Dawn’s Thoughts

Where the Wild Things Are

I liked this film more than the recent Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. I love both books. The part I loved in the book — the trees growing in Max’s room is not shown here, but the illustrations of Max wearing a costume and chasing animals downstairs is certainly shown.

In this version, the reasons why Max meets the wild things is developed further. Max is a hyperactive, lonely child and the catalyst of the movie is something far enough away from standard that I wondered why his parents didn’t relinquish ownership of him.

Max thinks so too, because he flees immediately, The script in this movie is minimal. We learn little from this point on about the wild things other than their names; they function mainly as extensions of friends for Max. As when Max is making up stories for his mother or playing “what-if” with one of the wild things, the script seems remarkably similar to actual conversations children have. Just like an ethnographer recorded them.

In this concept, the story is not so much what happens as how it happens — Max and the wild things run about, play, build things and demolish them again — the sort of “doing nothing” that was done in Winnie the Pooh. That’s good. But although the scenery is beautiful, and everything in it has some basis in real life, the movie is also slow, in script, motion and setting. There are, however, things that I thought were clever because this is not a film that follows a standard format at all — too slow for the story-book audience, with darker areas, like an adult version.

Some of the time I was able to catch the lessons Max took away from his time with the wild things; at other times, it appeared it only provided him entertainment and friendship (which may or may not have been applied back at home). Like real life, some of the things Max encounters aren’t fixed entirely when he returns.

And if everything had its own basis in real life, when the turning point occurs and things grow worse for Max, who was that actually based on?

This was a slow, sometimes unrevealing, unusual movie which I would watch again just because I like how it’s made. Even if parts of it annoy me, it appears to have been created with someone’s viewpoint in mind because it is so far out of “Hollywood” style that i think for that alone it should be given a try.

The Sinking of Santa Isabel

Oh, what a good idea this was, and oh, how I have problems with the spin on it.

The idea is wonderful — the first part, even the promise, but the excution of it becomes boring quickly. The main character,Webster, decides that his life is at a standstill and becomes determined to spend the summer in the treehouse in the back of the house he lived in as a child.

This is a situation everyone in the town accepts with good humor, considering they already have a mailman, Peter, who rides around, periodically reading people’s mail and flinging it where it pleases him. Naturally, he befriends Webster, and the two of them, and 13-year-old Jester, all fall in love with neighbor Beth.

Now here’s the parts I thought were good. The part with the treehouse was clever, as was the promise that created it. The idea could have created a kind of return-to-childhood-joy movie, and to some extent it is, since the characters run about playing childish pranks on the nieghbors, building tin can telephones for communication etc.

But here’s the thing. Spending time in a treehouse is fine, even all summer. But Webster’s promise is much more than that, and there is the film’s restriction. It’s supposed to show three people who learn to love each other or something like that, and move on, or something, and it ends up showing them not doing all that much except bingo and sitting in a treehouse.

Each one has a secret, but I didn’t particularly feel by the end that I knew any of them well enough.Although the movie ends hopefully, because the characters are together, life has in fact gotten worse for them throughout — as it should in a story.

It just doesn’t leave you with the right kind of ending though. How will they take care of themselves?

Deliverance

Seen this movie parodied in so many different cartoons and movies that I finally had to sit down and watch it. I would have had more to say about it if I had writing earlier, but here goes.

Since it was done in 1970’s, the movie has a nice, easy beginning, where all the characters are set up in more depth than today. I knew the basics before I rented — men go on a canoe trip, there’s a banjo player, they’re deep in the hills out of their territory and local hillbillies are trying to kill them.

The only hillbillies really in here are at the very beginning and the middle. In the beginning we meet the family the main characters hire to drive their cars — inbred, mentally-retarded mountain people, every one of them. Oh, yeah, except the kid that picks the banjo — they think he’s just fine because he can play.

Here’s an interesting twist: didn’t realize that one of the banjos in “Dueling Banjos” here isn’t a banjo at all but a guitar.

The banjo picking kid in this has a very good prosthetic to make him look like he does –better than stuff I’ve seen in much later movies (Back to the Future II comes to mind).

So off our main characters go, drinking, carrying and harpooning fish galore. A small mention is made of men who go “buck crazy” and can’t shoot a gun at a living thing even if they’re crackshot, and then the film goes on. And just at the point when you get tired of all the quiet and beautiful scenery and want something to happen, there it is.

The men stumble on a still and run into some onery locals who are determined to make them pay.Here’s the problem. In desperation, they kill a man in self defense, and then, in good novel style, spend so long discussing how and why and in what way they should get rid of the body, that any remaining moonshiners could have picked them off easily.

By the time revenge occurs to them, they return quickly to the canoe and set off — trailed, naturally, by the same mean locals, determined to get even.

