Untamed … Where the Wild Things Are
What would it be like if Edmund, Lucy, Peter and Susan Pevensie could escape from wartorn Britain through the back of a wardrobe – only to be totally cool and blank about this new world of fawns and talking lions? Or if Dorothy and Toto could fly away from drab family strife to a multi-coloured land of midgets and witches and yellow brick roads and yet remain shruggingly laidback about the evident contrast between this place and Kansas? My guess is that it would look like this film, Spike Jonze's subdued, deadpan and even slightly depressive account of Maurice Sendak's much-loved 1963 picturebook classic Where the Wild Things Are.
- Where the Wild Things Are
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): PG
- Runtime: 60 mins
- Directors: Spike Jonze
- Cast: Catherine Keener, Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker, James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Max Records, Paul Dano
It has been expanded into a full-length psychological study of childhood loneliness and dysfunction, in which an unruly boy called Max (tousle-haired, 12-year-old Max Roberts) explodes with unhappiness and rage at the frustrations at home, and runs off. He sails to a remote land occupied by vast Muppety creatures: gloomy, clumsy, quarrelsome beasts, who after some discord accept him as their king. Instead of screaming with horror and astonishment at these extraordinary talking animal-giants, or in any normal way freaking out, Max calmly takes them at face value. They are, perhaps, hardly less scary than the grownups and bigger kids who intimidate him all the time. In this way, Jonze's movie intuits both the unjudging nature of a child and also an adult's detached understanding that, being metaphorical, these beasts are nothing to be scared of.
Metaphors for what, though? The movie begins with a plausible sketch of an imaginative, lonely boy who feels neglected. He plays on his own – a much older sister hangs out with her much older friends, one of whom may be her boyfriend, another unconquerable gulf between them. His mom (Catherine Keener) is affectionate enough, but clearly distracted by her job, some sort of freelance writing work that isn't going very well. Then there is Max's dad, played by Mark Ruffalo – but is this, in fact, his dad? Is he a stepfather or mom's boyfriend? At all events, he is a pretty distant and unsatisfactory dad figure with whom Max has no obvious connection. When he has a tantrum with his mother, and actually bites her, all this guy very feebly says is: "He can't treat you like that …"
On a crisp snowy day, friendless Max has built himself a heartbreaking igloo-cocoon. Seeing his sister show up at the house with her cool friends, he prepares a snowball-ambush, and we tense, expecting an upsetting putdown. But no; they join in gamely enough. The crisis comes when these big teenagers play too rough, hurting and upsetting little Max, and accidentally destroying his small igloo. Unable and unwilling to offer the tearful boy the necessary hugs of comfort, they just slouch off with embarrassed giggles, lighting the fuse for his later tantrum-explosion and traumatised escape.
His new land itself has a weirdness that isn't immediately obvious. It is partly woodland, partly rocky headland, leading to a windswept deserted beach bombarded with rolling, dangerous-looking breakers. Yet this stiff wind dies to nothing when Max traipses with one of the creatures through a limitless, whispering desert. It would surely be impossible to draw a map of this country, à la Tolkien or CS Lewis. Often it is seen bathed in a glowing sunset light, which adds a further level of unreality and disorientation.
These monsters are reasonably keen to accept Max as their king, perhaps as a way of solving their internal grumbling differences, and agree to Max's plan to build a big hideaway structure where they can all live and sleep together in a huddle. But it is clear that his reign, if that is what it is, is doomed. Max seems at odds with the female presence among the wild things, and there is a boys v girls division in this brave new world that echoes his life at home, overshadowed by female authority figures.
It grew on me. Dave Eggers is its co-writer, and his kidult literary aesthetic is an acquired taste. Yet I made one or two more steps here towards fanhood. Between them, Jonze and Eggers have created an intriguing oddity whose fate it may be to fall between the sensibilities of adults and children. Mike Myers took Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat and turned it into a crass and misjudged romp. Wes Anderson took Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox and reinvented it in his own school of cool – and yet he preserved and extended the original's innocent charm. Jonze's Wild Things is an altogether darker, colder picture: a film about the way children can lose their fear of the world only by losing their innocence. Jonze's design extrapolates the book very cleverly, but I have a feeling that loyal fans and family audiences looking for fun may be disconcerted. It certainly doesn't offer much Christmas jollity. Jonze's fans, on the other hand, will find that this director's talents remain untamed.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Theo Walcott sold to Random House Children's Books | Books | guardian.co.uk
Nice manoeuvre ... Theo Walcott gets past Ashley Cole during the Arsenal-Chelsea game last month. Photograph: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
Random House has jumped the gun on the January transfer window, signing the Arsenal and England winger Theo Walcott for an undisclosed fee on a four-book deal. According to the publisher, the footballer is due to be "working with a writer" to produce a series of novels for children based on his career so far, though the identity of the author involved is a closely-guarded secret.
