This from EW.com:

Oct 8 2009

09:05 AM ET

Magazine preview: Spike Jonze goes 'Where the Wild Things Are'
by Jeff Jensen

Categories: Kids' Corner, This Week's Issue

”To make a movie about what it feels like to be 9 years old — that was my simple intention,” says Spike Jonze, whose edgy riff on Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are hits theaters on Oct. 16. But don’t let the PG rating fool you. Where most family films are comically zany and full of morals, Wild Things is naturalistic, dramatic, and raw. Jonze — who clashed with Warner Bros. over the final product — has directed what’s reportedly a $80 million family film about childhood that really isn’t for children, leaving its box office prospects as cloudy as a sky full of meatballs.

”Even in the first month that Spike and I started working on it together, we realized this wasn’t going to be a traditional, easy-to-market children’s movie,” says Jonze’s writing partner on the project, novelist Dave Eggers. ”I expected resistance, trepidation, and fights. And by golly, they happened.”
Where the Wild Things Are bloomed out of Jonze’s friendship with the book’s author, Maurice Sendak. In 1995, Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) was developing an adaptation of Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon, the rights to which Sendak controlled. The movie imploded, but Jonze and Sendak became tight. After Crayon crumbled, Sendak and his producing partner John Carls began talking with Jonze about adapting Wild Things. ”I loved the book as a child. Its images are seared into my brain,” says the director, 39. ”The book was filled with emotions I could connect with. Being hurt. Being angry. Being wild. I yearned to be Max. I wanted to play with the Wild Things and hug them. But they scared me, too.” When Jonze decided to make Wild Things in 2003, Sendak gave him the following commission: Make it your own. Make it personal. Make it dangerous. Says Sendak: ”I would rather not have had a film than turn it into a kiddie movie.”

Jonze felt the same way. ”The book is like a poem — it could mean different things to different people,” he says. Max’s parents would be divorced — but his father would be conspicuously absent from the story. The Wild Things would metaphorically mirror Max’s turbulent emotions about himself and his family — but the correlations wouldn’t be so obviously on the nose. If that sounds intriguing but still nebulous or shifty, welcome to Planet Spike. The director is notorious for his unwillingness — or inability — to explain himself. ”It’s hard to get inside the head of Spike Jonze,” says his longtime producer Vincent Landay. ”I’ve worked with him for 16 years, and most of the time I only understand 60 percent of what he wants. Nobody knows exactly what he wants until it’s over.”

In 2007, Jonze showed Warner Bros. an incomplete first cut of his movie — and the studio, which is splitting the price tag with Legendary Pictures, got nervous. Jeff Robinov, president of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, says he was concerned about the film’s pacing, clarity, and tone, and he further worried that Max might be too edgy for the typical family-film audience. ”He just isn’t your typical ‘movie kid,’ ” says Robinov, who compares Max in some ways to Edward Furlong’s rebellious, troubled youth in Terminator 2. ”He was just so real that at times, it was jarring.”

Warner Bros. execs say they didn’t want Jonze to sanitize his work — but they did want a movie that had a better chance at recouping its financial investment. The director, who had final cut, refused to compromise. ”I was never going to work on something for that long and not make what I set out to make. That was not an option,” he says. Throughout the stalemate, Jonze continued to work, and as he did, his vision evolved. In March 2008, Jonze submitted a new version of the script — one that he believed in, and one that Warner Bros. would support — and spent eight more days shooting.

Today, Jonze says that the Wild Things that people will see in theaters is very much the one he’s had in his head. Robinov says the studio is very proud to be releasing Jonze’s film — but he also thinks parents should take the film’s ”Parental Guidance” rating seriously. ”I would say it’s a movie for adults first and for a certain kind of child second,” he says. ”It doesn’t completely fit your expectation of a pure family film. It’s all good, but it is surprising.”

For more details about the new movie and more about Spike Jonze’s eccentric filmmaking style pick up this week’s EW on stands now.

