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We first meet Max (Max Records) as he violently roughhouses his dog.  Is he playing?  Is he always this violent?  Are we supposed to connect with this character?  The answer to all these questions is yes.  Where The Wild Things Are starts with all the momentum of a sled speeding down a massive hill.  Max plays in the snow with a joyous youthful exuberance.  He runs wild in snowy streets; he builds an igloo and provokes a fight against the friends of his older sister (Pepita Emmerichs).  There is no wasted second for Max.  He must cram in every element of play as if there is simply no time to just stop and appreciate his surroundings.  After provoking a snowball fight he is charged by adolescents.  Max smiles one last time before retreating into his igloo.  He giggles out of impish pride before being crushed alive as one of the teenagers jumps on top of his igloo.  He emerges crying.  His tormentor leaves without so much as a glimpse back.  Max nearly died.  No one cares.  As Max retreats into his home he is consumed by uncontrollable rage.  He destroys his sister’s room in a violent and vengeful frenzy.  She ignored him; she must be punished.

This is by no means a movie for children.  Max exists alone in a tumultuous world.  There are no other children.  He exists as a lonely entity without so much as a friend besides his mother (Catherine Keener).  Even she seems to grow tired of him after he attacks her while she’s sipping wine with an innocent suitor (Mark Ruffalo).  Max runs down the stairs in his ruffian monster costume, attacks his mother and bites her as she tries to pick him up.  She brings him into the kitchen, whereupon he roars, “Woman, feed me!”

Frustrated with those whom are deservingly angry with him, Max runs away.  He sails to a fantasy world, intended as an escape from the complex people of reality.  Unfortunately, the creatures that inhabit this new world become allegories for all the impenetrable people that inhabit the real world.  Max models them in his own image; unfortunately that means they are equally rage filled and bipolar.  The most important of these creatures is Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini).  He has the same wants, needs, and fears as Max.  We watch Carol pine over the loss of KW (voiced by Lauren Ambrose) with the same alternating dejection and wrath that Max has over the growing rift between him and his sister.  Max empathizes with Carol and inspires him to rediscover his own spirit of play.  As they grow closer and closer, Max grows to appreciate his natural talents more and more.  As Carol opens up to Max, the two explore their own insecurities with the general transience of childhood.  Carol is Max’s imaginary friend, created to have everything Max loves about himself.  Carol is Max’s projected feelings, and in their interactions Max gains a unique perspective on himself.

As the wild things play a game at Max’s suggestion, they begin hurling “dirt clods” at one another.  The inevitable conclusion brings to mind a common phrase heard by most children Max’s age: it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.  The game culminates in Douglas the giant bird (voiced by Chris Cooper) having his arm ripped off by Carol. In this Chaotic proliferation, Max finally embraces the consequences of unbridled mayhem.  He finally understands that he is simply too free and too angry.  He is ungrateful, and he is in essence a spoiled child.  His sudden revelations create a natural divide between him and Carol, and Carol reacts as old Max would: he gets angry.  As Max flees the horrors that are himself, he longs for his old life.  He is capable of appreciating it now.  Eventually we see these same maturations in Carol, but they are still in the style of old Max: he roars, then he cries.  There is nothing in between.

It’s very common for something to be lost when a music video director attempts to direct a feature.  David Fincher’s first feature after directing Madonna is the incoherent mess that is Alien³.  Michel Gondry’s first feature after directing Björk was the sputtering Human Nature.  Some directors making the transition forget about character development (i.e. Tarsem Singh’s The Fall).  Others forget that they need occasional breaks in action (i.e. Michael Bay’s Bad Boys, The Rock, Armegeddon, Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys II, The Island, Transformers, Transformer 2). Where The Wild Things Are feels far too much like one of Jonze’s music videos.  Although visually stunning, it doesn’t allow viewers any time to stop and appreciate the visuals.  Oddly enough, Jonze’s first two films (Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.) are all-around great movies, but it’s beginning to seem that credit is entirely owed to their screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman.  In Where The Wild Things Are, Max doesn’t give so much as a second glance to any of the fantastical landscapes and structures surrounding him.  This perspective leaves the audience to also ignore them as commonplace.  Just as a music video must for lack of time adjust tone in a jarring shift, the movie approaches every emotional change with an uncomfortable abruptness.  While sudden tone shifts are certainly effective when used once or twice, their frequency in this movie give it a manic quality that virtually eliminates any emotion that isn’t as severe as it is sudden.  Both Max and his creatures cry and then roar, then fight, and then cry again.  There is never a break; there is no appreciative moment where the creatures look at each other with a subtle smile.  Each emotion is entirely explicit.  Kaufman and Eggers should know better.  Jonze’s Adaptation. emphasizes the subtle, unstated (and frustrating) love between brothers and Egger’s Away We Go shows a couple completely in love expressed entirely through casual conversation.  The wild things never stop saying, “I love you” or “I hate you.”  All the work made to create truly organic creatures is virtually destroyed by cardboard bipolar dialogue that would be more believably uttered by 6 year olds.  Hopefully Jonze will eventually adapt to the unique demands feature films.

But maybe this is all deliberate.  When the wild rumpus starts, the audience is swept into the free wheeling style of a contemporary Smirnoff commercial.  Jonze captures the joyful cadences of roughhousing in his directing.  This is probably his best skill as a director.  He creates extreme emotions.  Thinking about how most 10 year olds appreciate the world around them, it can be absolutely solely in these extreme emotions.  They have very little patience, and little to no desire to stop and appreciate the beauty that is life.  Is it the fault of the director that he so convincingly eliminates all pauses from life?  Isn’t he really just perfectly emulating the frustrating un-appreciativeness of this particular ten-year-old child?  Yes, it is irking to watch someone act with complete abandon, but if the perspective is true to the character, then is it truly at fault?

