{"id":4689,"date":"2009-10-17T02:55:20","date_gmt":"2009-10-17T06:55:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=4689"},"modified":"2009-10-17T02:56:35","modified_gmt":"2009-10-17T06:56:35","slug":"where-the-wild-things-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=4689","title":{"rendered":"Where the Wild Things Are"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"wherethewildthingsare1\"<\/a>I really can\u2019t draw. If there was ever proof of this, it was in college when I was taking a video production course and amongst all of the other little things that went into the writing, editing, directing, and organizational elements, we had to do storyboards. It is wishful thinking on a student production that you\u2019re going to even use your storyboards anyway, you\u2019d be lucky to get shots that cut together at all<\/em>, let alone that follow predetermined images. Our professor told us that we were not allowed to draw stick figures; if we didn\u2019t have any ability to draw we had to draw blobby people. When he described a blobby person, he held up a wooden figure with various joints connected by string that was loose enough to flop around. They kind of looked like one of the monsters in <\/span>Big Man J<\/span><\/span>apan<\/span><\/em><\/a><\/span>, but in my head I always thought of blobby people* as a lumpy, shapeless Grimace type, kind of like t<\/span>his<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"where-the-wild-things_4\"<\/a><\/em>Blobby people are what I thought of while watching Spike Jonze\u2019s adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are<\/em>, where the creatures that a young boy, Max who has run away from home has imagined, are lumpy, odd looking, and unnerving, if not exactly scary (think Lidsvill<\/span>e<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/span>, <\/em>but in the desert). Their lips, which perfectly match up with the celebrity-voiced dialogue (well cast celebrities at that, especially James Gandolfini as Carol, the impulsive, short tempered monster, and Chris Cooper as Ira, a soft-spoken, pale version of the San <\/span>Diego Chicken<\/span><\/a>) combined with the large heads of the puppets have a feel unlike any other movie other than The Neverending Story<\/em>. And unlike that Wolfgang Petersen film (and presumably the novel it was based on, I haven\u2019t read it), Jonze doesn\u2019t wallow in condescending messages, and doesn\u2019t guide us through the story point by point.<\/p>\n

Where the Wild Things Are<\/em> is messy, repetitive, beautiful, ugly, drawn out, and underdeveloped, and considering the monsters all represent various parts of the Max\u2019s personality (caring, insecure, sensitive, adventurous, lonely, frustrated, etc.), that\u2019s exactly how it should be. As soon as he enters their realm, they dub him king (since that\u2019s what he tells them he is), but expect him to tell them how to be happy, as they have devolved into complete insecurity and destruction. Jonze\u2019s own childlike view of the world (especially evident in his music videos) makes it obvious that he sees Max as his surrogate, and just as Jonze would, he has Max make suggestions to the monsters, such as building forts and hideouts, and playing games of where everyone throws dirt at each other, but doesn\u2019t order them around, letting them figure out on their own what they excel at. This was true in Jonze\u2019s first two features, Being John Malkovich<\/em> and Adaptation<\/em>, which had plenty within Charlie Kaufman\u2019s scripts to direct the way. Jonze\u2019s ethos boils down to a clich\u00e9d tough guy question: If he was asked to \u201clead, follow, or get out of the way,\u201d Jonze would get out of the way. He doesn\u2019t show off and his choice to once again drain the color from the film and use hand-held camera amidst the surreal (especially effective in grounding the human relationships in Being John Malkovich<\/em> and not letting the bizarre concept be the whole movie) is what gives Where the Wild Things Are <\/em>a strange naturalism different from all other films that tend to be aimed at children.<\/p>\n

\"Wild-Things-Are-movie-03\"<\/a>The movie is in some way more of an achievement than the Kaufman scripts that Jonze adapted, because he, along with co-writer Dave Eggers, had far less to work with in Where the Wild Things Are<\/em>, as Maurice Sendak\u2019s book is so short and concise. Their decision making seemed to have revolved around not trying to overload us with too much of anything (well, except those numerous music-accompanied running sequences). The movie is downbeat and occasionally sad, it\u2019s funny, but not hilarious (\u201csorry we were going to eat you, we didn\u2019t realize you were king\u201d), the imagery can be striking, such as the enormous castle that looks like Weird Al\u2019s The<\/em> Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota<\/em>, but it isn\u2019t overwhelming, staying with the dusty brown look, and it\u2019s dreamlike, such as the Jonah and the Whale<\/em> sequence, but never betrays the reality it has created. In that way, Where the Wild Things Are<\/em> is a movie that seems the most in touch with the way a child\u2019s mind works in any film since the crazy nonsense of S<\/span>py Kids 2<\/span><\/a><\/em>. Whatever your reaction is to Where the Wild Things Are<\/em>, and all credit to Jonze for convincing Warner Brothers to finance it, it\u2019s not easily summed up or simplified, unless being told that monsters punching holes in trees entices you enough. Who could hate that?<\/p>\n

\"where_wild_things_are2\"<\/a>* I would have been happy to draw blobby people, if I could, but I\u2019m really not even close. I was making a silly music video about a spazzy-dancing clueless guy who accidentally picks up a hooker (a pimp trips him with his cane while the guy bounces around an undesirable alley) and brings her back to his dorm room where he insists that instead of sex, they play paddy cake. I was too concerned with having the story make sense, rather than worrying about spending 3 hours drawing completely unintelligible scrawl. \u00a0So I shot the video first and then had a more artistically-inclined friend draw the storyboards afterwards based on my descriptions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I really can\u2019t draw. If there was ever proof of this, it was in college when I was taking a video production course and amongst all of the other little things that went into the writing, editing, directing, and organizational elements, we had to do storyboards. It is wishful thinking on a student production that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,12],"tags":[5188,2559,757,728,40,4547,4385,130,74,818,5773,4390,166,5778,1777,4445,5776,5779,5172,5770,307,5772,5768,1301,4600,5470,1891,2511,1403,5189,5774,276,3275,5771,462,918,3085,5777,1496,5769,5558,4042,5775,873],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4689"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}