Needless to say, I loved Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are:
Spike Jonze's body of work is mostly music videos and skater videos. Besides this, he has directed two other feature films, both for the brilliant writer Charlie Kaufman. Those films being: Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Two films which are on my top favorites of all time. So yeah, I love Mr. Jonze. What he has done here, is take Maurice Sendak's beloved book, and turn it into an intense, fantastic, melancholic, wild, and nostalgic look at the intense emotions of a child and what it means to be immersed in the childhood experience.
Let's kiss Spike's ass a little more and talk about everything involved in his creative direction.
1. The detail in this film is such a treat for the eye. There's always something little to pick up in every shot, and he clearly has such a distinct vision that he does not want to be messed with.
2.On the other side, the scope and cinematography is just awe-inspiring. This land of where the wild things are is beautiful, dark, vast, and a great imaginative surrounding.
3. His ideas are so precise and creative that you can tell that he loves making films and putting all of his creative juice into them, something, I highly look up to.
4.Watching "makings of" on the film shows me the effort he puts into getting things right. The little things he did for Max Records, who plays Max, are so touching and inspiring and to such a point that they built a strong relationship which, if they hadn't, I don't think the movie would've succeeded.
One of the things that Jonze talked about when starting this piece, is that he wanted to have the wild things to be mock ups of wild human emotions. We see these in the different characters who embody emotions Max and the people around him have. Before the film kicks off with Max going to where the wild things are, we're given only about twenty minutes of exposition seeing what Max's life is like in reality, at home. And in these short minutes we see just glimpses of what his life is like, however these glimpses show everything we need to see in order to draw parallels between the wild world Max imagines and the real one. We see his relationship with his mother, with his older sister, with school, with the older kids on the block, and the way he sees the "boring" world, and all of this in under twenty minutes. Looking at the way the real world is shot is also beautiful, but beautiful in it's own way, and not fantastical as is the wild world is. And this is all due to, once again, Jonze's directing.
Most complaints I've heard about this film are that when we get to the land of where the wild things are, it looses it's story, and looses it's narrative. I think that, that was the point. When Max get's to this land, it's a full escapism into childhood. It's incoherent, crazy, wild, sad, confusing, strange, new, and exciting. And that's what childhood is to many of us, and that's what I think Spike Jonze recognized with this. That's why the movie is mostly the wild things interacting with each other and dealing with emotions new and old, and that's why it ends up being a great mediation on childhood feeling and life.
I can't say enough good about this film. Some of the things I haven't touched on, but are to be recognized are:
-the great voice work by the wild things
-the superb work by Max Records playing Max
-the effects and how they worked with their amount of money and made it fantastic
-the amazing soundtrack by The Yeah Yeah Yeah's lead singer Karen O
-the amazing costume department for creating the wild thing suits and making them work
See this film and think about when you were younger and what a simple, confusing, and fantastic time that was.
Martin.
