Tom Scocca: Original Max wasn't a bad kid.
Tom Scocca: Max Eggers is a whiner.
Choire Sicha: Having read this story, I can assure you that Max Eggers is a little bitch.
Tom Scocca: Because Dave Eggers can't understand why the original Max would do the things he does if he isn't suffering from Hurt. It is Hurt that makes the world go round. Hurt and Problems.
Tom Scocca: This is like Jim Carrey's The Cat in the Hat. [ED NOTE: Which is, actually, Mike Myers, it turns out? Wow. That is how hard we blocked that out. Also we are thinking of The Grinch. Ugh.]
Choire Sicha: There is actually a significant difference between the Sendak book and this story, plotwise, also?
Tom Scocca: Besides that the latter rambles on forever?
Choire Sicha: They do have totally different endings.
Tom Scocca: Only because Eggers runs out of room after nine pages, which has gotten him as far as Maurice Sendak got in 184 words.
Tom Scocca: Sendak: "And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start."
Tom Scocca: Eggers: Blah blah blah blah the beasts gathered around blah blah blah Max understood that he was supposed to say something blah blah blah "Let the wild rumpus begin!"
Tom Scocca: I would say that the difference between that crisp "start" and Eggers' flaccid "begin" defines everything that could be said about the literary gap between the two, except I am also fixated on "understood that he was supposed to say something," which is essentially the epigram and epitaph for the literary imagination of Dave Eggers.
Tom Scocca: Maurice Sendak said something. Dave Eggers understands that one is supposed to have something to say.
Choire Sicha: I can see how doing this story would be an appealing exercise for a writer/screenwriter type person.
Tom Scocca: Because it was already illustrated?
Choire Sicha: I meant as a working process. But I suppose that doesn't not help!
Tom Scocca: The main appeal is that the original genius of Maurice Sendak has opened the gates of approval so wide that the Hollywood employees can roll just about anything through them without being impeded by criticism.
Tom Scocca: You may remember the exact same stunt from Julie & Julia. No one has to get consent to turn the marketing of the movie into a Cultural Event. No doubt the Times' culture section is planning blowout coverage of the Wild Things movie.
Choire Sicha: The Times culture section isn't doing that much "planning," God bless it.
Tom Scocca: I stand corrected. But I bet it will be there, regardless.
Choire Sicha: Well you know. These sections are forced to cover "news" "pegged" to "events." And what that becomes is: "a movies is being released." So: "What is this movie? It is this movie. This movie has a star."
Tom Scocca: If Warner Bros. can get a ten-page advertorial in the New Yorker, it can get Sunday culture for sure.
Choire Sicha: They can probably brand something on Arts & Leisure editor Scott Veale's behind, having come this far.
Tom Scocca: That's the laundering. It's Julia Child, but also Meryl Streep, so you see there is certified cultural quality there, at both ends of the process. What lies in between Julia and Streep? Um, some chick's blog? But: Streep IS Julia Child! We mean for you to take that as literally as possible–you can't say a bad thing about either one of those ladies, so the deal is done.
Tom Scocca: Now the most childlike of critically acclaimed novelists is bringing you an acclaimed children's book.
Choire Sicha: A Child Specialist.
Tom Scocca: With a cool rock soundtrack, because nobody has to grow up anymore. Who wouldn't want to be attached to something as great and fun and meaningful as that?
Choire Sicha: I would like to never get old.
Tom Scocca: Bloggers will post the trailer, because it was so cool to be young and it is so young to be cool.
Choire Sicha: It is, well, sort of manipulatively moving? Or maybe actually moving? In part (or maybe even in whole) because of how it trades upon the original.
Choire Sicha: It's sort of like if you went to the theater and your mom was there. Reading Good Night, Moon to you. OR WORSE: The Tenth Good Thing About Barney.
