Where The Wild Things Are

I am exhausted and should be sleeping right now, but instead I will give you my impression of Where The Wild Things Are, because I just saw it. Yeah, my mom won tickets to the sneak preview and she's typically the only one in our family that never wins anything. (It's been a year since I've won anything, though!) Anyway, my overall impression of the movie was that...well, it was weird and I am glad I didn't pay to get in. Now, maybe I am a bad judge of these things, because although you might say I am inherently kind of weird, I don't like my movies that way. The Never Ending Story, for example? Don't get it. I only have a vague recollection of that movie, anyway, but my impression is that it lived up to it's title. The book Where The Wild Things Are is also a distant memory, so maybe that adds to my confusion.

It's not even that I didn't understand it, per se, it's more like the movie just never fully came together. It was visually appealing but not dramatically satisfying. I appreciated the aesthetics, the music, and certain themes, but the dialogue seemed overly basic and rather poorly written. It often felt like I was listening to and watching 8-year-olds (monsters) express mature emotions that were beyond their understanding or maturity level. (I just looked it up out of curiosity, and Max is, in fact, 8.) I would say that the monsters and my camp children sometimes spontaneously reacted in similar ways, but the way that the monsters discussed them came across as an adult projecting those ideas onto them and imagining what a child might say. That might be lost on some people, but I handled groups of 8-year-olds at camp for six years, after all. I know it's supposed to be an adventure from the boy's perspective, so maybe I'm also projecting, but I'm pretty sure that kids won't quite get the message, either. The rudimentary adult language and fundamental intellect of the monsters just never quite grasped the principles behind their feelings. It's like a movie about childhood made for adults, only...too emotionally simplistic (?) for my taste. The emotions themselves were deep, sure, but the expressions seemed incomplete and childish. The whole movie was like, "Why are we so sad? Max, you are our king, make us happy." Most of the movie was melancholy with dramatic splashes of emotion, and it made me feel generally uncomfortable. Maybe it did the job, then, because growing up is often relatively uncomfortable. It seems like the critics who are calling it a "masterpiece" are embellishing the narrative, though. (Update: RFT's review said "For me, it seemed like group therapy with the Muppets." Haha, agreed.) In any case, I think it's already way over-hyped, but fantasy movies were never my thing, anyway.