The 20-year-old striker, who made his debut for the national side at the record-breaking age of 17 and earlier this year signed a four-year contract at Arsenal reported to be worth £60,000 a week, said he was "really excited to be working on the series."
"Books played an important part in our family life as I was growing up," he said.
The series is due to launch in April 2010, and follows hot on the heels of a series from Walcott's predecessor on England's right wing, David Beckham, which kicked off earlier this year. The first two titles in Walcott's story are due to chart the arrival of a boy who shares Walcott's childhood nickname, TJ, at a new school. Even though he's never played a proper football match before in his life, TJ falls in with a group of children who love football.
"Many of my experiences as a young footballer will be relived by TJ in the series," Walcott explained.
The 128-page books, with black-and-white illustrations throughout, are aimed at readers aged 9-11 – an age when many boys lose the reading habit.
The children's author Mal Peet, whose retelling of Othello as the story of a South American football star won this year's Guardian children's fiction prize, confessed that he was unworried by the prospect of a new player in children's fiction.
"The scowly part of me thinks, 'Oh yeah, another celebrity publishing deal, taking the bread from the mouths of proper writers like me'," he said. "But the cheerier part of me thinks it might be quite a good thing. If you can turn young people's enthusiasm for football into an enthusiasm for books then everyone's a winner."
The relentlessly positive upswing of Theo Walcott's life so far might prove a challenge, he continued, but "it's all down to the ghostwriter. "They didn't offer me the gig - if they had I'd have probably turned them into ghost stories or something. It's very hard to write about football and make it exciting and appealing to both boys and girls. We're not short of crap.
"In terms of plotting it lacks a little something, in terms of harrowing setbacks and so on. I can't see these having much of a dark side. The fact that Walcott is a great player doesn't mean anything about the quality of a book with his name on the front cover." Publishers have a responsibility to "do this well", he added. "If all you read is two Theo Walcott books and they're both rubbish, like the David Beckham Academy books, it's not going to encourage you to become an avid reader."
But as an Arsenal fan, Peet said that he would "wish him luck".
The managing director of Random House Children's Books, Philppa Dickinson welcomed the new signing. "Theo is an incredibly talented player and electrifying to watch in the field," she said. "We are thrilled to be publishing his books."
Thursday, December 10, 2009
SparkLife » Blogging Twilight
"Why is attractiveness part of the vampire mythos? It seems unfair to say the least. There should be some overweight vampires or vampires with knobby knees and bad bangs. If only the gorgeous get bitten, it would be smarter to gain a lot of weight than to hang garlic in your room." Brilliant!
Harry Potter enters the Twilight zone | Film | guardian.co.uk
A taster … Daniel Radcliffe in Equus at the Gielgud theatre, London, in 2007. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
If you had to pick one fault in the Harry Potter films, it would probably be their lack of sexual content. Sure, it's nice to see Harry and his chums lark about with Hagrid's pet hippogriff and all, but it goes without saying that the films would be much more popular if that aspect was balanced out with several gratuitous scenes of depraved wizard-on-wizard action.
Luckily, your wishes are about to come true. David Yates, the director of the final two Harry Potter instalments, has been telling Spanish-language entertainment guide La Vibra about just how naked Harry Potter is going to be during the film, describing "a fascinating scene in which Harry and Ron are trying to destroy a horcrux. It tries to defend itself and creates an image of Voldemort's soul that has a series of images where Harry and Hermione are kissing and embracing". He goes on to mention "another scene in King's Cross Station where Harry almost dies. In that scene he will also be naked".
The question here isn't why King's Cross was chosen as the location for the scene – in my experience King's Cross does appear to be the traditional home of the almost dead, naked young man, especially at weekends – but why Harry Potter needs to get naked at all.