I AM SO EXCITED TO SEE THIS FILM YOU HAVE NO IDEA!!!

I hope this film can get an Oscar nomination for Best Picture! I am actually going to try and see this film at the midnight showing! I am prepared to be blown away!

Easily the best trailer I have seen in a long time, really looking forward to this.

I really hope this film doesn't disappoint. The trailer was the best one I've ever seen.

Watching a commercial for the film today, it stated Peter Travers at Rolling Stone gave it 4 stars (classic rating)! Anyone know where the review is? It is not at Rolling Stone's website.

So excited!

quote:

Originally posted by clementine:
Watching a commercial for the film today, it stated Peter Travers at Rolling Stone gave it 4 stars (classic rating)! Anyone know where the review is? It is not at Rolling Stone's website.

So excited!

Haha! I just saw that too, and have been searching the web with a fine comb trying to find that review! I've been wanting to see this movie since it was first announced, and I hope it doesn't let me down.

Peter Travers is the biggest quote whore out there - unlike nearly any other serious Metacritic, but like many lesser reviewers (particularly broadcast "critics"), studios get copies of the reviews before they are printed/broadcast so that they can be used in the ads.

It's a totally disreputable practice, but Travers has been doing it for many many years.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
Peter Travers is the biggest quote whore out there - unlike nearly any other serious Metacritic, but like many lesser reviewers (particularly broadcast "critics"), studios get copies of the reviews before they are printed/broadcast so that they can be used in the ads.

It's a totally disreputable practice, but Travers has been doing it for many many years.

Maybe, but I do respect the man's opinion. It often correlates with my own. I look forward to reading his full review.

A positive review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE...

What an impossible task Spike Jonze has set for himself, adapting one of the few works that can be confidently called “perfect.” Maurice Sendak’s illustrated children’s book Where the Wild Things Are is the tale of a little boy’s tantrum and his fed-up mother’s rejection, and of the dream that transports him over the sea in his wolf pajamas to a land of monsters that crown him king and help him act out all his rowdy, infantile impulses—until the rage goes out of his system, melancholy comes, and he longs to return home. The huge creatures are right on the border between stuffed-animal cuddlesome and mythically grotesque. Childlike fantasies in Sendak’s world are always double-edged: They can liberate you or eat you up—or both.

Jonze’s film is a different animal from Sendak’s. It’s tamer and more domesticated, and its characters come with a backstory. As with many compact works, to expand is to decompress and diminish. Jonze, who wrote the script with Dave Eggers, fills in too much of the life of Max (played by Max Records—his real name, fancy that), now a lonely casualty of his parents’ divorce who freaks out when his mom (Catherine Keener) gets frisky with a date (Mark Ruffalo). One alteration is unpardonable: Max dashes out of the house and into the woods instead of getting sent to bed without supper, so there are no bedroom walls melting away and no waves rolling in—one of the book’s most archetypal images. No warm supper awaits Max’s return. What can you say? Bad adapters, bad. But once the boy is in his boat being tossed on the waves, things go swimmingly. That’s when Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are begins to cast a spell all its own.

Jonze and Eggers’s most agreeable innovation is turning Sendak’s rather anonymous beasts into complex, conflicted personalities. They sit around quarreling, smashing things, making holes in trees, staring into space, and wishing for a leader. They’re like a counterculture commune after all the hippies and their woks have left, after the drugs have stopped working so well. And then comes little Max, who proclaims himself a king to keep them from devouring him. Max Records (I still can’t get over that name) has a mop of dark hair and a sweet face, but his Max is petulant and edgy. It’s a wonderful performance; you’d never know he was acting opposite nine-foot puppets.

If you’ve seen the previews, you know that the setting is real (it’s the rocky coast of Australia) and the creatures are decidedly not. The mix of an unruly landscape, a live boy, and kiddie-show fakery shouldn’t jell—or should jell only on the level of a Muppet movie. But it works like a dream. Instead of being bombarded by computer illusions, we’re allowed to suspend our disbelief, to bring our own imaginations into play. For all the artfulness, the feel of the film is rough-hewn, almost primitive. It’s a fabulous tree house of a movie.

