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A Late-Viewer’s Review of Where the Wild Things Are
In this review I will not attempt to rate this film. I don’t mean to grade Where the Wild Things Are by any cinematic/aesthetic/critical scale, so I’ll leave that to the slew of critics who will watch all movies on their superficial level. Underneath the furry hides lies a semblance of childhood that isn’t quite fondly recalled.
The last thing to fade from our memory is light. A wrestling match amongst the bed sheets when we were seven is fused with the light coming through the window and through the sheets in our older minds, but there is a moment, probably forgotten, when one child has overpowered the other and there is an intensive fear of not being able to breathe. Max is thrust is similar situations three times in the movie: play gone too far, all air passages blocked and a tell-all panicked expression on his face while his arms move in frenzy to escape the deadly embraces. The moments in this movie force audience members to review their sun-spotted memories with that unsettling addition. He was playing too rough and I could not breathe.
The funny thing about Max is his ambivalence towards being eaten, perhaps an unconscious confidence in his immortality, or even, his ignorance about mortality and all that it entails. He is however very scared of being abandoned, a feeling he knows very well and abhors. He feels a need to impress the wild things so they will not leave him. The all-encompassing concern is not necessarily to rule, that being a more adult-like concern, but to simply be accepted. In the social circle of Wild Things, Max picks out a mother figure, another creature very similar to himself and a rivalrous, sibling-like character. The father-figure is markedly absent where the Wild Things are since, as it is a sort of parallel universe, Max hasn’t a father in real-life. His mind has constructed something vastly different from reality, yet is inspired by reality. His fantasy proves to be much more susceptible to reality the longer it plays out: families fight, friends lose trust in you and forts get destroyed, most frequently, by someone who helped you build it.
The end of fantasy is inevitable, so Max returns home to a mother anxiously waiting for him. The audience is then thrust into the mother’s shoes as we get a sense of the heartbreak she must have waited with and how terribly sad and wonderful it is that Max is totally oblivious to it.
I see this movie as an attempt to paint the true divisions between adulthood and childhood. Adults tend to view children as beings living out a sort of psuedo-life where only good things happen and any expression of pain is due to the child’s over-active imagination.
(To tie in with a point I was making earlier, this perception is probably thanks in part to our shoddy memories.)
Children are completely ignorant to things adults have a better mental grasp of: primarily mortality. They simply cannot know what shoving against the parent’s embrace does to the parent’s heart. It is the parent that can abandon them, the child, not the other way around.
In attempts to explain these dynamics, Spike Jonze takes a rather surrealist approach. There are hints of Oedipal complexity and World-of-the-Mother, but the most telling surrealist property is the dream-like execution of the plot. That is to say, there isn’t really a plot. Things do not happen for any real, coherent reason. Events are meant to mirror the anxieties Max feels in reality. Seeking “organic unity” within Where the Wild Things Are is a moot point, unless you happen to be Sigmund Freud.
That said, I’m afraid this review may reveal certain aspects of myself to strange readers, but I mean, I can’t claim any empirical objectivity when I review something. So go ahead: psychoanalyze me bitch.
Jonze… what do you mean to say? For I heard, “Ignorance isn’t bliss, and we are all children in the face of death.”
I especially miss New York over the weekends because the movie selection at the theaters are frequently worse than what’s on the television at home. I can feel my braincells slowly suffocating. I’ll admit that I’m a snob when it comes to movies. 1) They should be original and 2) They should stir a thought or emotion. Is that really too much to ask?
Don’t answer that.
Anyway, I walked out of the theater last weekend as loopy as a small child sucking the helium from the balloons at the wedding reception, complete with the emotionally confused wedding planner, the exuberant family, the designer gown, and that man that always crashes the wedding at the last moment to declare his undying love to the bride. (Yes, that was a reference to My Best Friend’s Wedding, The Wedding Planner, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and The Wedding Singer ALL AT THE SAME TIME.) At any rate, if there was a weekend for unoriginal romantic comedies, this last took the cake. I rarely go to the movie theater back-to-back, but since I did, I figured I could take two of the recent romantic comedies, put them in the ring, and have them slug it out for the title of The-Movie-That-Didn’t-Suck-the-Most. Besides, Living the Rom-Com has been on a lengthy hiatus, and I figure that if I’m ever going to steal his readers, now is the time to do it.*
First beef was the title. I hated the movie even before it started, but the plot struck a personal chord. You see, the 24th of May, next weekend, I will be attending a wedding. It just so happens that my best friend (whom, I may or may not be in love with… I guess I’ll be finding out soon enough) happens to be in love with someone else. Which, I mean, whatever. Point being, I was feeling Tom’s pain. But despite being at-one with the plot, the execution was unoriginal, predictable, and taking the subject flippantly. Which, yes, I know, it’s a comedy, but some of it was just in bad taste.
And the Scottish-dual before the wedding was completely pointless. What if he had won? It was just a tradition, the family wasn’t really going to call of the wedding just because the groom couldn’t through a tree farther than the Maid of Honor.
But things I liked: the Scottish tradition of selling kisses before the big day from pub to pub. That really was cute! And, hi, when Hannah and Tom are ordering for each other at the bakeries and restaurants just because they knew each other so well, you can’t say that your heart isn’t swelling with hope that there might be someone out there who knows you better than yourself. Who could potentially order dessert for you and read your stomach’s mind.
Plus, even though you knew the ending from the moment she introduces her fiance, (who is a total tool), you’re still happy that it happens.
Conclusion: Though the comedy aspect of the movie was… lame (as in I never laughed), the romantic part of it had its moments. And Patrick is hot. Almost as hot as Ashton Kutcher.
