Where the Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things Are, midnight showing, Brad and I were there, of course. This is not something either one of us would miss. I’m breaking from my usual game review because Where the Wild Things Are is a classic book that pretty much every person that is mine and Brad’s age has read.

If you’ve read the book you know the basic story, the magic is in the presentation and its simplicity. Boy gets in trouble, boy gets sent to bed, boy runs away to island, boy becomes king, parties with the Wild Things, and then goes home. That’s it!
So how did they stretch it into an hour and a half long movie?

Pure genius.

As I searched other reviews, trying to figure out why some people had given this movie such a bad rap, I realized that for some reason people had decided that the book Where the Wild Things Are was something other then what it is. Some of you may have experienced this, some of you might have not, but I have personally had some of my favorite childhood stories ripped to shreds by professors or people who for some reason think they have some amazing sense of seeing the “real” story the author was trying to get across. This act will DESTROY books. It will also destroy this movie for you if you let it.

The book had no moral, no true climax, and no MESSAGE, the movie stays true to this. I appreciated that. If I’d felt that they’d try to turn this into something politically correct or something other then what it was meant to, I might have thrown “rotten tomatoes” at the screen. When I watched the movie I saw something else, I saw my childhood, I saw my brothers, I saw the boys I’d grown up with. Most of you know that I grew up around mostly boys, it’s one of the reasons I am so into gaming. We had a close knit culdesac that did just KID stuff, we built forts, we got dirty, we used our imaginations, we created WORLDS of our own. It was how we lived. I can’t tell you how great it was, now that I’m 24, to see these kind of childhood memories come to life on screen. Just to see a movie that shows a kid being a KID. Every child in their mind is a king when they escape to their fort or forest, they are ruler of it all. I feel like somehow that’s been lost in the drudgery of trying to BE politically correct or the “perfect poster child”. Nowadays in the movies it’s either a kid being a bad kid or a kid being a good kid. I rarely ever see movies that just show that innocent childhood escape that we find when we feel our world is falling in around us.

There were lines that were delivered in the movie that I laughed about because I’d HEARD them actually said, from myself or from one of my childhood friends. Situations that I could relate to, it was wonderful. I even saw certain aspects of me as a kid in the “Wild Things”.

It’s a movie without reason, it’s a movie about an afternoon that you might have spent as a kid. A child’s imagination does not end with a moral or with some emotional climax, it ends with innocence. It’s something that as it seems to face you bid farewell with teary eyes and hold the memories of it close to your heart. It’s those people, that have not let go of those memories that will understand this movie. It’s those people that will appreciate this movie.

If you want to see this movie to get some kind of moral uplift, don’t go. If you are going to see this movie to be delivered a message, don’t go.

This movie delivers like a book. You get out of it what you put into it. If you go into a book expecting the book to sing and dance for you, you’re out of luck. You go into a book and let the illustrations to reach you, get your imagination going, and to put yourself into those words, THEN you truly understand.

What I mostly loved about this movie is that almost every scene could have been painted into a picture book. Not only that, but it was scary. Yes, it was scary. I would not advise anyone under the age of 10 to see this because it DOES get extremely dark, but that is childhood. A child’s imagination can be an extremely scary place and that’s what I loved most about the movie.
This is a GOOD movie that was TRUE to the original story. I didn’t feel anything overly cheesetastic about it. There were no scenes where I went “Oh geez, yeah right, like that would really happen”

It’s a movie about a BOY, and you rarely see those nowadays. There is something that my mom always says, “Oh, he’s all boy”, this movie is all boy. Maybe that sounds sexist, but it’s true. When I watched this movie I saw pieces of my brothers and of the boys I’d grown up with. It’s the perfect description I can think of for this movie, “It’s ALL boy.”

Now go see it.