Just last week Todd Solondz's birthday forced my hand into reviewing Life During Wartime, which I was having trouble talking about, and now we've got Spike Jonze's 40th birthday today making me feel the same pressure to talk about his new and greatly-anticipated-by-me flick, Where the Wild Things Are. I did briefly wrote up a piece at The Film Experience earlier this week touching on the film's happy-making box office success, and the fact that the film made me literally shake with tears, but nothing here yet...
And man... I just don't really know what to say. I loved the film. It hit me in exactly the sort of deeply personal way I hoped it would... actually, even more than I thought it would. It was eerie how perfectly it captured not just the feeling of Sendak's book (which I've admitted before was my favorite book when I was a kid) but the feelings I remember from my own childhood so well. I know that these are pretty much universal, the roiling emotions of youth that Jonze deals with here, but in that way that only great art manages he made it feel entirely personal to me. It really felt as if the film were flashing images of myself on the screen. My single mother raising me. The anger and confusion and sadness that plagued the seemingly endless hours of alone-time I had, every so often interrupted with outbursts of ebullition. The monsters became exactly what they were intended to become, that is extensions of these emotions - the loneliness, the anger, the excitement that turned to exhaustion.
The film just really really worked for me. It worked me over. It's one for the ages, as far as I'm concerned. So a happy birthday to Spike today and congrats on the film's success, both box-office-wise and in terms of actual artistic merit. You done it right, sir.
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And man... I just don't really know what to say. I loved the film. It hit me in exactly the sort of deeply personal way I hoped it would... actually, even more than I thought it would. It was eerie how perfectly it captured not just the feeling of Sendak's book (which I've admitted before was my favorite book when I was a kid) but the feelings I remember from my own childhood so well. I know that these are pretty much universal, the roiling emotions of youth that Jonze deals with here, but in that way that only great art manages he made it feel entirely personal to me. It really felt as if the film were flashing images of myself on the screen. My single mother raising me. The anger and confusion and sadness that plagued the seemingly endless hours of alone-time I had, every so often interrupted with outbursts of ebullition. The monsters became exactly what they were intended to become, that is extensions of these emotions - the loneliness, the anger, the excitement that turned to exhaustion.The film just really really worked for me. It worked me over. It's one for the ages, as far as I'm concerned. So a happy birthday to Spike today and congrats on the film's success, both box-office-wise and in terms of actual artistic merit. You done it right, sir.
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1 comment:
That cute little genius is only 40? I better get off my ass!
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