There is CGI, but it’s largely used for the creatures’ expressions. Outside of Gollum, I’ve never seen facial movements so evocative. Jonze rehearsed the voice actors together instead of taping them separately (by way of comparison, Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres didn’t meet until the premiere of Finding Nemo), and they’re like a crack repertory company. Catherine O’Hara is Judith, who sounds like a whiskey-soaked biker momma; Paul Dano is Alexander, the woebegone little guy with ram horns who’s always ignored. James Gandolfini has tender, plaintive cadences (all New Jersey gangster inflection expunged) as Carol, the tempestuous lummox whose stringy-haired hippie-chick girlfriend K.W. (Lauren Ambrose) has left him. Carol needs a king, a firm dad, someone to direct his wayward energies. He’s the one who asks Max if he can “keep all the sadness away,” and Max says he has “a sadness shield”—a mistake in a world of such up ups and down downs.

I’m of two minds about how Jonze and Eggers go soft in the end. These wild things don’t turn carnivorous when Max wants to leave. They act more like the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, etc. But this isn’t Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and the creatures aren’t projections of Max’s id. They’re a family, which is what this fatherless boy needs. They don’t eat their own.

A mixed review from David Denby in THE NEW YORKER...

The opening sequences of Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are”—a live-action feature based on Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s classic—are sensationally good. Max (Max Records) is an angry nine-year-old boy: his teen-age sister has abandoned him for her friends, and his divorced mother (Catherine Keener) noodles on the couch with her boyfriend. The way Max Records plays him—with darting eyes, and lips pressed together in rage—the boy has no idea that anyone’s feelings but his own could be real. He builds forts in his bedroom and an igloo in the front yard. He wants to be enclosed in his own imaginative space, but he also needs to burst out and tear around, and, as Max crashes through the house, Jonze’s camera, bounding up and down stairs, stays with him and brings us as close to a boy’s impetuousness and egotism as we’re likely to get in the movies. The sequence has non-stop momentum and a juggernaut impact. Max’s mother tries to calm him down, but he bites her on the arm and runs out of the house, wearing a wolf suit, its pointed ears sticking up like two little knives. As he gets into a boat and heads for the open sea, the movie slows down and offers a different kind of wonderment: the dark skies and foamy white waves of a perilous journey.

Max arrives at a mysterious island, and Jonze, re-creating the monsters that live there, stays close to Sendak’s ineffably goofy style. The creatures are eight or even nine feet tall—snouted, horned, clawed, and furry, with huge heads and snaggleteeth that are as pointed as Max’s wolf ears. One is lionish, another goatish—each suggests a different animal, yet stays within a child’s fantasy of that animal. An eccentric menagerie, they are physically a little manic, but they’re also almost tragic in their uncertainty and their melancholy. They briefly think of eating Max, but, claiming magic powers, he shouts, “Be still!,” and they crown him king instead. “Let the wild rumpus start!” he cries, and they all run and jump, bash one another, gouge holes in trees, and fall down in a heap, with Max happily nestled among them.

Jonze, the director of the witty experimental features “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation,” was right to use actors in elaborate suits (designed by Jim Henson’s company), instead of animated figures, to play the monsters. The creatures sail through the air now and then, but most of their movements are weighted, rather than slickly virtuosic or glib. Only their faces, which have human-seeming eyes and mouths, were digitally enhanced. Though Jonze stays faithful to the creatures, he discards Sendak’s sombre green-and-brown backgrounds. The movie was shot in Australia, and the landscapes are fresh and bright; blossoms fall like a benediction through the trees, and a big hairy dog rambles on a ridge above a blank yellow-sand desert. The best scenes are peerless in their creative freedom and warmth: when Max sits atop the head of the monster’s nominal leader, Carol (James Gandolfini), holding on to the beast’s horns, and is told that the kingdom is his, it’s an ecstatic image of childhood aggression fulfilled. Max has lost his old family but gained a new one, and it pays him unlimited attention.