Tom Scocca: Of course it is manipulatively moving. I will not watch it, because I still can't get the image of Jim Carrey in cat makeup out of my way when I turn to The Cat in the Hat. [ED NOTE: Except apparently sort of not, because it is Mike Myers!] I don't need a bunch of CGI fur getting between me and storytime.
Choire Sicha: That Cat in the Hat thing was no f'ing good.
Tom Scocca: It was the same piece of shit as this, only positioned for crass lowbrow appeal rather than crass upper-middlebrow appeal.
Choire Sicha: Well, and pretween/tween/posttween variations.
Tom Scocca: Jim Carrey [ED NOTE: And also Mike Myers!] is gratingly ingratiating in a way not unlike the way Eggers is gratingly ingratiating. SEE WHAT I AM DOING FOR YOU? Both of them remind me of this shifty stray dog we took in when I was a kid, which stole food and eventually killed one of my cats.
Choire Sicha: So what happened to the dog?
Tom Scocca: The dog was gotten rid of.
Tom Scocca: I'm sure Dave Eggers is donating all the lucre from this Hollywood turn to the betterment of disadvantaged children. Just like Mitch Albom pitches in at a soup kitchen.
Choire Sicha: Well, sadly, Dave probably is.
Tom Scocca: Yet this story and this project are still morally bad.
Choire Sicha: Oh of course! I don't really care if he uses the money to airlift raped Congolese children to a Paris boutique for a day of shopping. It's still ill-gotten.
Tom Scocca: Moral parasites love to do good deeds.
Tom Scocca: Where the Wild Things Are did not need to be a movie, and it surely did not need to be a Dave Eggers movie, and it just galactically did not need to be a Dave Eggers novelization of a Dave Eggers screenplay in my New Yorker this week. With a publicity still from the studio as illustration. Guess what? Our copy of Where the Wild Things Are is already illustrated. By Maurice Sendak.
Choire Sicha: Yes but he clearly left lots out.
Tom Scocca: Yeah, he left out the part where Max Eggers goes running away from home, in the night, tears all over his face, to the cul de sac and on to the bay, where he clambers around and finds a boat.
Choire Sicha: Yes. He left out... motivation. Which is what makes a movie.
Tom Scocca: Cf.: "and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day" Sendak left out the yelling family fights and the menacing older kids. Instead, all he supplied was: wild things.
Tom Scocca: Oy, the boat. "It seemed strange that a boat like this, a sturdy, viable boat, would be unoccupied. He had been coming to the bay for years and had never seen a boat like this, alone and without an owner. There was no sign of anyone nearby. The boat was his if he wanted it."
Tom Scocca: So "an ocean tumbled by" is just impossible for Eggers to turn into Eggers-logic. There's no way to make that happen in a plodding Young Adult narrative.
Tom Scocca: And then "with a private boat for Max," which is completely efficient and self-contained, becomes this blather about what kind of boat it is and how nobody is in it and how if nobody is in it therefore he should be able to take it.
Tom Scocca: Alan Dean Foster would have handled it a lot better.
Choire Sicha: Harry Dean Stanton would have handled it better.
Tom Scocca: But the New Yorker doesn't print Alan Dean Foster so much.
Tom Scocca: Hey, Eggers: rewriting Where the Wild Things Are doesn't make you Maurice Sendak any more than beating off to a picture of Posh Spice makes you David Beckham.
Choire Sicha: *blinks*
Tom Scocca: Keep your literary gifts away from the children's books. The children don't need you touching their lives. Not in that way.
Previously:
· Five Ways Ben Affleck Interviews Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn!
· The Last Sad Gasps of the 'Baltimore Sun'
Tom Scocca's first book, Beijing Welcomes You, is in the hands of his editor at Riverhead Books. He also writes intermittently at Tom Scocca dot com and for newspapers and magazines. He would likely write for you, for money, if you have some. Ask him!
You're thinking of Mike Meyers as the Cat in the Hat. Equally repugnant. Jim Carrey was the Grinch.
Oh my God, are we??? We may be!
CORRECTIONS APPENDED!