If you have read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, you won't be familiar with either of those scenes, because Yates has created them especially for the films. And it's not as if Deathly Hallows is a flimsy little pamphlet that needs to be padded out to fill a full-length movie: it's the size of a breeze block. The book is so gargantuan that reams and reams will have to be edited out to even squeeze it into two separate films. So what's the real reason behind this sudden outbreak of wizardy nakedness?
Could it be Twilight? It would make sense. Next to the Twilight series, with its endless middle-distance stares and emo-pop soundtrack and, crucially, the fact that none of the principal male leads seem to understand what a shirt is for, Harry Potter runs the risk of looking a little staid, like James Bond standing next to Jason Bourne. This might sound cynical, but could Yates be trying to cash in on the Twilight dollar?
It's not as if he needs to; although Twilight is the hot new thing, it's important to remember that Harry Potter films are more successful, plus they are based on better selling books, plus they have narked off the pope more than Twilight ever could. Is it really worth compromising the tone that's been carefully built up over the course of a decade just because some teenagers get a bit shrieky when they see Robert Pattinson's belly button?
Let's hope not. Let's hope the new Harry Potter nude scenes are there to push the story on in a cinematic sense, and not because everybody under the age of 15 suddenly fancies Taylor Lautner now. Because if that's the case, Yates would be setting a dangerous precedent. In effect, he would be telling children's book writers that their movie adaptations will only succeed if they contain endless scenes of sexuality. And there can't be too many people desperate to know what the Very Hungry Caterpillar's nipples look like, can there?
Monday, December 07, 2009
Still Waiting for the Wild Things
Tots to Teens, StarMag
THE Malaysian release date for Where the Wild Things Are film has been postponed. While we're waiting, here are some more books from Maurice Sendak, for Christmas or just anytime.
Sendak not only illustrated his own stories, but also the work of other writers.
Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (HarperTrophy, 90 pages, ISBN: 978-0064401470) is a Newbery Honor collection of seven folktales by 1978 Nobel Prize for literature winner, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Originally written in Yiddish, the stories tell of the lives, adventures and (mostly) misadventures of various simple country folk.
A number of the tales are set in the village of Chelm, which is inhabited solely by fools. The village is ruled by the seven Elders - the "oldest and greatest fools" in Chelm. They have long white beards and high foreheads from "thinking too much", and when they consider a problem they have to clutch their beards and cover their foreheads with their hands.
Facing the book's title page is Sendak's illustration of the seven Elders. There they stand, looking totally flummoxed - and who can blame them when they have to deal with difficulties such as four sisters getting their feet mixed up under the bed clothes! (The Mixed-Up Feet and the Silly Bridegroom)
In this book, Sendak's fine pen drawings are highly detailed, with plenty of shading and cross-hatching. The blunt-featured, slightly large-headed figures with their expressive faces are recognisably Sendak's.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
booklicious: Sticky Shelving: Wall Decals
I've seen restaurants wallpapered to look like book-filled rooms. There's even a food court in Suntec City, Spore that is decorated with fake books. I don't get it. What's the point of books you can't read? A real bookcase filled with real books would be dustier but so much more attractive, in my opinion. However, I wouldn't mind book decals for mugs, files, and other surfaces.
Want to spice up your walls but can't paint or use nails (hello, fellow frustrated renters!)? Wall decals might just be your solution.
Typically made of vinyl, and available in virtually any design and color, these stick-on graphics can add an unexpected pop to an otherwise bland room.
Check out a few mock-bookshelf wall decals after the jump.
Continue reading "booklicious: Sticky Shelving: Wall Decals" »
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Picture Book of the Month: Hush! A Thai Lullaby
December 2009
Hush! A Thai Lullaby
Author: Minfong Ho
Illustrator: Holly Meade
Publisher: Scholastic Press, 32 pagesA Thai lullaby is the basis of Minfong Ho's soothing rhymes in this bedtime book. A mother rocks her baby to sleep and begs various animals to be quiet for the sake of the sleeping child. The animals make Thai-animal noises, that will sound and feel unique to Malaysian ears and tongues - for example, "Jeed-jeed," says a Thai mouse and "Hoom-praa" goes a Thai elephant. The illustrations, which won a Caldecott honor in 1997, are done with paper collage and depict Thai culture and simple rural life in a variety of earthy colours and interesting textures, .
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