Title was fine.
Two New Yorkers (must pause here to ask: What is it with Romantic Comedies and New York City? Are they trying to tell New Yorkers something? Are they trying to tell the rest of the United States something? Like, your best chances at discovering your love for someone is in the financial capital of the world? What?) experience some major life-upsets. Joy gets dumped by her fiance in front of all of her friends and Jack’s own father fires him. (Keep in mind that at this point, they still don’t know each other.) So they go to Las Vegas to forget about everything, to let loose you know, and they somehow book the same hotel room. Jack and Joy head out together to take on the strip, get completely smashed and decide to get married.
For the record, this movie is fucking funny. I laughed THE ENTIRE TIME.
So the next morning, they flare at each other for being so stupid next to the slot machines. Joy storms off and Jack haphazardly drops a coin in the closest machine… and hits the Jackpot of three million dollars. For those who have seen the trailer know what happens next: “What’s yours is mine baabby… remember?”
My only real annoyance with this flick was the lack of thought that went into the sentence. I mean the judge basically said, “You have to be married because it will make me laugh and I get a kick out of making examples of drunk fucks like you.” Divorces are over-ruled everyday. It’s not the norm, but it happens… the writers couldn’t come up with something that, I don’t know, made more sense?
At any rate, they’re sentenced to marriage before they can claim their jackpot. So they hate each other. And it is hilarious. No, really, it’s hilarious. Like I said, I laughed a lot. It was so funny, that when it started to get more romantic, you were like, “Wait? What happened to sword fighting with french bread? BRING BACK THE FUNNY REVENGE DIALOGUE!”
So I’m going to say that What Happens in Vegas has the opposite problem that Made of Honor had. Where Made of Honor had an influx of romance, What Happens in Vegas had an influx of comedy. So which one would I recommend to my readers? Yeah… go watch Aston Kutcher and Cameron Diaz slug it out. It’s the more funny and original film.
And yes, Ashton also happens to be really hot. Which helps things.
*And Billy, I’m not actually planning to steal your readers. We can share them.
I just returned from Edward Scissorhands, the ballet running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Yes: Edward Scissorhands is now a ballet. Our human potential has been reached. Tim Burton may not know this, but just about every movie he conceptualized/directed is a ballet waiting to happen. Will someone be choreographing The Corpse Bride next? I sure hope so. Edward Scissorhands was a tender, quirky dance that (I’ll own) made me laugh and cry.
I’m mean, when that heartbroken, old lady hobbled on stage clutching a pair of scissors…oh oh… it was just hit that spot. The one embedded deep underneath the space between my top left rib and my bra wire.
Two things that I wish were different: The difficulty of the ballet (several moments were only inches away from typical Broadway dancing) and Jim’s fate. As everyone knows, Jim dies in the movie. He should have died in the ballet. That’s a very important part. And the build-up needed for his well-deserved stabbing would have added even more to the emotional punch at the end.
The sets? Amazing. Kim? Amazing. Edward? Amazing.
I really enjoyed the dance that fleshes out this town’s nauseating perfection at the beginning. I actually watched the movie last night to get in the mood, and I was telling my roommate that the town reminded me of my father’s hometown. Can’t you picture it? Two decades behind, flat, immaculate and rather like living on a miniature golf course. The townsfolk themselves reminded me of the old Leave it to Beaver family with clocks for hearts. The irony of this, of course, is that Edward is more humanistic than everyone else despite being an invention among the “natural beings.” Therefore, his leather-clad, gothic outfit is less disturbing than the white capris and pastel button-downs that dominate and seems to say: Really folks. It’s your heart that matters.
For those who don’t know of the plot at all, allow me to give you a brief rundown. Edward was invented in the mansion overlooking the Spectre-esque town, but wasn’t finished. His inventor died before he could give Edward hands and he was left with a bunch of scissors protruding from his wrists. One day Peg, the Avon lady, arrives at the mansion and finds Edward desolate and scared. She takes him home where he is an instant sensation. While he has difficulty fitting in, his talents at shearing hedges, dogs and hair encourage the town to accept him. Edward falls in love with Peg’s daughter Kim, but her boyfriend Jim, sensing Edwards affections, frames him in a burglary. With the entire town turned against him, Edward runs back to his mansion. Kim follows, knowing that Jim has ruined Edward’s chances of happiness. Unfortunately, Jim follows her, and cuts into a rather tender scene by trying to kill Edward. Of course, as Edward has scissors for hands, he won rather easily, but now with Jim dead, Kim had to leave him behind.
The story itself is a creative masterpiece that gives more edge to the Beauty and the Beast story. But while I wouldn’t recommend going to Beauty and the Beast on stage, it works in magnificent ways with Edward.
Mostly because Beauty and the Beast is a musical and Edward Scissorhands doesn’t have any of that “Producers” shit going on.
The dancer who played Edward fortunately recognized that while he wasn’t Johnny Depp, Johnny Depp was Edward Scissorhands, and didn’t screw up the character all of us knew and loved. He even turned his body in the same way and kept that particular look (you know the one) on his face so that all of us clearly understood the Johnnyness of Edward, despite the pirouettes.
I’m bothering with this review because it has potential. As said, the technicality of the dancing was lacking and the deviation from the script at the end was anti-climactic. That it managed to still touch everyone in the audience (including yours truly, whom we all know is not one to get emotional) despite those two things makes its future very exciting.
We can only hope the director will come across this review and make the necessary changes.
In the meantime, if you can see it, you only have one day left. If you can’t see it, sit and imagine it with the soundtrack. Shhh… no laughing: I’m serious.