I have too many favorite parts of this to recap here, and it seems like it would be bad form just to repaste the whole post in a comment, so. Thank you, guys.
Can't someone please get Harry Dean Stanton to write something already, like books for young children who'll look sixty for the next eighty years?
While I don't doubt your assessment that the story itself is terrible, I feel I have to question your assertion that printing it was some unforgiveable ethical lapse. I understand at a gut level while a short-storyification of a portion of an upcoming movie with a multimillion-dollar marketing budget feels meretricious in a way that an excerpt from (to use your example) the next Jhumpa Lahiri does not. But aren't films works of art in their own way, no matter what the size of their marketing budget? And are not Jhumpa Lahiri books subjects of commerce that make tidy sums for their author and a number of hangers-on and middlepersons in the literary industry? The difference is one of scale, not of kind. If this was a well-written short-storyfication of a film that you ended up liking, would you feel the same way?
I think I agree, but I hate to let logic get in the way of a good beatdown.
It's a fine question, actually! (One I've been asking myself for weeks.)
The story, and the screenplay, is itself a work of art. It has to be; it's something someone made. And the movie itself, steeped as movie-making is in commerce, is also a piece of art. (And I do have high hopes for it. I might really like it! I like a Spike Jonze Joint.)
But I absolutely do believe this is a pegged event for the promotion of the movie. Between the studio-supplied art--and I speak as someone who's been doing a weekly silly Q&A feature for a major newspaper for the last three years or so, and for which even that little thing we would NEVER accept studio art--to the timing, to the Brand Naminess Quotient (in which you ask: would the New Yorker publish this submission from my Aunt Susan? No they would not): well, it all smells.
(Um, sorry: don't try to parse that grammar and punctuation.)
In decades gone by, stories in the New Yorker--and I mean nonfiction ones--were never "pegged." The front of the book was about recent events; the rest of the magazine was about things that writers and editors deemed important. This has changed--but one never thought that the FICTION section would now become subject to the relentless, horrible "pegging" of everything.
(I use "pegging" in the sense of "tying to upcoming events," not in the Dan Savage sense of "people using strap-ons," by the way.)
And also, while the movie may be an adaptation of the book, which may or may not be fine, the expanded remix/"short story version" in the 'New Yorker' was, as a piece of writing and also as a thing with a relation to a preexisting piece of art, just horrifying.
Did I finish my thought entirely? Maybe not. SUPER-HUNGRY.
So anyway, I think the publication of the story is crass and pandering and incorrect for the publication.
Except quite possibly maybe I am living in the past, oh well, where everything is noble and clean and merit-based. (Which certainly is a distortion; which I should know, as someone without an Ivy League degree.)
Also, I have finally figured out what these (wonderful, wonderful) columns remind me of: Socratic dialogues, if, instead a representative of the usual batch of humps and morons, Socrates' interlocutor was a cheerful, clever gay who liked exclamation marks, and Socrates himself was much, much grumpier.
Funny. I thought of Alcibiades in Symposium. Kind of close!
A bit closer to Herodas's dialogues, I'd have said...
Eggers is writing Wildthings fan fiction for the New Yorker?
I would say that the difference between that crisp "start" and Eggers' flaccid "begin" defines everything that could be said about the literary gap between the two, except I am also fixated on "understood that he was supposed to say something," which is essentially the epigram and epitaph for the literary imagination of Dave Eggers.
**This is why I put down the hardcore gay porn (sometimes)and go to The Awl for all of my smartypants writing. This passage makes me moan.
I zoomed right in on that photo credit too. Haven't gotten beyond that to read the story yet. Luckily for me perhaps I grew up in a place where WTWTA wasn't part of the canon.
It's funny, because I always agree 100% with Choire and Tom, but in this case I disagree 100%.
