All About Why Grainne is Boycotting "Where The Wild Things Are"

By: Grainne Rhuad

I'm not trying to be a buzz kill. I like kid's movies and especially those that are done well. In fact as I am sitting here typing I am watching "The Nightmare Before Christmas" one of my very favorites.

However I am Boycotting the Film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are."
The reason is this, I love, love, LOVE the Book.
The Book is a practically perfect book for kids. Almost no words and lots of room for personal imagination. It also allows the dreaming child in us all to be naughty and be made royalty in spite of it. It also points out to us that at the end of everything our mommies (and others who love us) stilllove us although we are naughty and yes even sometimes embrace our naughtiness.

I had this book when I was a child, I would stare and dream and make up on-going stories about how I would manage the island and the wild things if I were Max. As a kid it was still acceptable to send your children to bed without supper as a punishment and let me admit, it happened more than once to me, but this book got me through it.

While I have heard the movie is perfectly acceptable, I just can't confine my vision of the monster's to someone else's. I had always thought this book was Meant to be a personal visionary tool. I "knew" this becuase as I talked to other's my age and later children both my own and not, I found everyone made a different stories and sometimes many different stories from this book. Max's journey was interpreted differently and so was the wild rumpus.

I heard Terry Gross interview director Spike Jonze who said Maurice Sendak approached and to a certain extent bullied him to do the movie. No, that doesn't change my mind, I couldn't give a shite what Maurice Sendak wants. His book has taken on a life of its own for me. I also never wanted little trinkets like Wild Thing Dollys or Max's magical scepter the story was my lifeline for so long, that it transcended all that marketing that the publishing-house used to keep the book in places like Barnes and Noble.

It's okay if you see the movie and like it. But for me I shall keep my own stories, and side stories created from the book, besides I have a sneaking suspicion that Maurice Sendak wrote the book for himself and never understood what impact it would have on young pliable minds. He is famously not known for understanding or liking kids or people for that matter having given the New York Times this quote in 2008, "I hate people." going on to explain he likes his dogs much better.

In this case, for myself, I'll stick with the book

On Falling Down

Remember Michael Douglas in that movie Falling Down.(1993). A simple man whose day goes horribly wrong, we find out later it wasn’t just one or two things but several things that caused his absolute collapse.

Recently people of all walks of life have been experiencing extreme falling down situations. Some of them garner media attention like Nidal Malik Hasan, the Psychologist at Fort Hood that went on a shooting spree. Or Tiger Woods, White America’s favorite Black Man, Mr. Clean who could do no wrong. Other’s get attention only on local levels. Like the man who recently drove a car through the Methadone clinic lab in our area. Most people escape reporting altogether, maybe their neighbors just call the police on them because they are yelling more at their kids, or maybe their spouses are up at night worried because they are on walkabout after behaving strangely.

(Used by permission of Grainne Rhuad and Subversify)

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