Where The Wild Things Are

I recently went to see Where the Wild Things Are.

First off, I wasn't really into this book. Second off, what the fuck. The book left me, a kid with a lot of time on his hands, with a lot of questions -

1) Did parents REALLY send kids to bed without dinner?
2) How did he live on the boat for a year?
3) Where the hell was this island?
4) Why was he so okay with the monsters?
5) Had Max seen ANY Godzilla movies? Because if he had, he'd have known that an island full of monsters is bad news. It's an island of god damned monsters.

The movie, like the book, was beautiful. The design of everything, the burned out forest, the monsters fort, the amber colored sand dunes - gorgeous. The Wild Things were especially well done. The way they moved and interacted with their world was fantastic.

But other than that, the movie was...cold. I mean the voice acting was good. The regular acting was good. But, yeah...

The movie wasn't made for kids. It was made for adults who read the book when they were kids.

Spike Jones did a great job capturing the isolation and loneliness that kids go through - in that phase where they just don't get along with the rest of the world.

But he forgot the fun. If you're going to escape into a fantastic world, even if it's in your imagination, it should be fun. I want clues into where this island was, how the monsters got there etc.

Any kid who played with action figures knows you have to reconcile certain things - like why the Star Wars figure is with the GI Joe figure, why the ships/vehicles are of different scale, and where that Barbi came from when you're an only child and don't have any sisters.

But instead of fun, the movie was all mopey, whiny, bullshit.