New Yorker fiction has been pegged for as long as I've been reading it. Not always, I imagine; I'm sure there was a time when it was just short stories that came in manila envelopes from John Updike, whether or not John Updike had a novel coming out soon (although, it being John Updike, he always did). I guess I could go back through my New Yorker DVD-ROM collection to see when it was that the magazine started running excerpts from forthcoming collections or novels, but I don't have the heart to subject my poor CPU to the rigors of that awful RAM-devouring interface.
At any rate: I don't buy that this is different! I'm not convinced, for example, that Warner Bros. placed this story. I think that there's a 99% chance it was his agent, Andrew Wylie, who certainly knows his way around that fiction department. But even if I'm wrong, I think it wouldn't matter, because the book is viewed by many -- including me -- as a potentially interesting literary event. Eggers has a book of narrative nonfiction out right now that has been widely praised; the movie and its screenplay come with the blessing of Maurice Sendak; the novel seems to me to be an honest attempt to make a story about childhood by a writer who is, I agree, "the most childlike of critically acclaimed novelists." But why is that bad? Why is a novel about a child, that children might also be able to read, that takes the concerns of children seriously, necessarily not literary?
How is this story, for example, different than Tony Earley's "Jim the Boy," a novel from the point of view of an eight-year-old in rural Depression-era North Carolina, written gracefully and gently enough that any child could enjoy it? It too was excerpted in the New Yorker, if I remember correctly, before it came out. That novel was amazing and meant a lot to me. I have high hopes that "The Wild Things" might do the same.
Yes, the difference is that there wasn't a movie of "Jim the Boy" coming out simultaneously with Earley's novel. But "The Wild Things" is still a novel, a separate thing from the movie, a work of art created by a respected (if not by everyone) author.
I haven't read the book. I read the story, and I really liked it. And maybe at its base this is what my disagreement boils down to: I like the story, I think I will like the book, and I hope I will like the movie. You guys hate the story, know you will hate the book, and won't even see the movie. I think we are both equally annoyed by Dave Eggers' public persona and how much more perfect it is than everyone else's, but I just don't think this qualifies as a hurlable offense.
Or, more simply, as Choire says in his comments, it is a question of merit. I think that this story has merit, and that the book very well could have merit as well. It seems as though you guys think that the story does not have merit, and that the book could never have merit -- that on top of the story being awful, no book produced under these circumstances could ever have merit. But the circumstances of its creation aren't part of my judgment as to this project's possible merits. I think it's at least potentially interesting, and I'm glad the New Yorker published it.
You are VERY confused on the authors' feelings toward the book. Sendak's original work is universally considered a masterpiece of illustrated children's literature. The movie and Eggers appear to be defacing this, hence the ill will.
Also, you probably have bad taste!
Agreed!
Kois, I was disagreeing with you...
Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence.
Pâté was a regrettable name for an unfortunate food.
He swung it around, he stabbed trees and rocks, he whacked branches and relieved them of their snowy burden.
Very much so!
Yeah, Mike Myers was the only thing that actually made me cringe about Inglorious Basterds, too.
No! No! No!
I say that as someone who, until mere hours ago, pretty much agreed with you. Unless you're joking, and think that the Mike Myers scene was brilliant! Which it is! It made no sense until I was at work, thinking about how Tarantino plays with accents and languages - a problem he plays with throughout this film. Mike Myers is in far too much make-up doing his really clever, really lovingly crafted English accent, and we all hear how clever and lovingly crafted his English accent is, usually for the purposes of his parodies - and so also recognizing it as a fake, something we would not expect from, say, your average German. Suddenly, hop and skip into the saloon - excuse me, French bar - and you've got a British man pretending to be German; to our ears, his accent is fantastic, he sounds like a kraut, looks like a kraut . . . but to a German, well, a German senses something wrong, he can hear that something isn't quite right . . . and the rest is history. Or not actually history because, well, it's not real. But history nonetheless.
All well and good! Still. Does not not make me cringe whenever I see Mike Myers on screen.
