Quodlibets

Another wasted $20

***There may be spoilers in this post, so if you're planning on seeing "Where the Wild Things Are", don't read it.

Let me start out by saying that the "Where the Wild Things Are" trailer made me teary-eyed.  It was probably a combination of the song ("Wake Up" by Arcade Fire, a beautiful, beautiful song), and the images of the Wild Things--amazing and hairy and also beautiful.  I don't have a great deal of feeling for the original book by Sendak; of course I knew of it, of course I've read it in the past, but it meant nothing to me.  (Unlike "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," which is one of the touchstone books of my childhood.  But that's another story.)  So my teary state wasn't brought on by my emotional attachment to the book.  It was produced purely by the lovely trailer.

And I am so sorry to say it, but that trailer was so much better than the movie, it was sad.  About halfway through, I used my phone to check the football scores, and I realized that a) I wanted to be at home watching the games and b) oh my god, I was bored.  Bored out of my head.  And there was still a LOT of movie left.  Now, there were a lot of problems with the movie--producing boredom, yes?--but one of the worst was that it created NO emotion in me.  I wasn't attached to Max.  I didn't really care about what happened to anyone in the film.  Including the monsters.

Now, the monsters were amazing.  They just looked great (though at times they moved more like men in big ol' hairy suits than actual living breathing creatures), and they were very fun to look at.  But the voices?  Distracting, for me.  Every time Judith talked, I had a moment like this, "Hey!  That's Catherine O'Hara!"  I spent a good portion of the movie trying to see in my head the actress voicing KW.  If I was into the movie, would that be happening?  (Or maybe Jonze should have chosen obscure voice actors for the roles.)

Sam wasn't all that impressed with it either, which made me feel better, because as the movie was ending (finally, oh my god, finally), I was hoping that he wouldn't turn to me and say, "That was so good."  There's something reassuring about the fact that he didn't like it.  He may not be as vehement as me about it, but it's just nice knowing that someone else felt the same as I did.  I don't always need this reassurance, but when it's a movie like this, that you a) expect to love and that b) everyone else around you loved and that c) everyone thinks you should love, well the expectations make you feel a little weird about things.

I still feel a little bit like maybe *I* just didn't get it, and other people will see it and freak out about how good it is.  Regardless of Sam's reaction.  But it seemed empty to me, at the very end of it.  I can't think of another way to describe it.  Empty, is all.  Beautiful at times, but empty. 

Loop

I've been struggling with the issue of whether to make myself write posts, or to only do it when I'm truly itching to say something.  The thing is, I've got all this stored up writerly energy, and it makes me want to post post post, but then I start thinking about what I'm going to write about, and I freeze.  Which, incidentally, is why I didn't blog here for almost a year; I had the above experience nearly every week, and it was enough to keep me from blogging completely.

Even now, I've just erased three different paragraphs that said three different things, all about this topic of not blogging.  Or blogging.  I don't know why, but I'm suffering from the fear of putting a word wrong.  I have things I'd like to talk about, but I also don't want to....start something.  That's a weird thing to say, right?  I'm talking about writing about personal things, and I have very strong feelings about some things--many things--and where I used to just let it all hang out and type it all up like a battering ram, now I am mindful of the silence I've kept for the last eleven months, and unsure.

If you know me, you're probably yelping from the hilarity of me keeping any opinions to myself.  Probably I didn't when I was speaking in the last eleven months.  But writerly silence is still a silence of a particular type, and in those silent eleven months I mourned the loss of writing; now I am mourning the breaking of that silence.  It's a very weird loop to be caught up in.  When I am not writing, I am thinking "I would really like to write again," and when I begin to write, I am thinking, "I am wondering if I should actually type these things so people can read them.  Perhaps not."

I don't know how to reconcile the loop.  Again to the options of the first paragraph.  I could force myself to write, thus hopefully breaking the loop.  Or I could wait until I feel really compelled, and hope that compulsion comes more and more often.  I don't know what I will choose to do, but I do know that November will in fact break the stalemate in my head, because I will be doing NaBloPoMo this year.  The original month was always November, and so November it is.