Then “Wild Things” runs into trouble. Sendak’s book was created for young children. The text is all of three hundred and thirty-eight words long; some of the drawn pages are rhapsodically wordless. But the movie has been designed for older children and adults, and the creatures, voiced by strong actors like Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker, Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper, Paul Dano, and Catherine O’Hara, never stop talking. As re-created by Jonze and Dave Eggers, who collaborated on the screenplay, they turn out to be a discontented and quarrelsome bunch. They have mysterious relations with one another—friendships, love affairs—and deep-seated grievances. They throw jealous fits or walk off in a huff, and we don’t know where the hurt feelings are coming from. The bickering peters out, then starts up again, and, after a while, the creatures all sound like peevish adults elbowing one another out of the way at the smoked-fish counter at Zabar’s. No one gets enough love or respect. In the book, the creatures are projections of Max’s imagination, but these beasts are all too real, and, appearances to the contrary, they aren’t wild things. They’re becalmed, even defeated. They build a twiggy fort that looks like a giant birds’ nest, and then don’t use it much. After their initial burst of energy, they fall into a funk, and the movie seems to be less about liberation than about futility. One of the things they ask Max when he becomes king is: “Will you keep out all the sadness?” The answer, it turns out, is no.

Jonze and Eggers have spoken of their desire to keep the film close to a child’s needs, but have they done that? Kids like danger, followed by a release from danger and a return to safety, yet the only danger posed by these creatures is that they will turn Max into someone as messed-up as they are. The filmmakers may have wanted to link Max’s anger to the creatures’ wounds, but the connection is fuzzy—Max isn’t the one who hurt them. I have a vision of eight-year-olds leaving the movie in bewilderment. Why are the creatures so unhappy? That question doesn’t return a child to safety or anywhere else. Of one thing I am sure: children will be relieved when Max gets away from this anxious crew.

A *** out of **** review from SLANT...

by Ed Gonzalez
Posted: October 11, 2009

aurice Sendak might say that where the wild things are is a place where children go when there's too much sadness in their lives. In Spike Jonze's much-anticipated film adaptation of Sendak's classic children's book, we understand this world more than ever as a stirring projection of a nine-year-old boy's troubled psyche, a place of vast deserts and sinister forests and ginormous monsters who build homes and playgrounds seemingly designed by Richard Serra and whose behaviors parallel those of the humans in the tyke's life, and in the case of the particularly fearsome Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), the father who is conspicuously missing from it.

The film's pleasures derive partly from its rich and realistic sense of psychological detail, the way Max (Max Records) nestles next to his mother's feet, like the cat he dresses as, pulling at her stockings while she speaks on the phone. He longs for intimacy, evident too in the way he cries when his sister doesn't stick up for him after a playful snow fight with her friends culminates in the destruction of his igloo, but works hard at precipitating his unhappiness, destroying in a fit of anger a memento he made for his big sis and antagonizing his mother (Catherine Keener) before dinner for smooching her boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) on the couch.

Max, like Jonze, may rush to get to the island where the wild things are—the trip there is, for sure, cinematically and philosophically underthought, even if it does poignantly connect to an inscription on a globe given to Max by his father—but what the journey reveals about the nature of adolescence is haunting. Part of the group Armond White dubbed the American Eccentrics, Jonze, like Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola, understands the paradoxes of growing up, obsessing over his youthful nostalgia in ways that attest both to his solipsism and sensitivity as a filmmaker. You watch Where the Wild Things Are like you do Anderson's brilliant The Royal Tenenbaums and Coppola's Marie Antoinette, knowing that their makers spent many moons, as children, cocooned by their insecurities and, as adults, working fearlessly to ensure that their art both reflects their unique torments and resonates with ours.