Leaving aside whether the magazine should or shouldn't be pimping a film, Sendak worked with Eggers and co-writer/director Spike Jonze on the film -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG16ceUP3v4&feature=player_embedded -- and has approved of the finished product. Max Records, the young actor who plays Max said recently that Sendak told him, "I really love this movie. I hope people like it. If not, they can go straight to hell."
The last time I hurled the New Yorker at the wall was also of the fiction section. ( On account of this piece of shit , for which I still believe the editor should be fired. I mean how would the narrator not know the age of the protagonist but know his innermost thoughts??!?? Entry-level P.O.V. problems do not belong in the New Yorker's fiction section!)
Anyways, living where I live, I get my New Yorker three weeks late, but when this issue arrives, I shall be ready with a well toned hurtling arm. My pre-existing condition of not being fond of Eggers, plus my tendency to view the New Yorker as the last major publication I can read without second-guessing every editorial decision they make practically guarantees something will be flung in anger.
The Sendak seal of approval doesn't negate -- or even mitigate -- any of Tom and Choire's criticism.
Just because his children's book is brilliant doesn't mean he can't go on to participate a movie of it that sucks.
This is what New Age psychobabble does to the imagination: it turns wildness into a developmental stage. The wildness of childhood is a pathology that we can blame on society and work out in therapy.
Also, I am dreading the hipster target market merchandising.
I will admit, the trailer made me weep, it was so beautifully done- like stepping into the book, as many have said. While I was troubled by what appeared to be a back story about Max being somesort of neglected child (being of the opinion myself that the appeal of the Sendak story was that Max was safe the whole time; that Wild Things represented the natural fear of the unknown that comes with being a child coming to know the world, but all children in the idealized world of Sendak, are protected by a loving family whose very purpose is to keep a child safe and loved and unaware of Grown Up Problems like divorce or romantic love)
I watched that trailer 10 times, and every time it moved me to tears (perhaps those tears were from remembering the very shelter that children are ideally afforded - a yellow-eyed teeth-gnashing monster can be kept at bay with a nightlight, a bill collector calling constantly is not so easily thwarted. Alternately, maybe I just missed the sound of my mother's voice reading it to me.)
That said, I read today that they are making the movie version into a video game, which, I could be wrong, but, NO THANK YOU*.
Anyways, to paraphrase another inappropriate thing involving kids: ramblerambleramble,die
*Unless I somehow get to be Catherine Keener, because even being her in a video game would be sweet.
Yeah, I HATED this thing in the New Yorker. I felt like it had been written by someone who had never actually been a child.
And I actually tend to be an Eggers apologist. For example -- I liked "A Heartbreaking Work." Out and out liked it. I also liked "What is the What."
But as wretched a failure as I think the New Yorker piece was, I don't think it marks any new territories in movie marketing. Instead, I agree with the guy who thought Eggers's agent placed the piece. It's my understanding that Eggers decided to write this novelization sometime around the same time that the movie plans got firmed up. People are treating it like a regular book. So I think the New Yorker just treated it like a regular first serial rights sale (that is, the way The New Yorker treats first serial, which is to take material from throughout the entire book, string it all together, and not indicate anywhere that it's from a book).
Loved this: "It's a terrible capitalist construction that violence against objects is actually violence."
And every other thing in Shadow Editors, it seems.
What a fucking surprise, snarky bloggers annoyingly chat to one another in sarcastic, quipy, self-loving ways. It's so much easier to sit back, get pissed off and remain ignorant than, you know, make art.
I'll grant you that The New Yorker running a novelization of an upcoming film in their fiction section could be taken as blatant advertisement space masqueraded as content. BUT, whether you like Eggers or not (you do not), he's a widely read, critically praised novelist adapting one of the classics of children's literature. You know who ASKED him to do that? Maurice Sendak (you do like him). Mr. Sendak also LOVES the film that Mr. Eggers and Spike Jonze have made of his book. His words: "There will be controversy about this, but the film has an entire emotional, spiritual, visual life which is as valid as the book. He's (Jonze) done it like me whether he's known it or not, but in a brilliant, modern, more fantastical way that takes nothing from my book, but enhances, enriches my book."
