Late to the party and I’m not entirely sure a good live action feature length movie could have been made from the book.
My problem? The interaction between Max and the Things, the Things sound like twentysomething slackers full of self pity and whining. I dunno it just had a totally wrong mood, I was reminded of a million sitcoms where a group of friends sits around whining. I never imagined the Things sounding like Tony Soprano and Phoebe from Friends
I just found myself hoping it would be over already, and then it just became background noise.
The book is one of the most perfect books I’ve ever read, pure poetry. It’s not realistic, it’s not slapstick, it’s mythic. The movie looked as though the parties involved didn’t even know what genre the book is, much less understand its power. I saw no reason to watch it.
I think the WtWTA film is one of those “love it or hate it” movies (probably due to its legendary source material). I think it’s one of the best, most underrated movies of the 2000s, and can’t think of another movie, ever, that portrays childhood so perfectly. (And the Karen O soundtrack is superb!)
But I have friends who dismiss it entirely. ::shrugs::
Me too, but for me the fact that the main character, the kid, was written as a totally unsympathetic willfully violent and disagreeable asshole topped even the “sad and dull” thing. I wanted to smack that kid, not watch him inhabit a fantasy for 2 hours. Spike Jonze totally blew it with the script and the direction. I did like the way the Wild Things looked, tho.
They made Max way older than he seemed in the book, which made him seem more mentally unstable as a preteen rather than a child. Max should have been younger.
Its pretty hard to find a six year-old that can act well enough to carry a film. They kinda had to either age the character-up or relegate him to a supporting role.
The Wild Things are not Max’s playmates; they are the unlikable aspects of his personality. By observing and interacting with these unsympathetic creatures, Max is forced to confront his destructive streak, his petulance, and his temper.
Where the Wild Things Are is a work of literature and the creatures are metaphors; not Muppets. We aren’t supposed to like them; Max doesn’t like them, either. He’s learning lessons in how not to behave from them. The characters are jerks because Max is a little jerk. The landscape and puppets are phenomenal, but enjoying the film requires a deeper reading of the story.
How then does one aspect of Max’s personality having the hots for another aspect make a lick of sense?
I get this meta view, it didn’t make the movie any more enjoyable. I can understand intentionally unlikeable characters, but at some point it breaks the movie as entertainment if nothing is enjoyable.
His mom’s relationship with the new boyfriend and his sister who is quickly outgrowing him as puberty brings new boyfriends/rivals for his attention. Max has to make sense of relationships that he isn’t mature enough to experience yet ergo the lusty characters.
I agree it’s painful to watch, but I think parents get it. I think a lot of kids get it. Kids and their impulses aren’t rational. They are crazy, destructive, angry, unpredictable force that rules the household from ages 8 - 18, and we need both a scapegoat and a big fuzzy something to love about them despite it all.
MOYERS: But do you believe it’s true? Do we all, adults and children, have to come to grips with our own untamed passions and…
SENDAK: Oh, yes. We’re animals. We’re violent. We’re criminal. We’re not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures. So, of course. And then, we’re supposed to be civilized. We’re supposed to go to work every day. We’re supposed to be nice to our friends and send Christmas cards to our parents.
We’re supposed to do all these things which trouble us deeply because it’s so against what we naturally would want to do. And if I’ve done anything, I’ve had kids express themselves as they are, impolitely, lovingly… they don’t mean any harm. They just don’t know what the right way is.
And as it turns out sometimes the so-called “right way” is utterly the wrong way. What a monstrous confusion."
This is how I feel. It’s definitely an unusual movie, and isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste. But I was totally swept up in it, and I did get a little misty-eyed at some points.
Even my five-year-old nephew liked it, which surprised me.
The Kid and I loved it. She’d never read the book (remiss of me, I know) and we had great discussions about different things in the story and how they illiustrated real life issues.
The bird whose arm was ripped off (his *favourite *arm, too!), forgave the Thing that injured him, but still had to use the branch, because sometimes, even when you say sorry and are genuinely forgiven, the damage remains.
I think Troppus has explained it brilliantly.
Eventually the Kid started asking how things were explained in the book and I took her to the bookshop to flick through it. We both thought that the movie was true to the book and that they did a great job expanding on such minimal material.