Jonze, the earthiest of the Eccentrics, accomplishes this here by getting elemental. Max's dilemma and emotions are distilled to their essence, so the way his real-life suffering informs his dreamscapes becomes unmistakable. This correlation between the real and the imagined, and the way human feeling is made animalistic, may be understood too obviously in the way the wild things live (in circular nests lined with twigs, reminiscent of Max's igloo and ball of rubberands), fight (like her sister's friends), and love (like the motherly way KW, voiced by Lauren Ambrose, protects Max from an angry Carol by swallowing the boy), but the story's flights of eccentric fancy keep the story feeling alive and surprising. By observing the whims, longings, pettiness, and suffering of the wild things, Max comes to realize that his title of king—like that of a father or creator—isn't just some braggart's badge of privilege but one of honor and responsibility.

I could have done without the songs by Karen O and the Kids, not because the tunes feel like appeals to the tastes of Pitchfork hipsters but because they interfere with the elegiac tone of Max's narrative on the island. (If they feel discordant with Jonze's images, it's because they never feel, like the wild things, as if they're projections of Max's troubles and interests; you could say he seems more like a Death Cab for Cutie kind of kid.) But it's impossible not to be moved by the nine-year-old's journey. In class, Max's teacher's alarmist ramblings about the sun dying—and the world with it—haunt him straight into dreams. This explains the desert of sand, but when Max wonders "what comes after dust" you can tell that Jonze is seriously fixated on Max's fearful yearnings. This is how Wild Things becomes more than just a visual feast; it's a blissful evocation of imagining as a process of spiritual maturation.

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
Peter Travers is the biggest quote whore out there - unlike nearly any other serious Metacritic, but like many lesser reviewers (particularly broadcast "critics"), studios get copies of the reviews before they are printed/broadcast so that they can be used in the ads.

It's a totally disreputable practice, but Travers has been doing it for many many years.

I kid you not, as soon as I saw the Travers rating on the TV spots, I knew you would have something to say about it, Sean. We had this conversation back when one "Dark Knight" commercial literally only used quotes from his review. I agree, sometimes he tries to use too-hip phrases ("Will Vibrate The Core of Your Imagination's Mainframe!") but like Tye-Grr, I do tend to side with his opinion most of the time, mostly since he doesn't put up with crap like "Fred Claus."

A negative review from Kirk Honeycutt in THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER...

Bottom Line: A reverential but uninvolving adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic illustrated book for children.


An illustrated children's book that consists of nine sentences and 20 pages does not immediately suggest a feature film adaptation. Nonetheless, Spike Jonze has fearlessly plunged ahead to weave whimsical movie magic to bring Maurice Sendak's 1963 "Where the Wild Things Are" to the screen.

The story, as millions of children and grown children know, tells of a rambunctious boy, sent to bed without his supper, who then encounters fearsome-looking but surprisingly gentle creatures when his bedroom turns into a mysterious forest. The film does surmount one of its two difficult challenges: Through puppetry and computer animation, the filmmaking teams have successfully put a world of childhood imagination on the screen. Where the film falters is Jonze and novelist Dave Eggers' adaptation, which fails to invest this world with strong emotions.

Children might enjoy the goofy monsters and their fights and squabbles, but adults likely are to grow weary of the repetitiveness. In the end, the book probably was too slender to support a 102-minute movie. Without a quest to propel the story, such as Dorothy's journey in "The Wizard of Oz," the movie turns into an afternoon-special with an easily digested moral that fails to grab youngsters by the collar and shake them up with an exciting adventure.

A viewer is encouraged to see that Max's (Max Records) rough play with the family dog and his snowball fights with neighborhood kids are angry reactions to a home life that disturbs him. His single mom (Catherine Keener) must juggle demanding work assignments and a new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) while perhaps neglecting her impressionable son.

An older sister's self-absorption and a science teacher's declaration that one day the sun will die don't help matters. Nonetheless, the boy is too much of a brat to elicit much sympathy. And his adventures with the Wild Things never captivate a viewer.

