Forest Whitaker Movie:

				Label: Warner Bros. Salesrank:
		MPAA Rating: Media: Blu-ray

Editorial Review:
Through his handcrafted ode to the trials of childhood, Spike Jonze puts his own unique imprint on Maurice Sendak's enduring classic. In the prologue, 9-year-old Max (Max Records) stomps around the house, feeling neglected. When his mom (Catherine Keener) sends him to bed without supper, Max runs away (something he doesn't do in the book). He finds a boat and sails to a distant land where fuzzy monsters are raising a rumpus in the forest. Since his wolf suit allows him to fit right in, he joins the fray, catching the eye of Carol (James Gandolfini, excellent), who notes, approvingly, "I like the way you destroy stuff. There's a spark to your work that can't be taught." With that, they pronounce the diminutive creature king, hoping he can bring cohesion to their fractured family. After Max comes across Carol's scale-model town, he decides they should build a real one, but the project stalls as Alexander (Paul Dano) and Douglas (Chris Cooper) mope, Judith (Catherine O'Hara) browbeats Ira (Forest Whitaker), and Carol pines for K.W. (Lauren Ambrose), who prefers the company of owls Bob and Terry. Max realizes he has to make a choice: stay with the wild things or return home, where he has to keep his aggressive impulses in check. For readers of Sendak's slim tome, his decision won't come as a surprise, but Jonze ends the story on a lovely grace note. Until that time, the squabbling is a bit much--these monsters never stop talking--but Jonze, cowriter Dave Eggers, the Jim Henson Company, and singer/songwriter Karen O. have gone all-out to re-create the inner world of a child with as much empathy as was mustered for the inner adult world of Jonze's Being John Malkovich. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Where the Wild Things Are [Blu-ray] Reviews:
Let The Wild Rumpus Start!
2009-12-17 - 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 real things in this set of 'wild' locations (woods, desert, beach, rocky coast). As soon as you can open up yourself to these being real beings, not just animatronics, the whole emotional core of the film opens up as well.

But oh, it's also such an unusually, beautifully realized film. From its vivid and in-the-moment use of hand-held cinematography (and, sometimes, the stillness of looking at the creatures and Max in the backdrops), to the songs from Karen O. that are always supportive of the scenes (never the obtrusive kinds in other kids movies), to the complex relationships between all of the characters that one can see reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz, it's a piece of pop-art that lets the viewer in. Its welcoming, refreshing and kind of staggering to see someone who knows the way children think, and how we don't have to be a mixed-up little boy to identify and see ourselves in Max (and, also, how we can't fully identify with things as a child like divorce, re: Carol and KW's 'friendship'). Where the Wild Things Are works as spectacle and comedy, and as the best Jim Henson movie the man never made, so it works for children. But for adults, because it's really about *us*, it can work wonders for us too.


GET ME THE H-E Double hockey sticks OUT OF HERE!
2009-12-13 - I would rather sit through a painful root canal than to sit through the agonizing boredom I experienced watching this film. Even the children next to me at the theater were bored to tears, and one was even playing on his Nintendo (I don't blame him in the least). I really tried to give this film a chance (and the snooty discerning indie side of me wanted to love it), but after 30 minutes, I wanted to shove my head in my tub of popcorn and suffocate my self to death.

A lot of potential that doesn't get filled.
2009-12-11 - Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)

This is another of those movies that I went to see not long after it came out, and here I am months later still trying to find the proper words to review it. It probably doesn't help that I was the only member of the group I went to see it with who has anything at all positive to say about it; when A. O. Scott tabbed it as one of the best movies of the decade on At the Movies (which happened this weekend, as I write this), there was a good deal of hooting and hollering in the room. (For the record, At the Movies, I wish you'd bring back Ben and Ben. I'd imagine we'd be getting much more interesting best-of-the-decade lists from them then we are from the rather staid team of Scott and Phillips; have you read Scott's Best DVDs You've Never Seen book? Yeah, you've seen them all, probably.) I didn't find it nearly as bad as those I went with; while the movie does have its share of problems, and they are many, I did find it an interesting exploration of what it means to be human, and to be a part of a family, and for that, at least, I do think it's worthwhile.

Max (The Brothers Bloom's Max Record) is a kid who doesn't have all that many friends. Not any at all, it seems, given the movie's opening scenes. After a fight with his mother (Jonze regular Catherine Keener), Max runs away to a world where monsters are real. After a conversation with the monsters, Max is named their king, and sets about remaking the tribe in his own image. (Not that that's hard; Jonze's monsters are all parts of Max's personality.) Things go well for a while, but inevitably, given Max's lack of leadership skills, the tribe's morale begins the break down, leaving them worse off than they were before Max's arrival. Can Max manage to bring the tribe together again before the damage becomes irrevocable?

The most impressive thing about the movie, to me, was the phenomenal cast put together to play the monsters. Forest Whitaker, Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O'Hara, James Gandolfini, Paul Dano, Chris Cooper, and Michael Berry Jr. are running around under those suits. That's a pretty fine cast by anyone's standards, and thanks to the incredible CGI in the movie, the personalities of the actors really do come out. The downside is that they're hobbled by a script composed in the main by the overrated and entirely unfunny Dave Eggers, whose involvement in the movie did just what I feared it would do; while there are a few scenes of great tenderness, the humorous bits fall flat (I saw it in a packed theater, and there was nary a laugh from the crowd throughout the film) and most of the characters, including Max, remain firmly undeveloped. One would expect, given that this is Max's story, that he would in some way grow during the film; this never happens. Some of the monsters do get developed (especially the Gandolfini-voiced Carol, who is the closest of the bunch to Max's personality), but not nearly all of them; some seem almost as if they're more backdrop than anything (the Whitaker-voiced Ira, who seems to be in the film solely for the quirkiness factor of his character) or just to advance the plot (Judith, voiced by O'Hara).

It's not a bad little movie, but it could have been so much more than it is. ** ½


Explore the mind of a lonely, scared boy? Wild!
2009-11-30 - I never read Maurice Sendak's children's book as a child, so I had no sentimental or nostalgic attachments to the source material going into this film. However, I did squeeze in enough time to read the ten sentence children's book prior to seeing this Spike Jonze adaptation. Jonze's version is much darker in my opinion, but it really explores the depths of the mind of a pre-adolescent, lonely, scared, imaginative, and introverted young boy named Max. We see the problems in Max's real life then we spend the remainder of the film watching Max explore different aspects of himself that manifest in the form of monsters or "wild things" on a magical island he travels to by boat.

The cinematography and art direction are wonderful and make this a fun film to watch even as Max explores painful aspects of his life. However, the film's main flaw is perhaps it captures Max too well. Max is nine, and like most nine-year-olds he is prone to irrational thinking and sudden mood shifts. Since the film follows Max it also follows his moods, and this makes for some frustratingly languid scenes. The ending suffers from this especially as Max's great realization for why he needs to return "home" is only inches away from, "I'm bored with this now. I'm done." And essentially that's how the movie ends as well. This is indeed an accurate portrayal of a nine-year-old boy's mentality and totally keeps in line with the character of Max; however, it's not an entirely satisfying way to end two hours spent in a theater.


Playdate from Hell
2009-11-29 - My wife and I saw this with our 8-year-old. She hated it. We hated it. Most of the other kids in the theater ended up running around the lobby half-way through because it bored them.

The "wild things" are not charming. They are whiny and obnoxious. Imagine being cooped up for two hours with 6 kids from hell, and that's what you get in this movie. How anyone can find anything charming in this movie is beyond me.