You Better Look Out Below

If The Children Don't Grow Up

"You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them – no matter how old or impressive they may be – as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much – we simply grow taller. Oh, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales." – Leo Rosten

That said, this is the trailer for Where The Wild Things Are, which has been made into a movie, obviously:



I love that book, and I hate movies based on books that I love. (For example, I refused to see 1984, which was based of course on George Orwell's novel by the same name. Here's why: One, I loved 1984 and I didn't want anyone else's vision of the work fucking up my own. Two, the movie poster I saw showed a man (Winston Smith perhaps) sitting at a wooden table in the cafeteria, and anyone who loves the book as much as I do knows that the tables in the cafeteria were made of metal. So clearly the filmmakers were asleep at the wheel there. Three, there's a tiny passage in the novel where Winston is sitting in his cubicle and he absent-mindedly scratches the bridge of his nose with a paperclip. I knew, I just knew, that that small, human-sized detail was not going to be in the film. It's not movie-important, that, and that is why I hate seeing movies based on books.)

Yes, I am a goddamn crank about shitty Hollywood filmmakers fucking up every book I love and every memory I have from my childhood. So here's how I feel about seeing this trailer for Where The Wild Things Are, a book I love:

I will absolutely see this movie.

I cried at the goddamned trailer, goddamn it, and while the look of the monsters was initially very fake and off-putting, I think there are a few seconds in there where they seem less like big clever suits of lumbering fakery and more like real creatures. I also really love the look of the light in this movie, that late afternoon glow that lights up so many of my childhood memories. Too, I'm willing to forgive this movie in advance in part because the trailer makes it seem like nothing about this movie is going to pander to the children who go to see it. There's nothing cutesy about it at all, I mean. And we all know that growing up is seriously hard work.

And If You Were Wondering How I Feel About You

Animals

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

--Frank O'Hara