Rather than being exiled to his room, the boy, clad in only a wolf costume, runs away into the night. He discovers a sailboat that transports him to the faraway land of Wild Things, creatures that nurture childlike ambitions and grudges.

It is not long before he declares himself a Viking king. Swallowing anything the wee lad says, the monsters nominate him to be their king, too. He readily accepts and promises to keep them happy and safe. Max is about to learn the first lesson of a politician: Be careful about what you promise a potential constituency.

The monsters carry on like children themselves. They wish to sleep in piles of furry bodies, think and behave with a child's self-righteousness and are swift to perceive any slight. The large costume suits, courtesy of Jim Henson Co.'s Creature Shop, achieve a remarkable semblance to the witty illustrations of Sendak (who as one of the film's producers was heavily involved in overseeing the page-to-screen transition).

The Wild Things are overgrown dolls with expressive, feral faces and often lighter-than-air bodies. (Sendak reportedly based his monsters on family members studied intently as a child.) They rather like to bash things but are quick to realize that little gets accomplished by such actions.

The voice actors couldn't be better. James Gandolfini plays the pack leader, Carol, who looks avidly for purpose in life and thinks Max might provide the key. Catherine O'Hara is the sardonic, pessimistic Judith, all mouth and one horn growing incongruously out of her nose; Forest Whitaker is her patient and possibly adoring companion, Ira; Paul Dano is a put-upon goat; Chris Cooper plays the birdlike, kinetic Douglas; and Lauren Ambrose is the aloof KW.

Virtually plotless escapades in monster land feature the building of a fort and a dirt-clod fight, all things that Max instigates without any thought about how these activities will fulfill his promises to the gang. They don't, causing him to realize that "it's hard to be a family."

The Australian production takes huge advantage of the hills, sand dunes and shores of the outer Melbourne area to create the changeable landscapes of this other world. Cinematographer Lance Acord, Jonze's collaborator on "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," superbly integrates the imaginative with the real, and K.K. Barrett's design further enhances this "real" fantasy, a far cry from the studio-bound phantasms of old. A rock-pop score by Karen O and Carter Burwell tries too hard and at too loud a pitch.

I don't care what that high-falootin' Hollywood Reporter says, I'm still totally psyched about this film.

quote:

Originally posted by Dr. McPhearson:
I don't care what that high-falootin' Hollywood Reporter says, I'm still totally psyched about this film.

I don't think the industry based and box-office mined HOLLYWOOD REPORTER is hight-falootin' at all but especially compared to THE NEW YORKER, NEW YORK MAGAZINE, THE NEW YORK TIMES and some other sources I regularly cite. THE NEW YORKER I would think even prides itself on its exclusive readership.

Disregard this post if you are just joking. LOL.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,

A negative review from Todd McCarthy in VARIETY...

Fleet of foot, emotionally attuned to its subject and instinctively faithful to its celebrated source, "Where the Wild Things Are" earns a lot of points for its hand-crafted look and unhomogenized, dare-one-say organic rendering of unrestrained youthful imagination. But director Spike Jonze's sharp instincts and vibrant visual style can't quite compensate for the lack of narrative eventfulness that increasingly bogs down this bright-minded picture. Widespread curiosity about the cinematic fate of Maurice Sendak's childhood perennial looks to spur sizable if not stellar commercial results in all markets, including on Imax screens.

Thematically, comparisons to everything from "The Wizard of Oz" to "Coraline" are not out of order for this flight of fancy on the part of an emotionally neglected 9-year-old boy; the driving impulse to escape an oppressive real life through creative fantasy is the same in all these books-to-films, as is their success in speaking simultaneously to children and adults. At the same time, contrasting "Wild Things" to two such superlative works in the same vein sharply shows up the new film's lack of density and complexity.

Granted, Jonze had a lot less to work with going in, as Sendak's 1963 volume, consisting of just 18 picture panels and 338 words of text, can be digested in less than five minutes. It's a simple but powerfully evocative tale of a mischievous boy who, sent to bed without supper, finds his room transformed into a dense forest and, after a long sea voyage, lands on an island populated by several fearsome-looking beasts, whom he tricks into believing he's "the most wild thing of all."