To claim the entire undertaking is immoral, that the film is akin to the recent films of "The Cat in the Hat" or "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" is insanity born upon ignorance. Spike Jonze has made two feature films of great distinction that are, yes, art. His cinematographer Lance Acord is one of the premiere visual technicians in the world. There is no indication that any of the chief creative persons involved in the film are in it to make slick product to fill kids heads with junk and sell them toys.
Take issue with The New Yorker, take issue with the quality of text (though how one could take issue with a piece of fiction that contains the line "We’ll cut his brains out and make him eat ’em! He’ll have to think from his stomach!" I, in all seriousness, do not know), take issue with Warner Brothers, they are responsible for what is clearly a horrible offense to your delicate eyes and soggy brain, by god they must have ruined that rainy Sunday after noon you carved out to go through The New Yorker to find things to try and eviscerate on your blog Monday morning.
Mr. Sendak's book will still exist long after the movie has stopped spinning on space discs in the year 2000, along with your precious memories of it. The book is ten fucking sentences long. It provokes your imagination, and the film seems to be aiming for that too, albeit on a larger, more fleshed out scale. How is that wrong?
Since when was Eggers "critically praised"? Are standards this low? Even his best books get mixed reviews.
There are a couple different trailers of the movie on Youtube (go search for them) as well as a 5 minute featurette with Sendak and Jonze flattering each other, plus some clips of the film. (Artic Fire soundtrack, OF COURSE).
When I heard that they were make a movie of Where the Wild Things Are, I just knew it was going to suck. Just like Bridge to Terrabithia and Cat in the Hat and The Grinch that Stole Christmas and Starship Troopers and yadda yadda yadda.
That book still seems to glow and hum with magic energy to me, even know as a middle aged dude. I dressed up as Max on Halloween several times in the 70s when I was a young boy. Yes, the trailers did move me to tears. James Galdofini as the main monster friend just seems perfect in so many ways. In fact, just writing about the trailers is causing a little welling of liquidity right now....
So, hopes are high that the movie is in fact like "stepping into the book". My little son has just started walking so he's too young for the book but I hope someday to introduce him to it and fire up his imagination and thirst for adventure.
And, yes, if there is a Max figurine I will buy it for my boy. Although I bet he would prefer a 2 foot tall monster to wrestle with.
Note that my mother added: "No, I think YOU would like a 6-foot monster to wrestle with." Damn straight I would!
I dislike everything about this story â€" not least the clumsy prose in which the wild things are mired â€" but what felt like an insult was the magazine's publishing a "young adult" or "kiddie lit" story in a place where I expect to find writing for grown-ups. In other books, Dave Eggers has shown himself to be an unparalleled master at writing about the assorted agonies of childhood and youth, and it may be that, with this novelization, he will enchant young readers. But for The New Yorker to publish the story was to fill its fiction slot with news. I do hope that no one over the age of twenty-five derived any literary satisfaction from the final third of the excerpt.
i've reviewed a few children's movies, and now more than ever i guess the question nags: is this movie pandering to experience at the expense of innocence? shrek, etc. this is marketing rather than art, right? selling children's films to their adult parents? i watched miyazaki's ponyo a couple weeks ago. wonderful film for children. adults: not so much. i liked it a lot for this reason. the previews that preceded the film included (where the) wild things (are) and anderson's fantastic mr. fox. my question, which may not be but seems fair, is will kids enjoy theses films? they managed to enjoy shrek, clearly and regrettably, but will they enjoy these more sophisticated versions of the shrek trend?
related: do kids respond to the arcade fire? that band always struck me as sounding gestural and nostalgic, like it needed footnotes to truly enjoy--not in a complicated and smart or good way, only that its textures and spaces were the shadows of certain antecedents.
i don't have kids, but i want them to be happy and have their own good art. is that what's happening here?
actually, i was trying to take it easy on these two new films by saying that they would be more sophisticated versions of the shrek trend, which is not quite right since sophistication (reflexivity and euphemism) is the problem with shrek. what i meant is that these two films will cater to adulthood in a different but equally bad way, and that way is... i don't know, something to do with indie rock and design snobbery and obama?
Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Editorial inclusion of fiction-as-advertisting and whatever your feelings are about Eggers aside...You didn't like Starship Troopers?
It was missing that satirical portrayal of fascism that made the novel truly subversive.
I totally agree that this should have been a "Shouts and Murmurs" (that's what your point is? I think?) but here's my question: Even if I agree, is it still OK for me to buy the fur covered edition to complete my collection of fur covered books (Margaret Wise Brown's Little Fur Family, Spiegelman's Open Me I'm a Dog and The Highwayman: Narrative of the Life of James Allen alias George Walton)?
Have not really looked at the internet in a couple weeks. This was the only thing I missed!
I am not an automatic fan of Maurice Sendak -- "In the Night Kitchen" is just dumb and fucked up, and scares my kids -- but the best Sendak books are a very nice combination of mischievous art and carefully worded stories that are fun for the grownups and children alike.
Max, as Tom says, is not a twee emo butthurt kid. He is a regular kid, who is being a little motherfucker because that happens, and he has a pile of self-confidence and imagination and that particular Sendak style of child indignation.
He is not sad and he is not lonely. He is running loose in a fucking wolf suit, for fuck's sake, threatening to kill and devour his (human) mother, because that's how wolves roll.
So she says oh yeah, well go to bed you nut, no dinner, calm down. And he stomps up and -- because like most children at this age and this hour of the day, he is both spastic and exhausted -- he falls asleep, immediately, and has this quick, crazy, wonderful dream.
And he wakes up a little while later, because he smells the sandwich and soup that his mom set out in his room, because obviously she was trying to make him dinner and he was being nuts and then he conked out and minutes later she finds her kid passed out, in a wolf suit, and she leaves his dinner.
What would possess someone to muck that up?
I hear you, Ken. I'm worried about the "spying on my Mom and her creepy new boyfriend" jag that apparently is part of the movie. Max (in the book) isn't a damaged little kid ready to injure himself and he sure as shit ain't weighed down by his family life or any guilt trip.
Holy crap! Ken Layne!
Gee, I wonder what the second half of this unnecessarily-paginated conversation looks like.
It looks like this!
http://www.theawl.com/2009/08/the-shadow-editors-hands-off-that-rumpus-dave-eggers/2
Another perspective on what’s going on here: the script of a good movie can suck. The movie can be visually stunning, “moving,” well acted, emotionally realistic, etc., and yet the script be lousy by the standards of written texts. People who read and write don’t like that, but there it is. The short story fails, because it needs the rest of the Hollywood Gesamtkunstwerk.
For what it’s worth, I too loathed the story and scoffed at the obvious advertising.
"Hey, Eggers: rewriting Where the Wild Things Are doesn't make you Maurice Sendak any more than beating off to a picture of Posh Spice makes you David Beckham. "
Wow. For the win.
Also, I am annoyed that they're also turning Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl into a 3d animated (I assume) pukefest. Just sayin'.
It's not 3D, and it's not CG, and from the looks of it's far from a pukefest you rotten fuck. It's stop-motion, Wes Anderson adapted and directs.
Here's a look (you rotten fuck).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGU8CrXEXXg
I haven't been called a rotten fuck in ages!
In my defense, I was going by the poster image...It had the look of CGI, and since that's the going thing these days, I jumped to the conclusion that Hollywood was making *another* attempt to cash in on a beloved children's book (what, hard to believe?).
And since this particular beloved children's book was one of my favourites when I was wee, I didn't even want to look into it for more info, lest I become sunk in depression.
My apologies, you dirty fuck.
(I'm still not watching the trailer.)
Oh and here's your NY Times Magazine story, 7 pages. Jonze is on the cover.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06jonze-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1