Bill Maher has always been an opponent of the ridiculous child-proofing of our society, our need to bend over backwards to accommodate children even in very adult situations. I’ve always agreed with him, and this movie review of Where The Wild Things Are (which reads more like an Onion article) is a perfect example of the way we’ve handed our society to infants.

I haven’t seen the movie, but from the previews anyone can see it’s a quiet, muted-tone, indie-licious Spike Jonze / Dave Eggers movie made for nostalgic twenty-somethings to reminisce over, blog about (meta?), and possibly cut themselves to, I’m surprised the soundtrack was released on anything other than pre-distressed vinyl LPs and I imagine dudes in ksubi jeans will be lined up around the block to place VHS bootlegs on Dash Snow’s headstone on the 25th anniversary of The Goonies… because, you know, relevance is relative in nostalgialand, and everything from your sister’s slap-bracelet to your Nevermind CD to your mom’s Pontiac Transport you listened to it in to the fall of the Soviet Union is the same level of “EPIC!” to our generation, and that’s why this movie was made for us and given the indie / “nu sincerity” street cred of Karen O and Spike Jonze. I can imagine if this movie does well, Darren Aronofsky and Band of Horses are signed on for the remake of Fraggle Rock.

So that’s that, and it has nothing to do with this review, but I think it needed to be said. The review opens with the headline, “Parents upset, bored by ‘Where The Wild Things Are,’” which makes me wonder, on a scale of 1 to “put a shotgun in my fucking mouth, please” how they would rate 2 hours of the usual shit that entertains their 1 to 4-year-olds, things like staring at ceiling fans, pissing themselves and drooling a lot, a ball of lint, the new Black Eyed Peas record… that sort of thing. One man said that his 20-month-old kid “can’t get enough” of the book but was bored by the movie, like spending ten minutes flipping through colourful pages with a familiar face talking at you and sitting still in a dark theater for 101 minutes are even remotely similar experiences, much less for a kid that prefers elmers glue to Le Bernardin, or the sound of a car alarm to Ready To Die. The reviews continue to warn against taking children younger than 5 to see the movie, lest they be bored - again, I haven’t seen the movie, I doubt I ever will, and I haven’t talked to any five-year-olds lately - but really do we need to be told this? Kids don’t know what’s good or bad, you could read them Mein Kampf in a sing-songy librarian voice and show them bright drawings and they would love it, this was never positioned or promoted like that, as a kids movie - yes it’s a kids book, but it was aimed squarely at the facebook / pitchfork / tumblr audience, so why are parents surprised? PS, I know this makes no sense.