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Review: Where The Wild Things Are
Photo Credit: Photo by Matt Nettheim/Warner Bros. Pictures
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Written by Zach Ellman, Online Entertainment Editor
When I was three years old, I remember when my dad came to tuck me in one night and he read to me “Where The Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak. What interested me about it was that my father’s father read it to him too when he was just three years old. The only thing that we could’ve never seen coming was seeing Max and the Wild Things on the big screen years later.
When books are turned into movies, some of them will become instant classics in the world of movies. For example, “Gone With The Wind” by Margaret Mitchell, which won Best Picture at the 1939 Academy Awards. Also, “Harry Potter” by J.K. Rowling made more than $5.4 billion in worldwide box office earnings. After seeing “Where The Wild Things Are” on the big screen, I could tell that this childhood classic would definitely have its part in being considered an instant classic.
Director Spike Jonze specifically gave them film a dark sense, literally and figuratively, such as how Jonze filmed some scenes with a handheld camera in the middle of the woods. After seeing the movie, the author of the book Maurice Sendak stated, “I’ve never seen a movie that looked or felt like this”.
The movie starts out with a little kid named Max (Max Records) showing how he is unnoticed by his teenage sister and divorced mother. When Max causes mayhem as his mother (Catherine Keener) is eating dinner with her boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), Max decides to run away. While coming upon a sailboat, Max decides to sail away and ends up on an island inhabited by seven wild beasts, played by actors like James Gandolfini, Academy Award Winner Chris Cooper, Catherine O’Hara, Paul Dano, Lauren Ambrose and Academy Award Winner Forest Whitaker. He befriends them and they claim him to be their “king”. As king, Max leads the Wild Things into smashing trees, building forts, and starting “wild rumpuses”.
One of the things that made the movie so enjoyable was seeing James Gandolfini, who is mainly recognized by his character Tony Soprano of the Emmy Award Winning Show “The Sopranos”.
With a $90 million dollar budget, Spike Jonze went above and beyond with filming for three years in Australia with an ensemble cast brings all of us back to our childhood days to show that inside of all of us there is a wild side.
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