Movie Reviews: Where the Wild Things Are, The Sinking of Santa Isabel, Deliverance
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.