We went to see Where the Wild Things Are last night. This morning, my kids were still freaking out about the whole "Carol ripped off Douglas's arm" thing.
My kids said it was disturbing more than anything else. I think the scene where the monsters surround Max yelling that they are going to eat them is pretty scary, but mostly the monsters made a very, very disfunctional family. Everytime things seemed happy, one of the monsters would get upset and derail the whole "feel good" moment. And it was draggy because it basically was about the monsters' relationships with one another and how those relationships were just never going to work no matter how much they wanted them to work.
One of the monsters (Carol) basically acts the part of a family member who "wants everyone to always be together" but constantly freaks out when others don't behave the way he wants them too. Douglas is Carol's best friend, but when Douglas objects to Carol's abusive behavior, Carol rips his arm off. The filmmakers tried to make this a humerous moment, with Douglas shouting, "Hey, that was my favorite arm," and Carol replying, "Now it's my arm!" Honestly, any kid whose seen adults fighting viciously probably isn't going to be too amused by that. Throughout the rest of the movie, Douglas appears with a twig stuck in his shoulder socket as a replacement for the missing arm. Raphy and I thought this was hilarious, but my younger son didn't even notice this detail and my older son found that just as disturbing as the ripping off of the arm
( ... )
We went to the library yesterday. Asked the librarian for books about dinosaurs, because Ethan loves "How Does a Dinosaur Say Goodnight?", which has semi-realistic drawings of dinosaurs in it. One of the books she gave us essentially had a T-Rex eating things, standing on the bloody corpses of his victims, and ending with him threatening to eat the reader. Ethan was quite unhappy with that.
Let me look through the boys' books. They don't read Boynton anymore, so I might be able to pass them on to you. I think 'Oh, My, Oh My, O Dinosaurs" did not survive them. It's that whole trying to gain knowledge by eating the book thing that kids do.
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I can highly recommend the Sandra Boynton dinosaur books. My kids could not get enough of them.
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He loves Sandra Boynton. If you want, I can recite The Belly Button book from memory. ;) I'll have to look up her dino books.
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