Here’s the other problem. I understand that the locals would be mad because strangers shot their kin. I understand that they might even be a little inbred and crazy, if you go by stereotypes and the fact that the mountains hemmed them in. But here’s the thing — the location provides them with the perfect location, an extremely out of the way area, far from their car, on the locals’ territory. It might have worked better had they gone deeper into the woods, but no, they go directly to the canoe, which the moonshiners have absolutely no trouble keeping up with.

Actually got bored with this and wasn’t particularly interested. Fast forwarded to find out how it ended. If that was me, I’d be gone from the county as quickly as humanly possible. Though what happens in the story could just as well have happened in the city.

I got this DVD because I knew it was a remake of a 1953 film, even though the DVD box doesn’t mention it…I never liked the catalyst in that film, but I did enjoy the child’s POV. That film is a very innocent film, something that would be very hard to duplicate today because our social context is so different.

For instance, in the original, Lennie, 12 years old, plays a practical joke on his 7 year old brother, Joey. I forget whether he’s playing war or target practice, but the point is this: Joey believes he shot Lennie and runs away to Coney Island, where he can earn money, ride the rides and be without supervision. Lennie regrets his joke and goes to find his brother.

Watching the original, I had a number of questions that the new filmmaker apparently has as well. First off, if you were 12 and playing war today on anything but a video game, people would look at you funny — but in 1953, target practice was likely different. I’m sure there were children mishandling firearms, but there were probably a lot more allowed to own them, without the concerns we hold looking at children and guns today.
The boys’ mother works long hours and apparently never notices her children are gone. Why? Well, if she did, the film wouldn’t a child’s anymore.

The people Lennie meets in the old version are kind if indifferent, in that they assume he’s a regular kid there — with one exception. The pony ride man suspects Joey is lost, calms him, “hires” him and gets him to tell his phone number, which he uses to alert Lennie. This is, I think, one of the best parts in the film, because an adult is trying to help Joey as a friend.
In this new version, the childlike quality of the film is gone, but a lot of the questions I had are also answered. The film isn’t a remake so much as an attempt to turn the original on its head. You can’t have children playing with guns anymore with the complete innocence the original film had, and taking this as its lead, the film updates the boys’ lives successfully. Their life isn’t entirely innocent — Mom drinks and works long hours and leaves them alone for days; Dad’s supportive and kind, and in jail.
More is made of Lennie’s friends — instead of being his age, they’re older, tougher and meaner, and a point in the film is that Lennie has to steal the gun from his house, where it is locked away in a toolbox, in order to play the “joke” on Joey.

The settings are great in this film even before we get to Coney Island. Old military forts, abandoned lots, and Lennie’s friend is an older man who allows him to repair merry go round horses…a nice touch. (In fact, this character kind of takes the place of the pony ride man in the original). The history of Coney Island is explored with B&W shorts, with Lennie as the narrator — though oddly his narrations are all about bad things that happened there — which is acknowledged later.

The mythology is in place before the catalyst. Here, if Lennie’s stories about Coney Island are bad, his Dad’s are wonderful mythical stories about Lilliputia, the land of dwarfs (made more appropriate by the fact that Dad is a dwarf)…but Lennie never hears them. Only Joey visits Dad in jail and still believes the stories…Lennie tells him that Lilliputia was a place built for freaks like him…thus giving him a good reason to go there. If Lennie becomes annoyed at taking care of Joey for one day in the original, here he is tired of it of doing it constantly.

From the original’s time period, Lennie is probably only worried about getting home on time, with Joey, and telling him he’s sorry. Watching it, though, I was thinking he’s all by himself. This new film spends a lot more time looking at Lennie’s guilt…he’s actively searching not because he’s sorry, though he is, but because he’s very concerned for Joey’s safety.

This film broadens the boys’ home life and the people he meets along the way. In the original, the only significant adult he met was the pony ride man…this version has him meet several other homeless people, including children, most of whom are kind. In the largest twist, the pony ride man is not at all the kind person in the first film.

That was a shame but makes sense. This film is darker than the first. It recognizes that if Joey runs away, the world is not necessarily a good place. (Although, at times with the shorts, it emphasizes this too much).

A number of twists at the end, some very appropriate that I wondered about in the first film, and some not, wrap up the story. Lennie is, by turns, more responsible for his actions in this film, and less so, as he makes more than one mistake along the way.

This was an interesting reimagining of this film…It worked for me.The ending…well, I had to think of it the way I thought of The Wooden Camera…they go off in the end for a fairy tale adventure. Considering Lennie’s stories of Coney Island, that may not be the case, but you can interpret it two ways, and that’s mine. This film answered my questions and fills in family life, and it does rather well I thought.