My thoughts on Where the Wild Things Are.

Wow! My first post in ages, and it still echoes in here! But I just wanted to document this.

So I finally got around to watching "Where the Wild Things Are" the other night. My reaction to it was to post on Twitter and Facebook: Please don't let Spike Jonze near "In the Night Kitchen"!

I suspected this would raise a reaction from my good friend Rob, who had seen it at the cinema and seemed most impressed with it. It did get a reaction: Wow! Methinks you just saw a very different movie to the one I saw a few weeks ago... I so wish I'd underhyped it...

My response: Or Spike read a very different book to the one that was a favourite of mine from childhood, that I have read a zillion times and could recite off by heart, and have the images of many smiling Max's embossed in my mind.

My "place" "where the wild things are" was a place of escape, my "happy place" for want of a better term. That was not a "happy place"!

Rob then responded with: But doesn't it always start out fun/happy, until someone gets hurt? That theme was obviously in the film... Is it not in the book too?

I probably didn't answer his question, but this was my answer (noting that I live in Hobart, Tasmania):

I caught a bus yesterday, and asked the driver for a ticket to the "city"; the bus had "Hobart" on it, and I was fairly confident that the driver therefore knew where I wanted to go - a city that I'm fairly familiar with. Sure there are still places within it that I am quite unfamiliar with, but when the driver stopped, I was thankfully in familiar territory.

There was, I guess, a chance that I could have ended up in Hobart, Oklahoma. It seems a nice enough place, although local government funding for the local library system, in fiscal years 2001-2002, was below the national average. Most people there speak the same language as they do in the Hobart I know. So could I be happy in Hobart, Oklahoma? Sure, I reccon so. But it wouldn't be the Hobart I know and love. It would always be a different Hobart.

There were whole swathes of this movie that I loved. The cinematography was glorious, I found the soundtrack smart, Max played the role he was given brilliantly, and the Jim Henson team did sterling work with the wild things.

But, as Hobart Oklahoma is not "my" Hobart, so Jonze's world of "Where the Wild Things Are" is not the one I grew up with. One was a place of therapy (A brief Time Out), the other a place where, when Max left, EVERYONE needed therapy (including me!), or so I felt! Perhaps if I were not so familiar (or not at all) with the book, I could have raved about the film. I don't know.

For what it's worth, these two reviews reflect well how I feel, but put it a lot better:

Here and
here

Not sure if that makes sense, but that's how I feel. Did I hate the movie? No. But boy his "place" was a lot more depressing than "my" place!

IMHO, this would have made a beautiful short film. The story didn't need padding out and filled with depressed creatures, just to make a "Feature Film"! I would have had the scene "That very night in Max's room a forest grew and grew- and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around..." - that would have been more "real" to me. I would have been more faithful to the book, which didn't need expanding...

I want my "place" "Where the Wild Things Are" Back! To steal a phrase from a bizarrely similarly-themed film "There's no place like home!"

So what film adaptations have worked well/badly for you?