Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

Where the Wild Things Are, one of the most beloved children's books, comes to the big screen in one of the most highly anticipated films of the year. Spike Jonze, the man responsible for Being John Malcovich, Adaptation, and several Beastie Boys music videos including "Sabotage", brings the tale to life. I must admit, I have been anxiously awaiting this film for several months, something I don't like to do too often as it sets up for a potential major let down.

Well, that didn't happen this time.

We follow Max (Max Records), a boy who is lonely and misunderstood. His sister doesn't pay attention to him, his mother is busy with work and her boyfriend, and he has worries at school. All he wants is attention and to belong. One night, he finally breaks and runs away. He makes his way to the woods and to the waters edge. There he finds a small boat and set out on the open sea, leaving everything behind him.

He comes across an island and goes ashore. There he finds a group of monsters in turmoil. Max seizes his opportunity and confronts the group. He tells them that he is a great king and help them solve their problems.

I don't want to give too much of the story away because I feel like telling it would ruin some of the magic. This is one of the most visually pleasing films I have seen in a long time. Jonze filmed in Australia. We are given vivid landscapes of lush forests, arid deserts, and beautiful shorelines, culminating in an almost Lord of the Rings like experience. These spectacular settings would rarely be beaten in magnificence in another film, but here they come second to the unbelievable special effects used for the monsters.

There are seven monsters on the island. Carol, Ira, Judith, KW, Douglas, Alexander, and The Bull. They all have unique features and are of massive size. Jonze could have gone two ways here. He could have completely made them all CG or he could have gone Jim Henson and turned them into Muppets. Instead, he carved a third path and combined the other two options. Max is able to interact extremely well with the gigantic puppet/suits, but the faces are edited with computer graphics, giving them startlingly realistic features and expressions. Making these monsters any different way would have been disastrous.

Another key aspect of the monsters is giving them a voice. Jonze chose excellent voice actors with James Gandolfini, Forrest Whitaker, Catherine O'Hara, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano, and Chris Cooper. They each have their own personality that compliments their physical and emotional characteristics.

Aside from the monsters, I was very impressed with Max. He is asked to do a very demanding thing: be a kid. That sounds easy, but it is very easily messed up. I'm interested in finding out how much freedom Jonze gave Records in certain scenes that called for him to go "wild". I can imagine directing young actors is not the easiest thing to do, but sometimes you catch a break when you get a talented one.

Giving life to these characters is a spectacular screenplay by Jonze and Dave Eggers (who wrote Away We Go). Their writing speaks to both kids and adults, using language that is meaningful and easy to understand. The things Max goes through every child feels growing up: loneliness, fear, belonging, etc.

There is so much to love about this movie. It speaks to the heart. But before you head out with the whole family, heed this warning. Some parts of this film might be too intense for younger a

Fmovies: A beautiful, audacious, roughly-hewn motion picture (adjectives that are no doubt overused in describing the picture's modus operandi), Spike Jonze's adaptation Maurice Sendak's adored children's book "Where the Wild Things Are" taps into the innocent, volatile world of a 9 year old boy the way few mainstream feature films have. It is original, unique, melancholy, and because of this several mainstream critics (and even lucid critics like Salon's Stephanie Zacharek) have derided the film. "There's no story"; "kids won't like it"; "it's an adult film about children, not a children's film"; "it's boring"; "the pacing is slow"...

What? Why did it become such a crime to make an abstract art film within the spineless confines of the Hollywood system? Doesn't Spike Jonze get credit for personalizing, therefore, retaining a substantial amount of voracity while delving into one of the most revered children's books of the last fifty years? What the hell is wrong with that? I understand that some people just don't respond to the abstract, pseudo-verisimilitude of pretentious art films, but there's a stripped-down purity to this picture that cannot be denied. It's not pretentious, but emotional and honest.

It's bold, it takes chances...why is it being chastised in the media? How often do we get movies like "Where the Wild Things Are"? It should be celebrated, not snidely dismissed (Ex. Lou Lumenick, NY Post).

Maurice Sendak, who recently passed away, was one of the most controversial yet still imaginative authors to ever have been published. The stories he wrote are very much like Grimm's Fairy Tales: whimsical and fun, but still dark and threatening. He didn't pander or sugarcoat his stories simply because he didn't feel a need (as well as a rather unpleasant childhood that introduced him to mortality in a less gentle light than most kids, but that's another story). These come through in such books as 1981's Outside Over There, 1970's In the Night Kitchen, and, in the case of this review, 1963's Where the Wild Things Are.

The funny thing about the latter is that this book is only 9 sentences long! That's a short book, even by children's standards, despite the story being told more with pictures than words. So, naturally, director Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers had to go out on a limb with the extra effort if they were to successfully make a movie based on it. The effort is an interesting and impressive venture; No embellishment, no sugarcoating, just a stripped- down, but still whimsical tale of a child's curiosity and imagination.

The story is pretty much the same: Max, (Max Records, believably a kid), an imaginative, but frustrated kid gets into a fight with his stressed-out mother (Catherine Keener), runs away, and soon finds himself floating to a strange land, wherein dwell creatures that are both terrifying and fascinating at the same time. It's a simple story, but, as said before, they get across a lot with what they have.

