by Frank Calvillo
Box Office Alternative Column
Box Office Alternative is a weekly look into additional/optional choices to the big-budget spectacle opening up at your local movie theater every Friday. Oftentimes, titles will consist of little-known or underappreciated work from the same actor/writer/director/producer of said new release, while at other times, the selection for the week just happens to touch upon the same subject in a unique way. Above all, this is a place to revisit and/or discover forgotten cinematic gems of all kinds.
If there’s one thing that the world needs in this time and place in modern society, it’s another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie, which is exactly what we’re getting as the second installment of the re-worked franchise hits cinemas June 3 courtesy of the unstoppable Michael Bay, who once again serves as the film’s Executive Producer.
However there is a slight beacon of hope that the film won’t be a total waste of time with the appearance of producer Scott Mendick, who was also involved in the honing of the product. While his name may not be as high-profile as Bay’s, a significant handful of cinephiles owe him a debt of thanks for helping bring the touching and flawless Where the Wild Things Are to the screen.
Based on the classic children’s book by Maurice Sendak and adapted by director Spike Jonze from his and Dave Eggers’s screenplay, Where the Wild Things Are tells the story of nine-year-old Max (Max Records), who is fed up with his humdrum existence in the real world. After refusing to obey his mother (Catherine Keener), Max decides to run away, eventually ending up in a faraway island populated by gigantic creatures known as “the wild things,” which include Carol (James Gandolfini), Alexander (Paul Dano), Judith (Catherine O’Hara), Ira (Forest Whitaker), The Bull (Michael Berry Jr.), Douglas (Chris Cooper), and K.W. (Lauren Ambrose). The wild things instantly adopt Max as their king, which launches the youngster on a life-changing adventure.
One of the most glorious aspects of the film for me is the wonder and magic of the wild things themselves, which come courtesy of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The creatures have been crafted with the greatest of care and imagination. In a world where every other image on the screen has been pixelated and digitized to death, watching a film rely on the traditional beauty of practical effects is nothing short of refreshing. There certainly must have been some discussion about using new technologies when it came to the creation of the wild things themselves. But thankfully, those talks led nowhere, as the grand and detailed practical effects used to create the wild things, along with stunning cinematography and a production design that is truly from another world, all conspire to create one of the most beautiful films ever adapted from a children’s book.
Talk about turning Where the Wild Things Are into a feature-length film began almost as soon as the book had become a treasured staple, with many studios trying to capture the essence of Sendak’s story, but inevitably failing to make it past the inception stage. Many pointed to the sparse dialogue as the problem. Not Eggers and Jonze. The pair’s wonderful expansion of the novel’s themes easily lent themselves to the screen in their eyes, resulting in a screenplay which beautifully explores the intricacies of childhood.
Jonze is perfectly in synch with the screenplay and guides the movie carefully with a steady hand as he takes Max through an unforgettable, eye-opening journey. In Max’s eyes, each one of the wild things represents different layers of being a child and the differing, and oftentimes conflicting, emotions which encompass growing up. In living with the wild things, Max begins to understand what growing up is all about as he begins to experience it himself. Equal parts beautiful and melancholic, Where the Wild Things Are ends up being about the beginning of the end of one’s childhood.
Each of the accomplished actors voicing the wild things do their absolute best with their character. Most voiceover performances can be largely animated and over-the-top (naturally), but in Where the Wild Things Are, every actor plays his or her character in an honest, earnest manner as if they were actually real creatures, making all the difference in the world. Records joins them with a performance which excellently projects the core elements of childhood, namely innocence and curiosity, while Keener manages moments of warmth and sensitivity in her handful of scenes.
Where the Wild Things Are was greeted with the most lukewarm of responses from audiences when released in the fall of 2009. Families who had gone to the movies to see an adaptation of a children’s book were put off and slightly puzzled by the film’s more thoughtful take on childhood. In addition, cries about some of the film’s darker elements being too much for young children contributed to the film’s lackluster showing at the box office. Critics on the other hand applauded Jonze’s take on the classic story with glowing reviews, especially from The New York Times’s A.O. Scott, who named Where the Wild Things Are the best film of the year and one of the top ten of the entire decade.
There have always been those works of literature which were considered unfilmable for various reasons, including dense text, shocking content, or just an overall scope which proved too grand. Where the Wild Things Are was certainly lumped into this category for many years, with studio heads thinking that a book which consists of no more than a handful of sentences, never could contain enough involving story, endearing characters and the kind of special emotional pull required for a feature-length film. Oh, how wrong they were.
