It is only 10 sentences long, but Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" is a classic children's tale of the mischievous Max who ventures into his imaginary wilderness and ends up in a "wild rumpus" with the Wild Things.

Now, director Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich") and writer Dave Eggers ("A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius") have teamed up to bring a new version of the story to the big screen.

The long-delayed and much-anticipated film features music from the Canadian band Arcade Fire, and features the voices of Forest Whitaker, James Gandolfini and Catherine Keener.

The preview (below) has just been released, and it is already generating a buzz. (It has been viewed more than a half million times in less than a week.)

What does this story have to do with the Middle East?

As Rev. Earl Kooperkamp at New York's Trinity Church once noted in a 2007 sermon, Sendak's story can be viewed as a story about a personal journey into the wild wilderness, "that place of exile and refuge, the region where that which is to be purified is made pure, the location of testing and faith."

"A sojourn in the wilderness means confronting ourselves, and perhaps at the core, confronting our fears," Kooperkamp said in the sermon. "We go, like Max, to where the wild things that 'roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws' are. But we go into the wilderness in Lent as Christians knowing the most frequent command in the entire Bible is, 'Fear not.' Those words are spoken by God to Abraham as he starts off on the journey that leads him so far from his home. Confronting our fears, living into that commandment, 'Do not be afraid' transforms us with a radical openness, a place in which God’s love can make a dwelling."

Or, if that seems like a bit of a stretch, "Where the Wild Things Are" looks like it could simply be a very cool movie...