Wild Gift

At the risk of sounding as if I'm shilling for a product here I'll go off on a bit of promotional overkill.

Spike Jonze film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic, Where The Wild Things Are, will hit the screens a week from tomorrow. When I first saw the trailer early this year, I actually wept. I was moved to tears by a movie trailer. I sent the trailer to Curry. He wept. Two middle-aged men crying at a trailer for movie from a children's book.

Imagining the book as a film has been a ghastly exercise over the years. To take something with such simplicity and "Hollywood" it with CG and cuteness has been an enormous fear for those of us that grant the book its pedestal status. Those fears have been quelled. Sendak has given his blessing. Jonze has battled the studio (and I mean really battled) and won.

I watched a making-of documentary last nite on HBO. I cried again. I am going out on a limb, but if the promise is fullfilled this may be one of the best films of the year.

When Jonze and co-writer, Dave Eggers, say that they have not made a children's movie, but instead a movie about childhood and its confusion, anger and fear, you know the book is in good hands.



a sidenote: the soundtrack of songs by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O, and a chorus of Langley School-like kids, is fantastic and excruciatingly beautiful. And yeah, even the music made me cry.