Where the wild things are
Almost a month too late: Welcome to 2014! The end of the year 2013 saw me in Austria, where we enjoyed the snow in the Alps (hands down the most beautiful place on earth, if you ask me) and watched “Where the wild things are”. Strictly spoken, we watched it in 2013, but I have a tendency to be very busy at the end of the year and delay blog posts endlessly. Now that the Berlinale is coming up (and many many movies must be blogged), I feel determined to clear the backlog.
To be honest, I never read the book before seeing the film. When I read it, I came to the conclusion that the book really has nothing much to do with the film – they share a few lines and scenes, some of the characters (in the book they don’t really have names, do they) and finally some esthetic principles (everything is kinda beige and gray, huh?). But apart from that, it seems that they just took the book as a reference, and filled in many, many gaps, such as the main character’s family troubles, his relationship with the individual monsters, this whole “let’s all live together” thing. All these elements, which you could characterize as emo and spoiled-like-clichéd-American-kids, are plot points the movie unnecessarily adds to the film.
With that said, I will never get over the fact that the main character monster ripped off another monster’s arm without getting any consequences. From what I can see, that arm was permanently lost, but instead of getting angry or anything, the now arm-less monster puts his arm around the guy who ripped his arm off, essentially saying “aww, don’t be sad – it’s OK if you get angry and unreasonable, we still love you”. That just annoys the heck out of please. Children need to learn that they and their hurt feelings are not the center of the world, and that no hurt feelings in the world can make it alright that you rip off someone else’s arm. This is how criminals are born into our society, ladies and gentlemen.
The other thing I couldn’t get over with is the fact that the kid just divided the group of monsters into “good” and “bad”, obviously claiming that he himself is good. Ewww. It’s not as bad as the arm thing, but almost just as icky.
According to Wikipedia, the book was revolutionary in the sense that it shows a mischievous, angry child with a dark side. Well, I can see where they are coming from, and I definitely see the appeal of the book about how even a child just wants to vent and go all crazy, but I don’t quite understand why it is so incredibly popular. It’s a mostly gray and ugly book whose story is not about friendship, and I am pretty sure that I would not have liked it as a child. Even worse than that, the movie turns the generally interesting book into a painful emo-fest. I am not sure if I ever will watch another Spike Jonze film.