I am very annoyed

I think you are paranoid and misinterpret movies for something else.


Do you think that this movie will make some people shoot dogs and whatnot?


For most people, they already know that shooting animals for no reason is bad and immoral so even if this movie was pro-cruelty (which it was not) it wouldn't affect you.

It will only affect you if you are a born psychopath.

for sane people, they will look at the movie and think something like
"oh poor dog, and violence is so stupid"

but a psychopath will watch the movie and think
"ooo, shooting dogs that looks fun, ha ha ha"


and just so you know, youth violence has decreased a lot in the last 20 years

only once have i ever encountered senseless violence, a stupid kid literally killed a butterfly by breaking its wings.

*beep* assh**e

so i just though you should now that your family will be safe as long as none of them are born psychopaths

Society is a real mess. However, all you can do is take care of your kids, raise them right, and hope that they do good.

This was a great movie, but to be honest, the McCormick father was a bit of a caricature of a bad guy.

The movie was extremely challenging on several levels. For me, the animal cruelty and senseless violence in the first scenes was, of course, extremely disturbing. What happened subsequently, however, was worse: a steady escalation to lethal violence that even Avery finally concedes he had played a major role in bringing about.

The issues were not black-and-white by any means; When one takes the most righteous cause to extremes and refuses to back off or let somebody else prevail --- even if that somebody is wrong, unjust and infuriating --- then the consequent loss of life and cycle of bloodshed and rfetribution eclipses any fundamental righteousness. The end cannot justify the means. Was Red the dog appropriately avenged or honored by what happened in his name?

There is an ethos --- not always American, not always male --- that says one must seek redress for a wrong or one is weak, spineless, and worthless. If the law, for whatever reason, does not work in one's favor, then one must seek justice outside that law. If that mission involves trespassing, provoking, stalking, publicly humiliating, then so be it --- and Avery used all of those tactics to exacerbate the pathology of the McCormick boy and his father and push them beyond their own fragile boundaries. If Avery was the sane and moral one, as most of us would feel, then he certainly ceded that status by his acts.

Of course Danny was sick and hateful, but he was goaded outside his limits, where Avery, an experienced warrior, was able to terrorize and then kill him with legal impunity. The boy would have probably been an a-hole all his life, but he still didn't deserve the death penalty at age 17, administered by a vigilante feuding with his father. Not to mention the innocent bother's death.

In real life, the lesson of this movie that I would explain to my own children would be that vigilante justice is never warranted. Once the law is abandoned in our conflicts, we risk primal death; the protection of civilization is destroyed, and we return to the dark and bloody history we evolved from. What should Avery have done? Probably sued in small claims court and then dropped the matter, whatever the outcome. Cried over his dog's grave, and tghen bought a new pup. Everybody would have lived, though with a very bad taste in their mouths. It wouldn't have made a very good movie, of course.

I agree with you. Yes, it's only a movie, but there's also plenty of kids who act like this (maybe not quite as violently but who act similarly) and have idiot non-parents who indulge them their every action because they can't be bothered with being real parents. I think that was the most disquieting aspect of this entire movie: the subtext and themes about bad parenting and how profoundly it affects kids.

pauljohn...

Not sure what you're "very annoyed" about. Please be specific.

Retrojunk has a point. Take Eddie Murphy, a comic genius. Look at the vapid drivel he has produced ever since he made the mistake of procreating. I swear, people reproduce, and their humanity goes down the gurglar along with the afterbirth and their sense of humour.

Don't take your dog with you when you go fishing - you'll be fine!

Why do the brits have such a history of overreacting to films
Just look at the film nasites scare of the 80s... And was the world going to hell then?

The youth of today are fine, especially in the UK - In the state, I will admit there is a problem with over-imprisonment, a similar case is true where I live in Canada - But this isn't so much "the world going to hell" as it is a product of terrible things like the war on drugs, which both costs us money, creates a profitable black market, increases chance of harm and makes it more available to kids (when I was a teen, it was far easier to find weed than to find someone with ID to get booze).

If you really think society is going to hell, don't blame the youth, and instead work to battle the evil systems preying on them.