Over the past few days, Matilda and I watched “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” It’s a kid’s movie but . . . it was longer than hell. This is the “Dances With Wolves” of Children’s films. Add to that the fact that it’s a two DVD set, which contains 84 hours of outtakes, bloopers and publicity reels then you have a tome that’s nearly as large as the original source material.
I don’t find anything wrong with Harry Potter. In fact, I enjoyed the film and I look forward to reading the book with Matilida when she’s ready to tackle it.
But the author, JK Rowling has Steven King syndrome. What can be done in an easy 300 pages takes 800. Why? Who the hell knows? Perhaps she needed an editor. Someone to say, “Hey JK, why don’t we split this sucker up into two books?”
But, hell, this thing made a buttload of money and that’s all that matters, right? It doesn’t matter that there was a quality story that captured the imaginations of children. It doesn’t matter that kids who may have never read a book in their lives were clamoring to read these books. And it certainly doesn’t matter that, instead of focusing on who has the best Pokemon card, kids were competing to see who could read the most pages.
Back to the movie. Matilida and I enjoyed it. It was scary at times, but she closed her eyes and clutched my arms until it was over.
When it was over she told me that she would have nightmares. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” I said. “Everything on the screen was fake. It was imagined by someone else. There’s no trolls or evil wizards around.”
She went to be and slept soundly.
I didn’t, though. Because I know there really are monsters out there. But they look just like us. The bastards who don’t care if kids go to sleep feeling safe at night. Neighbors who take kids from their house in the middle of the night and do horrific things to them.
Those monsters won’t go away with a push of the stop button. Sadly, this world isn’t a safe place. But, I suppose, the best we can do is love our kids and make them feel safe. It’s their world soon. Perhaps they’ll do a little better with it.
But, then, that’s the battle cry of every generation, isn’t it? “Kids, just don’t fuck up like we did, okay? Find a way to stop blowing each other up and focus on the real problems, okay?”
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