“I’ll start off with the obligatory disclaimer that I dont recall ever reading the book (if I did read it, I dont remember). So I dont know how the movie follows or measures up to it. With that out of the way, I found the movie really boring. It had a really promising start. The low close up camera angles and Max’s imaginary antics brought you right into a kid’s world. But then, soon after he got to the island of the Wild Things, there wasn’t much happening. I’d dropped by phone about half way thru and spent the rest of the movie obsessing over picking it up. Thats how much the movie held my interest.
There were some redeeming qualities. My favorite wild thing was Alexander, voiced by Paul Dano. I definitely perked up a bit everytime he was around. And the wild things themselves were really well done. The costumes were built by The Jim Henson Company and were a combination of animatrionics and computer animation. I also loved the kid, Max Records. He was equal parts adorable and tough and gave a really heartwarming performance. Loved Catherine Keener as always, but she didnt particularly feature much.
Other than that, there’s really not much else to say. It was a lot of Max and the Things running around playing. Minimal conflict. Plot didnt seem to be headed in any particular direction. It was just flat.
Well this gives me a chance to introduce my movie rating system. I’ll just be using it on theater movies (so none of the AFI ones). The scale is up to 4 rock hands (\m/). A lot of times I’ll rate stuff on places like Flixter that have a 5 scale. That fifth point is reserved for _really_ awesome stuff like Aladdin. And as a rule, I need to have seen something at least twice in order to award it a fifth point. Also remember, this is entirely my opinion. I dont claim to be any real expert, just someone who enjoys movies. That said…
Where the Wild Things Are – \m/ \n