What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching? ARCHIVE

Michael Barnes wrote:

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.

Probably the most boring movie I have ever seen in my life. It made THE SORROW AND THE PITY feel briskly paced in comparison. The picture is not made for kids, it's for indie rock hipsters. HUGE mistake. One star, just for the incredible Henson costumes/puppeteering. Terrible, terrible cinema.

I still want to see it. I like Spike Jonze.

Michael Barnes wrote:

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.

Probably the most boring movie I have ever seen in my life. It made THE SORROW AND THE PITY feel briskly paced in comparison. The picture is not made for kids, it's for indie rock hipsters. HUGE mistake. One star, just for the incredible Henson costumes/puppeteering. Terrible, terrible cinema.

I am so relieved that we passed on this. My wife said it looked boring and I said it looked like something marketed to kids but really trying to get the "cool" parents to go see it.

I am glad you took the bullet.

Space Ghost wrote:

Michael Barnes wrote:

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.

Probably the most boring movie I have ever seen in my life. It made THE SORROW AND THE PITY feel briskly paced in comparison. The picture is not made for kids, it's for indie rock hipsters. HUGE mistake. One star, just for the incredible Henson costumes/puppeteering. Terrible, terrible cinema.

I am so relieved that we passed on this. My wife said it looked boring and I said it looked like something marketed to kids but really trying to get the "cool" parents to go see it. I am glad you took the bullet.

I second that! Hopefully, the rest of the family movies won't suck this fall and winter (Astro boy, A Christmas Carol, Red Cliff, Mr. Fox, Princess and Frog, Old Dogs, Alvin and Chipmunks).

I loved the book Where the Wild Things Are when I was a kid, but I was wary of the idea of a movie version. Spike Jonze is definitely an interesting choice for director, and it got a great review in The Onion. But why do the promo shots keep showing the kid talking to the one Wild Thing while standing in a desert? It doesn't look interesting if that's what they're leading with.

ubarose wrote:

On the other hand, my parents found it interesting, and after watching it commented that they now understand several events from our childhood, including why and how the oar ended up lodged in the bedroom door.

This is exactly why I personally wanted to see Where the Wild Things Are. But I'm afraid my spawns will have the same reaction as their cousin. So I'll wait for DVD on this one.

WTWTA isn't about being 9 years old as it seems. It's about being a dysfunctionial adult and hyperanalyizing the simple, everyday magic of childhood to the point that even the joy of imagination emerges as something broken. That stripped all if the greatness of the book away. There is so much cheap metaphor in the picture that by the time Max winds up inside one of them (the mother figure, of course), it's almost laughably pretentious.

There was zero drama and barely any narrative events in the entire picture. No kid wants to sit through 90 minutes of what looks like an amateur hunting video.

This is a trivial complaint in the overall scheme of things, but... a desert? My vague recollection of Where the Wild Things Are seems to include a jungle or at least a dense forest. I realize that there wasn't a lot of story there, but couldn't they use what they found? Or is a desert just more convenient for purposes of green screen, CGI and moving the cameras around?

Deserts oscillate between very hot and very cold. I wonder if that is bludgeoning symbolism for the 'ups and down of childhood'.

did I mention how good Zombieland was?

Re:What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching? 2 Hours, 35 Minutes ago
This is a trivial complaint in the overall scheme of things, but... a desert? My vague recollection of Where the Wild Things Are seems to include a jungle or at least a dense forest. I realize that there wasn't a lot of story there, but couldn't they use what they found? Or is a desert just more convenient for purposes of green screen, CGI and moving the cameras around?

Yes, the book is filled to bursting with these evocative, beautiful and slightly mysterious images of a jungle. There's no desert, and certainly nothing that looks like the woods outside my house. I didn't really think about the desert thing, but yeah, it makes no sense.

Actually, it does. If their goal was to take all of the beauty and fantasy out of the book and replace it with maudlin sadness and desolation, mission fucking accomplished.

Thinking about it some more over the weekend and seeing how some folks are having these doe-eyed reactions to the film and rhapsodizing about how profound and moving it is because of the way it dissects childhood down to an assembly of neuroses, I've come to realize that the film is going to touch a lot of people for whom childhood has died. I'm still a kid at heart, I think about things like kids do sometimes, and I feel like I'm still youthful and in touch with what it is like to be nine. I understand it, and what I don't understand is just the intangible magic of childhood. This movie takes all that away and tries to explain to people who's childhoods have died why kids act like kids.

It's a tragedy that this isn't a kids film. Kids need great movies that aren't insulting, condescending, or that serve solely as a vehicle for licensed character goods. This could have been it, but instead we've got a bad Woody Allen movie with monster suits.

Haven't seen it yet, but will try to. I've got kids, so I've read the book several dozen times. Probably a couple of hundred by now.

When the book was originally released, everyone's shit was lost because Sendak showed that kids are complicated, especially when up to no good. Prior to WTWTA, literature for children focused on saccharine idylls and loving families--any mischief was reserved for animals. Compare MADELINE's "little girls all in two rows" and CURIOUS GEORGE. (You can make a case for ELOISE breaking ground here, but she was a spoiled rich kid living in the Plaza--Max lives next door to you.) Not only that, but Sendak surrounded a child with grotesque monsters with savage claws and teeth--you didn't see that in PEANUTS.

Anyway, here's the way I read the book. Max is nine, gets sugared up and goes nuts. He's punished. He refocuses all that energy inward and takes his leave of home and comfort for an adventure across the sea in a land of monsters. Max quickly tames them because he's so awesome and is (naturally) made king. Rumpus, and then he's done. As quickly as he conjured them, he dismisses them without mercy--Max stepped into his private boat and says goodbye. I read this as punctuated: Max-stepped-into-his-private-boat-and-says-goodbye. There's no tearful farewell, he just drops them like a bag of dirt. All that out of his system he returns home, where the hate he has for his mother for putting him in timeout is replaced by love for having dinner all ready to eat.

To me, Sendak nails the selfishness of being adolescent. Max wants to tear shit up, Max metes out punishment just like his Mom--it's no big thing. Max doesn't like being told what to do, so he leaves. Max doesn't want to be king anymore, so he bails. The inner life of an adolescent is so focused on themselves, it's not even that they are ignorant of other's views--those views don't even exist. Maybe, right at the end, we start to see Max come out of this. His little smile at his dinner and the fact that it's still hot make him see something of the love his family has for him, despite the shenanigans.

So will I like it?

Some of that _is_ there, but do you remember the monsters being depressed, sad, lonely, and exhibiting a bizarre and awkward mixture of adult and child emotions and sentiments?

How about a weird quasi-romantic relationship between two of the monsters that represent Max/his absent father and Max's sister/mother? Remember that piece? Or how about the goat wild thing constantly being sad and depressed because no one listens to him. Or the owls that represent teenagers. Remember those? Me neither. It's all really kind of fucked up, confused, and like I said, awkward. And not in the book- too much effort was made to extend the book into a larger story with a lot of stupidly complicated ADULT emtions, which undermines the point of the book to begin with.

Oh, and this bit:

There's no tearful farewell

I'm going to spoil it, but there is TOTALLY a tearful farewell in this one.

You're absolutely right about the book and what it is...but what it is too is something very simple and uncomplicated.

I seriously can't imagine children liking the movie at all...there is just nothing in it that I can see appealing to kids beyond the first 10 minutes of watching the monsters run around in the woods. There's a point about 45 minutes into it where I was literally yearning for the movie to end because NOTHING interesting was happening and the novelty of seeing the costumes had worn off.