talk about a serious need for ritalin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Wild_Things_Are
1) originally intended to be horses and not monsters
2) book was banned for 2 years before it became popular
1:10 AM 3/11/10 · It's amazing how much movie can be made over so little. Similar to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which I believe was 9 pages and yieded a 90 minute film, Where the Wild Things Are may've been about 10 pages or so. Don't recall as I don't think I've read it since I was 8 or so.
The movie is an hour and 40 minutes...
...damned fun too!
Really my own complaint about this movie is that there's no 'making of' portion. I'd really have loved to see that.
10:51 PM 3/11/10 · Hmmmm? I stopped writing this review, watched 2 other movies and wrote reviews for them, and am only coming back to this now. Weird.
The wikipedia link details it out a lot better but the original Where the Wild Things Are was basically a kid that was defying his mother, fell ass backwards into a magical land, and then went back home when he got bored there...which is kind of odd cuz my memory has him leaving when the monsters got to be a bit too wild. There's an animated version too where the story is pretty much the same thing (pretty sure I saw that when I was little).
This version is a lot different!
Max (the kid) is a lonely kid but doesn't notice it a lot due to a highly active imagination. His sister is generally dismissie of him and his mother loves him but is distracted because of work and dating. Admittedly neither of these are unusual for any family dynamic but to Max, who hasn't seen as many talkshows as I have, finds the situation intolerable...
...Max is kind of a brat.
He has 2 personas, technically. His normal self and his rampaging self. For the most part the latter only occurs when he's dressed in his 'wolf' suit; looks more like a cat. When he rampages he destroys/floods his sister's room and bites his mother. Then he runs away...
...I dunno. Maybe it's due to the book being so short but I was kinda surprised the movie gives 30 minutes of his real life before he runs away.
By the by, that school teacher had no business telling little kids the kinda stuff he was. I didn't learn that stuff until I was well into high school. Well, I knew about it but that's when it came up in my official education.
So the kid steals an actual boat, in the book he imagined one in his room, and ventures out onto the ocean. Maybe. It really depends on how you view this movie, whether or not he accesses another realm or just imagines the whole thing. There's a part that sort of indicates that the monsters could just be larger representations of the stuffed aminals he has home...
...but then again, they are monsters. Normal anatomy kind of goes out the window there.
THe names of the monsters here are different than the ones in the book, the author named them after memories of his own family. The names in the book were a bit unusual by my standards, yet in this movie they're remarkably normal. At points I got the sense that they all represented different aspects of his personality, though Carol (main boy monster) seems the most like Max.
Think his name was Carol. Could've been Carl but that's not how it was pronounced.
So, Max fins the island and follows the only source of light he can see. He finds the monsters wandering around a massive campfire, one of them (Carol) destroying all of their homes. Max rushes into help him while the other monsters try to figure out what exactly Max is. They're about to eat him, which from their conversations seems to be how they normally treat anyone they're bothered by, when he spooks them into believing they can't because he has powers.
Another difference from the book. Not so much the powers part as the fact that in the film the monsters actually call him on it later.
Long story short, not too many spoilers, the fundamental difference in the book from the movie is that Max doesn't leave when he's bored. He leaves when he sees too much of himself in the monsters and has to face some hard truths about himself. That's one interpretation. Could also be that after the monsters start calling him on his bull he becomes seriously worried that they're actually going to eat him.
This movie can be seen through a lot of different eyes by just one person.
Where the Wild Things Are is a joy! I only hope that
Debbie enjoyed it as much as I did.