The XX Factor: What women really think.

"Where The Wild Things Are" Is Depressing

Hanna, I think you’re exactly right that Where The Wild Things Are is alternately too boring and too scary for kids. And as counterintuitive as it might sound to say about a beautifully shot movie featuring overly emotional, jeering, violent, hybrid beasts who bicker, build forts, and knock holes in trees, I think it just might be a failure of imagination as well.

If Wild Things existed in a cultural universe that was not saturated with twee, quirk, and thirtysomething ennui—if, in other words, it existed in a universe where the McSweeney’s aesthetic was fringe—this movie might be fresh. Even as it is, the decision to make the wild things neurotic, angsty, misbehaving, and nitpicky initially plays like a surprising choice. When we first come upon the monsters, arguing in the forest, it’s jarring that they sound like unhappy versions of the teenagers from Dazed & Confused. Whatever you imagined the wild things to be like when reading the original, this wasn’t it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

Where the Wild Things Are: Leave the Kids at Home

Manohla Dargis said the movie “startles and charms and delights.” The book is fantastic. It was cold and rainy all weekend. So I took my children, of course, and was startled to discover a heavy divorce drama that alternately terrified and bored. There are many sublime and original moments in the movie. But overall, the experience is like being trapped in an est session from the 1970’s, with lots of people yelling and haranguing one pitiful little boy, and family breakdown (and Jim Nelson) looming in the background. Needless to say, it was barely appropriate for kids ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Someone Please Make a Trailer for Ira Sleeps Over

Where the Wild Things Shouldn't Be

A trailer (see below) for the upcoming film of Where the Wild Things Are is out on the Web, and while I know the world has bigger problems, watching it infuriated me. I don't want a real-life Max, who goes to school and has a backstory! I especially don't want to see his face while he peers at his parents kissing in their bedroom! Nor am I moved by the 2009 special-effects version of Maurice Sendak's 1963 monster illustrations. Why did Hollywood have to come for this short poem of a children's book, which I'II bet many of us know by heart?

The magic of children's literature is the magic of imagination, of making up the visual renderings and actions of the characters for yourself. I know that some books are filmmaking candy, and to the inevitable screen version of Harry Potter I am resigned. I'll even concede that once in a while the movie or TV version of a kids' book augments the original, though for me these exceptions are usually cartoons, like The Hobbit. (And no I am not pleased that there seems to be a real-life version of that one in the works.) But do the imagination thieves in Hollywood really have to rob me of Max? All I want from him are the few words Sendak gives him. No more.