Where the Wild Things Are

[furtech]

Just saw the adaptation of Sendek's book. Longest 30-minute film I've sat through ever.


The Bad:
All my fears of what Jones did to the book were realized and then some. If you go to see this, you can skip the first 25 minutes and the last forty-five. There is some nice monster romping in the middle.

My greatest fear was that they "Yuppy-ized" the book, turning it into a touchy-feely thing instead of the *Rawr* boy and monsters fantasy the book was. Spike Jones (the director--though I think the musician would have done a better job, even being dead and all) totally gentrified the story. They can't decide whether to make Max a kid with tourets symdrome or a sympathetic boy who needs attention. The result is a boy who comes off as a neurotic brat. If they had just made him cartoony-crazy and spent five minutes showing this-- that would have been GREAT. Instead, they tried to make him the monster of the book AND a REAL BOY in the REAL WORLD. Weird.

As soon as the monsters spoke, I knew I was doomed. They sounded -just- like the crowd from Starbucks. Yuppie and soft-spoken-- like that tone of voice couples use in bed in PG films. WTF. I get it, Spike: yeah, the "monsters" are the self-involved adults in the world around Max. When I was a kid monsters had real voices: gravelly or shriek-y or anything monstrous-- not Woody Allen refugees! And the soundtrack! AIIEEE!!! New-age "calming" music! Again, WTF?!! If you heard the soundtrack apart from the film, you'd -never- guess it was from WTWTA! It sounds like day-spa music! Don't even get me started on the dialogue!

As noted above, the last 45 minutes or so were also worth ignoring: the tone turns suicidally depressing and there is -no- resolution or closure with the monsters. Basically Max screws everything up, betrays the trust/faith of the monsters and then just leaves when everything is ruined. That's it. Nice.

The whole end of the movie is a complete downer. You leave the theater thinking, "What's the point?"

The Good:
The costumes were -fantastic- and almost worth the price of admission (assuming it was a matinee). I'll definitely buy the disc with additional features when it comes out. I am desperately curious about the inner structure of the suits: they were able to run and jump and fall without the usual buckling and wobbly-bouncing that over-size pod suits like this suffer from. Also, I think they used CGI animation to manipulate the facial acting (like they did with the animals in "Babe"). Absolutely seamless!



Cut for spoilers and general crankiness wrt the film.

Comments

[vulpesrex.livejournal.com]

Children's Books - particularly those which are essentially lush, imaginative and evocative collections of illustrations with a story printed over them, with a sentence (or perhaps a paragraph) per page - just do NOT expand in to a 90-minute motion picture, not unless a whole lot of "depth" and "meaning" are added to fill it out. Look what happened with "Polar Express", for example, and there was much more, story and mood and theme-wise, to work with there, than there was in 'Where The Wild Things Are".

Or, even better (or worse, depending on how you look at it), consider "Cloudy, With A Chance of Meatballs".

Hollywood doesn't trust Fantasy; the few times it has tried it, it goes for exaggeration unto the surreal - which becomes unfathomable - or attempts to do it with Camp. Witness two different versions of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", each of which has neat memorable iconic moments, yet are quite divergent in mood. Between the two different interpretations, what with overl;ap, one can almost get a feel for the original storybook.

We are about to be exposed to Tim Burton's take on "Alice in Wonderland". Knowing how Burton tends to go for the macabre and grotesque, and just from seeing the theater lobby posters depicting the Fun-House/Surreal Clown representation of the Mad Hatter, I can't see ANY justifcation for wasting money and time and filmstock to make this...thing, let alone any reason to SEE it, other than that BURTON directed it, so it must be somehow "Cool".

The "Alice" stories are a loosely assembled, barely coherent collection of whimsical circumstance and fancy, and are barely intelligible to smart children, and due to archaic references to victorian commonplaces like sugarloafs and snapdragons and other things which we do not conceive of in this modern world, are dense and dificult for adults to fathom - Caucus Races, Lobster Quadrilles, and mockturtles notwithstanding. No One has any business trying to make a cogent movie out of it, even Disney's animated feature is just a series of amusing sketches which in the end don't leave you enlightened about very much. And I say this as someone who enjoys Lewis Carrol's writings, and classic Disney Feature Animation.

SOOO...WHY does Hollywood continue to do this?

Because the Management types are Bankrupt of feelings, and the Creative types are bankrupt of ideas, or are willing to compromise someone elses' vision, just to Make the Deal.

This is NOT Entertainment.

[cheetah-spotty.livejournal.com]

Luckily, there exists a movie culture outside of hollywood :)

[ruggels.livejournal.com]

There does?

[iisaw.livejournal.com]

Dude! Zombie Bikini Squad... now that is some fine filmmaking!

[furtech.livejournal.com]

I would say that you're -mostly- dead-on correct. If the adaptor (book to script) is good, it can be done. Look at "Stand By Me" (adapted from the very short story by Stephen King) and "Zathura" (based on the book by the same author of "Polar Express" and "Jumangi"). Both expanded the original material into a full-length motion picture-- yet retained the spirit and premise of the original works. In short-- there -are- a few (very few) rare birds that can pull this off, but for the most part the rest is crap.

I don't have negative feelings about Burton's AiW: what you say about the book is absolutely true, but the history of Alice is filled with the many different interpretations that artists have created around the original work. Arthur Rackham to Ralph Steadman: AiW fans eagerly look forward to new interpretations particularly -because- the book is, "barely coherent collection of whimsical circumstance and fancy" (<--I have to say, your description of the book is the shortest, best-worded that I've ever come across)

Re: the "Why" of films like these-- unfortunately it's true at that high level. The skills it takes to become an executive powerful enough to green-light a project are completely different from the skills that make a great creative director. With the usual exceptions (John Lasseter and Walt Disney are the only ones that come to mind).

Fortunately, (as Iisaw points out below), there are many countries and countless independents that still burn creatively.