The performances in this movie are stellar. Max Records plays Max as...well, a kid. He doesn't pander to the audience or become cloying and 'pwe-shuss' at any point in the movie. He's angry, bratty, imaginative, playful, greedy, attention-seeking, kind and all those other things a normal kid is. This doesn't make him a bad person, but it does make him humble and endearing when coming across what he sees and experiences with the titular "Wild Things." Speaking of which, these creatures not only look great, but are also something of (which has been made abundantly clear by most of the critics, but it's still there) a representation of Max himself. Take the imposing, but enthusiastic Carol (James Gandolfini, aka Tony Soprano), for instance. He's Max's pent-up frustration, creativity and longing for love. Loudmouth Judith (Catherine O'Hara, a scene stealer) is Max's brazen independence. Gentle Ira (Forest Witaker), is Max's artistic ideals. Shy Alexander (Little Miss Sunshine's Paul Dano) is Max's longing to be heard, as well as his fragile naïveté. And the gentle KW (Lauren Ambrose) is the feeling of maternity that Max has not felt from his own mother in a long, long time. Once he discovers these fragments and puts them together, he realizes that there is more love to be had at home than he realized.

The visuals in this movie are also great. The place where the island is doesn't have any magical places aside from the Wild Things themselves, but its full of trees, dirt and desert plains that are barren and empty. But, it's what they do with it that makes it impressive. They have huts made of branches, a dirt clod fight, long walks along the desert, and even the building of a huge hut. It's so massive, just like an imagination.

The only problem with this movie is that it can gets pretty depressing at times. It's probably supposed to be pushing boun

Where the Wild Things Are fmovies. I attended an early screening with my 8 year old daughter; we're both big fans of Sendak in general and this book in particular, and I quite like Spike Jonze as well. But this did not prepare us for the moody, almost downbeat atmosphere through most of the film, nor the sense of immediacy and almost hyper-realism combined with astoundingly fanciful imagery. It is such an odd movie! And yet, when it was over, we turned to each other smiling a melancholy smile and said, "I loved it." The expansion of the tiny story into a feature-length film is so subtle that you barely sense it happening. There isn't an artificial new plot laid over the bones of the original -- it's simply expanded at every turn and very gently stretched out to feature length. The voice performances are wonderful, and the costumes are magnificent, as is the one major visual addition to the material (which I won't give away). Enjoy!

It's taken Spike Jonze a while to write, film, edit and (after some wrestling with Warner brothers over the final cut) release his adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. One who greatly admires filmmakers will wait especially for a filmmaker who takes his time in creating something after years of speculation. Now, the filmmaker who first came on the scene with Being John Malkovich, once again gives me a one-word response with this third film of his: Wow. Hot damn. That's two more. This is, simply, a classic work of film-making, but also on a particular subject that so few filmmakers even attempt to make let alone get right, which is what it's like to really be a child. Films that come to mind like this could also include the 400 Blows, Fanny and Alexander, (arguably) Tideland and E.T. Now here's another, and one that is directed with an original eye and an inspiration of texture and feeling, a look like out of our own wanted childhood playgrounds. Or some kind of playground.

If you don't know the story by Sendak- and to be fair it's only several pages long and its story was *loosely* used for this film- is about Max, who, not entirely pleased with his life in the real world ventures into the world of the 'Wild Things', a place where he can be king (or rather makes himself one) and tries to create a paradise with his fellow creatures. This is the main bit of what the story is "about", but how it's about it is a whole other matter. It's a movie children can see and hopefully adore, but it's more than that. What it's going for is childhood itself, what makes up a young guy who has little experience in the real world and can only really see things through imagination and in a prism of what the 'real world' represents.

We see Max in class, for example, learning about how the sun works in relation to Earth. It's a truthful but pessimistic lecture (considering to elementary school kids no less) about how one day the sun will die, and so will all life. This is carried with Max when he ventures into the world of the Wild Things, and when he mentions this to Carol there's a perplexed response to this. "It's so small," Carol says of the Sun, and while it doesn't bother him at the moment it later comes back as a bit of real inner turmoil that Carol can barely contemplate. Or anyone else for that matter. Can one really be expected as a child to understand the full scope of the sun dying out and life as everyone knows it ending? It may be billions of years away, but to a little boy it could be just around the corner.

That, by the way, is one of the brilliant things about the movie - all of Max's collected experience, and who he is as a person, and what he can see and understand around him in his family and surroundings, is represented in the bunch of Wild Things. All of Max, indeed, is split among all of them: Carol, KW, Douglas, Ira, Alexander, and a particular 'quiet' Wild Thing that barely says a word, they're all Max, and yet because of their split pieces they're never fully whole either. This makes it easy, perhaps, for Max to be crowned as their king (hey, he did lead vikings after all!), and to lead Carol's dream of a fortress for them all where "everything you would want to happen would happen." There's magical moments experienced among them, and all of the Wild Things, thanks to the Jim Henson creature shop work, are all in front of us and live and breathe as rea

Where the Wild Things are is a well written, intelligent, and very cold drama about the often challenging interactions within a closed group of people, the complexities of leadership and the cost of selfishness.

It's not a movie about imagination or childhood at all, and it's only vaguely concerned with themes of growing up, family or maturity.

It's not wacky or funny. Not colorful or exciting. There's only about 10 minutes of what I'd call "fun" in the whole 2-hour package.

That doesn't make Where the Wild Things Are a bad movie. It just makes it completely defiant of the viewer's expectations, and thus a rather confusing film to watch.

The first time I saw this I wasn't sure how I was supposed to be taking things. Was that supposed to be funny? Is she being sarcastic, or serious? Is Max in real danger now, or not? That's not because the movie is actually confusing, but because it all seems vaguely wrong and inappropriate. I left scratching my head saying "I guess that was good?"

In the end I decided I didn't like it. I felt that this was either the wrong script for this movie or the wrong movie for this script. Either way, it didn't click for me and felt awkward to the end.

Nevertheless there is quality here, and I recommend you watch it yourself and reach your own conclusion.