lied down on the couch with their feet entangled, the spectator realizes that they felt really comfortable being together. The image of Jason peacefully sleeping over Sophie's chest (sweet for some, twee for others) is also a very faithful representation of true love, as well as Jason's attempt to stop time forever reflects very well how heartbreak feels. Miranda July said in an interview that she intended to describe: "the bittersweet vertigo of true love". Despite the audience does not doubt in the sincerity and profundity of the feelings of the couple, it is forced to see how circumstances and human weakness makes their love begin falling apart. Firstly, to understand why they (as us ourselves) start panicking when the words "a 5 years commitment" are brought up, it is necessary to come back to the kitten wounded in her paw. Like Paw-Paw, who patiently waits for the couple to start his real life (she's even counting the days), we are always waiting for something good to happen, for the real beginning of our lives. And when we reach the thirties, we start to question ourselves if that beginning is not already gone, get depressed for having wasted the first half of our life and look at the future even more anxiously than before. This is more or less what happens to Sophie and Jason, whom the idea of looking after a kitten -requiring a total care- for the next five years of their lives, make them think of their (scary) future: "We're 35 now ... by the time the cat dies, we'll be 40 ... and 40 might as well be 50 ... and after that, spare change." "Spare change?" "Less than a dollar-- not enough to get anything you want …" Jason's words reflect our anxiety about the passage of time as we cannot help feeling frustrated when the years pass by without us having reached the milestones we set for ourselves. Nonetheless in the film July, who said of life "I rush through it, like I'm being chased", warns us about the dangers that this feeling of "being always late" (late to live?) provokes. The Future not only make us consider how useless is to be always projecting into when it's going to be "better", but also make us question the importance of our lifetime dreams. It kind of helps us to get rid of the endless frustration caused by the contrast between our high expectations and our day-to-day reality. Like Sophie and Jason, everyone suffers from the Cervantine conflict, that is to say, the conflict between the world as we have imagined it and the world as it is. The story of Sophie and Jason somehow questions the futility of dreams, often unattainable and absurd (remembering Jason's: "I always thought I'd be a world leader").How is it possible we cannot live happily just because we have not achieved some pretentious (generally childish) life goals? The Future, although has not the answer to the question, teaches us to open our eyes to our own limitations and stop feeling as if we deserved something better in life so as to start really enjoying ours. Life is not about waiting things to happen, but making things happen, as July said in No One Belongs Here More Than You: "Don't wait to be sure. Move, move, move" July says that she intended to describe "the bittersweet vertigo of true love". Here an intense fear (vertigo) is intimately linked to an intense love, as imagining spending a whole life with someone is scary because from the beginning everyone already knows how the story ends, one dying in the arms of the other. Hence marriage makes you inevitably realize your own mortality and finiteness. Some optimism is hidden, nevertheless, behind the pessimistic tone of the film. No matter what happens we always have to remember the enigmatic words of Joe Putterlik played by Joe Putterlik himself, an eccentric old man who Miranda met in a street market. This old man who participated in the film shortly before dying, tell us with his example that until you are dead, never is too late to live. So remember: "This is just the beginning"."Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it is about learning to dance in the rain"Anonymous