The most bracing section of the film is the first 15 minutes. Using a spot-on handheld camera and deft edits ruthlessly timed to when you need an air intake, Jonze pins the action on the aggressive energy of Max (Max Records) as he terrorizes his dog, bombards neighbor kids with snowballs and disrupts cozy time his mother (Catherine Keener) tries to have with a boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo, barely present). A great-looking kid, Records behaves with credible abandon and, without any child-actor mannerisms, provides the film with a solid center throughout.

Perhaps the greatest liberty Jonze and screenwriting cohort Dave Eggers take with Sendak's little yarn is their dispensing with the flowering of Max's bedroom, instead having him run off into some woods in his white wolf costume and find a sailboat that takes him through turbulent seas to a distant shore.

Upon arrival, Max finds six large and potentially dangerous creatures variously outfitted with scary horns, sharp claws, pointy teeth and large stomachs that need filling. Taking advantage of the beasts' general forlornness and evident need of an authority figure, Max introduces himself and is quickly accepted as their king. As in the book, Max's immediate command is, "Let the wild rumpus start!," whereupon one and all engage in mad behavior worthy of kids of all ages. By the time everyone calms down, however, it dawns that these big wild things are just like people -- in fact, rather too much so.

Free to have the wild things speak however they wanted, Jonze and Eggers surprisingly give them the voices and attitudes of middle-aged urban kibitzers; vaguely complainy and neurotic, the creatures are dominated by their sense of isolation and sadness. On the face of it, this is a choice with some wit behind it. But it also defangs the beasts from the outset -- one never fears that any of them would dream of making a meal out of Max -- and in the long run makes them far too ordinary.

Absent any sense of jeopardy or dramatic complications, the 70-odd minutes of screen time Max spends on the island (beautifully represented by rugged locations on the southern Australian coast near Melbourne) becomes a blur of rambunctious shenanigans, fort building, pretend warfare and confided feelings, particularly on the part of the imposing Carol (James Gandolfini), the most developed wild thing and the one to whom Max becomes closest.

There are fine creative inventions along the way, notably the large birds' nest-style structures the island inhabitants build and two funny squawking owls that aren't in the book. But nothing much is ever at stake, causing a story that begins in dynamic fashion to slowly devolve to the level of fleeting whimsy.

Most of the attention the film received during its prolonged production centered on the difficulty of seamlessly combining the large creature costumes with CGI facial expressions. The wild things move around pretty well and interact with Max in a credible way that fully justifies the no doubt difficult decision not to use CGI all the way. All the more ironic, then, that the film's biggest problem is not the look of the creatures but the manner in which they speak.

That said, the thesps provide low-key, nuanced readings, with Gandolfini and Lauren Ambrose particularly distinguishing themselves with dialogue that often seems odd coming from the toothsome mouths seen onscreen.

Excellent production values stress the relative realness of what's on view compared to the digital worlds of most kidpics these days. The alt-rock tenor of the music scoring is refreshing at first, but the predictability of the music cues proves increasingly wearisome.

I will post their written reviews when available but the "At the Movies" critics A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips both liked the film a lot.

quote:

Originally posted by pacinofan:
Disregard this post if you are just joking. LOL.

Consider it disregarded.

Did I mention I want to see this film?

I don't think I've been this excited to see a film since the original X-Men (haha, comic nerd, yes I was/am).

Anyway, if this movie is not great I'm going to be hugely dissapointed.

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
Peter Travers is the biggest quote whore out there - unlike nearly any other serious Metacritic, but like many lesser reviewers (particularly broadcast "critics"), studios get copies of the reviews before they are printed/broadcast so that they can be used in the ads.

It's a totally disreputable practice, but Travers has been doing it for many many years.

And Mr. Know-it-all ruins the party, once again.