{"id":15969,"date":"2011-10-10T06:00:19","date_gmt":"2011-10-10T10:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.moviefanfare.com\/?p=15969"},"modified":"2015-01-20T01:35:44","modified_gmt":"2015-01-20T06:35:44","slug":"where_the_wild_things_are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.moviefanfare.com\/?p=15969","title":{"rendered":"Where the Wild Things Are: A Guest Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Guest blogger Ibetolis writes:<\/p>\n

When it was announced that an adaptation of Where\u00a0 the Wild Things Are<\/a> was to\u00a0be made into a film with\u00a0man-child Spike Jonze<\/a> at the helm,\u00a0I suppose I went through the same kind of giddiness usually afforded to my fanboy friends whenever Batman dons a new cape, or Peter Jackson<\/a> declares something interesting with Hobbits. It seemed the perfect coupling; Jonze,\u00a0it appeared\u00a0to me at least, had been directly influenced by the anarchy of Maurice Sendak’s book. His whole career to this point seemed to have been shaped by the wild raucous ones: think the music videos (Christopher Walken <\/a>dancing, bad break dancing in public places, Sabotage!), those Jackass<\/a> stunts, his first forays into feature films (remember the sheer ‘WTF’ feeling you had when you first watched Being John Malkovich<\/a>?). Jonze’s general personal demeanour spoke of a man shaped and defined by Sendak’s Max and his childhood obstinance.<\/p>\n

Did\u00a0the collaboration\u00a0work however?\u00a0 The jury’s still out on that one. To start with, how on earth do you turn a book–a little under 40 pages long and blueprinted into most people’s heads by the age of five, who in turn\u00a0have built\u00a0Sendak’s world\u00a0again and\u00a0again in their minds–into something on\u00a0the big screen that would be able to please everyone in the process?\u00a0 The simple answer is you can’t, but Jonze\u00a0must have known this; most people tend to know when they are asked to drink from a poisoned chalice,\u00a0so never let it be said that\u00a0he shirks from a challenge.\u00a0Where does one take the source material, of what little there is ,and turn it into a feature-length film?\u00a0 Where the Wild Things Are is so ingrained in the psyche of popular culture that the book means a lot to so many people in so many differing ways. Whichever way you cut it, Jonze was never going to please everybody.<\/p>\n

He\u00a0seems to have channeled the book directly in a way most\u00a0studios would have cared to avoid. That’s to say he focused on the bleak tone, the low-energy\u00a0droll, the greys and brown, the fear and\u00a0loneliness rather than\u00a0lighten the palate with more of Max’s adventures and youthful innocence\u00a0in creating a world where he is\u00a0king\u00a0of all he surveys. Should Jonze be celebrated, or does it show a distinct lack of understanding one’s audience?\u00a0 Who exactly was he making the film for? The\u00a0obvious answer would be for adults (or kidults), those that grew up\u00a0with the magic of the book, those around\u00a0the director’s\u00a0age\u00a0when they first heard the story of Max and\u00a0could relate similarly\u00a0as adults to its emotive issues of loneliness and fear.<\/p>\n

Jonze’s\u00a0focus on the emotive aspects of Sendak’s book\u00a0has its critics, but the loneliness of Max seems to have spoken to the director, and it’s this slightly depressive tone that fuels the fires of his detractors.\u00a0 As 2009’s big Christmas holiday, all-family fun film,\u00a0Where the Wild Things Are fails miserably, and overall it’s quite a solemn piece of work. It certainly isn’t the\u00a0film most families would have\u00a0expected and I doubt most would have liked.\u00a0Yet for fans of\u00a0the director’s work,\u00a0it once again demonstrates a willingness to defy expectations and to keep chipping away in his own idiosyncratic manner. It also signifies that obstinance (like that of our protagonist) that he will do it his way, despite studio pressures to lighten the film to the contrary.<\/p>\n

What Where the Wild Things Are\u00a0actually does is highlight and criticise the\u00a0self-indulgence of adults and\u00a0the ways in which we are encouraged to be selfish, petty, delusional\u00a0and forever youthful.\u00a0For Max, reasoning\u00a0with any of the array of\u00a0monsters he’s now king of\u00a0becomes a task in itself; All seem to be preoccupied by their own inner angst, unreasonable\u00a0desires\u00a0and\u00a0self-pity. Every\u00a0irrational behaviour, no matter how violent, destructive or just plain stupid, is\"\"<\/a> explained away in somewhat pseudo-psychobabble lifted from\u00a0a best-seller self-help guide.\u00a0 It’s as if Jonze, with help from co-writer Dave Eggers,\u00a0is using this beloved children’s story as a mirror to his generation,\u00a0a kind of “Stop the pouting.\u00a0 Listen, the world is bigger than you” fable, which\u00a0is pretty radical when all he was meant to be doing was filming a kid’s\u00a0film for the\u00a0Christmas market.<\/p>\n

That’s not to say this is a maudlin, navel gazing piece.\u00a0Where the Wild Things Are may well look a little deeper than the average “family film,” but it still has its cake and wants to devour it, too.\u00a0 For starters, the monsters are a treat and lifted straight off the page, voice artist work is top-notch (especially Chris Cooper’s<\/a> Douglas and Catherine O’Hara<\/a> as the dreary Judith), and there’s some great black comedy and slapstick, as well as frolics, anarchy and loudness. It has all the markings of a straight-“A” box-office “crowd pleaser” but–like all subversives working the system–there is something different about Where the Wild Things Are. That confuses and disturbs some people, and, for not being what it was supposed to be, it gets kicked.\u00a0 I, for one, although stating here and now that this is not his best work but an enjoyable distraction all the same, am glad theat Spike Jonze attempts to rocks the boat in his own understated, weird little way and that he\u00a0 shall continue doing so for many years to come.<\/p>\n

Ibetolis is a lumbering dolt in his mid-30s and a slave to the world of cinema in all its guises. He writes\u00a0the blog By Kubrick’s Beard,<\/a> where he finds relief in sharing his innermost musings on the world of cinema to the handful of people that manage to find their way to his little home in the corner of the internetwebby thing.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest blogger Ibetolis writes: When it was announced that an adaptation of Where\u00a0 the Wild Things Are was to\u00a0be made into a film with\u00a0man-child Spike Jonze at the helm,\u00a0I suppose I went through the same kind of giddiness usually afforded…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":15970,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[5588],"coauthors":[1710],"class_list":["post-15969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-articles","tag-movie-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\nWhere the Wild Things Are: A Guest Movie Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Movie review of the 2009 Spike Jonze film Where the Wild Things Are. 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