At heart, Where The Wild Things Are is a morality tale.  It is about self-discovery and growing up.  Reread Maurice Sendak’s book and you will discover that it and Jonze’s movie center around the same themes.  By exploring these themes of family and youthful ferocity further, Jonze has created a movie that is too complicated for kids, but too juvenile in its revelations for adults.

- Paul Brinnel

I’m not sure what happens in A Serious Man. This is not to say that the film fails as a logical, progressive narrative. After all this is a film by the Coen brothers, who, editing their own films under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes, provide scenes of sharp, crisp clarity, with journalistic precision. Since they also write their scripts and have just about the most creative minds in Los Angeles, every one of their scenes are both fascinatingly unique on their own merit and essential to the larger narrative as a whole. The reason why I’m not sure what happens is because I’m not supposed to.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish physics professor, awaiting tenure at a Midwestern college in the late nineteen sixties, is having a bit of an existential crisis. His job is threatened and his wife (Sari Lennik) is asking for a divorce to marry their obnoxiously tender friend, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). Larry teaches Schrodinger’s paradox of the cat, which must be assumed to be both dead and alive. He teaches with zeal, a feeling unreciprocated by his students. He confesses to a failing South Korean student that he does not understand the paradox, but uses it like a fable to emphasize the concepts and theories. The prologue of the film is a Yiddish fable of a self-proclaimed rational man who invites an old man home for dinner. His skeptical wife claims that the old man is a dybbbuk, the Jewish equivalent of a zombie. Both fables, in science and folklore, allude to the idea of false perception. Larry’s fault is that he has no perception. Behind his thick glasses he can only observe the world in terms of facts like the mathematics he teaches, which attempts to explain the world in a logical manner. He stands on his roof to fix the antennae, and triumphantly surveys his neighborhood. His gaze is equally confused when he sees his redneck neighbors, father and son, playing catch, as when he sees his other neighbor, considerably more attractive, sunbathing nude. Not only are there fables, but dream sequences, and characters under the influence of narcotics. The Coen brothers are playing with the concept of reality to the point that we can hardly distinguish what is real and make believe. This makes the film akin to the bible, which proclaims to be fact, but mixes unfathomable fairy tale elements. The Midwest certainly is not Eden, but its not Sodom either.

 A Serious Man is a comedy of sorts. We laugh if only not to cry. Larry is an innocent man, trapped in a world he doesn’t understand, tormented by forces out of his control. He seeks spiritual advice from three rabbis, one more useless than the last. In fact, the only person who seems reasonable and honest is Larry’s divorce attorney. The score by Carter Burwell is of a deep and melancholic sadness, placing strong emphasis on the hopelessness of human existence. Yes, the film is a comedy, but that’s not a limitation. We never laugh at Larry, but only his surrounding world. When Larry’s brother cries out at night, wondering why God has given him nothing, there is not a hint of irony. When the film ends we leave battered and bruised. The film lingers as a tragedy, not a comedy. We recognize Larry Gopnik as ourselves, a useless, little cog in a world that doesn’t need us or want us. Amen.

-Jason Bardin

To adapt a work of classical literature is just about the most unnecessary burden to which writers and directors force themselves to succumb. One can only wonder what John Huston was thinking when he tackled Moby-Dick. In his decision to simply ignore the encyclopedic chapters concerning the anatomy of the whale, he focused solely on the bare structure of the novel, which obscured Melville’s themes and vision. It became a story about a bunch of lunatics on a boat. Poets, in general, have been absolved from this bastardization. Every once in a while Homer receives a disservice or a director throws a poem up on the screen as an epitaph, but overall the works of the great poets are safe from the murky waters of film adaptation. So when Jane Campion became attracted to doomed Romantic poet John Keats, her only choice was to tell the story of his life. Unfortunately, Bright Star is not about Keats (Ben Whishaw), but instead focus on his love interest, Fanny Brawne.

Brawne (Abby Cornish) is an early nineteenth century socialite. She dances with all the men and makes her own clothes, which are of a colorful, if not flattering, austerity. In talking about Brawne, the word ‘bright’ can only be used to refer to luminosity, not intelligence. She can’t even properly lie about her literary pursuits. When talking to Keats’s boorish friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Brawne claims to have read all of The Canterbury Tales, The Odyssey, and Paradise Lost over the previous week. Falling in love with a Romantic poet is perhaps her most ill conceived notion of all. The lifespan of the Romantic poet was considerably short and they are not the most desired lovers. On one end of the spectrum you have Lord Byron, whose principle character, Don Juan, parallels his own lecherous sexual conquests. On the other end is John Keats, who is alluded to as a possible virgin. Keats confides to Brawne that women, including his mother, confuse him. By the time of his death at twenty-five, despite being engaged to Brawne, their relationship never progresses past a kiss. But what a kiss! The first kiss between Brawne and Keats is a moment of high erotic tension and power. They’re lying on the grass, Brawne is elevated above Keats, and their lips just connect. While not quite matching the moment in Campion’s The Piano when Harvey Kietel fingers a hole in Holly Hunter’s stocking, this bit of eroticism in Bright Star is still enough to shame most other films in their gratuitous, un-erotic use of nudity, which desensitizes our perception and appreciation for true pleasure and beauty.

The film succeeds the most during the limited portion of when the two are happily in love. Campion provides her boldest images in this sequence. Keats lying on top of a tree bathing in sunlight; a room full of butterflies that creates a poetic sense of elation. However, most of the film deals with Brawne in despair and Keats dying. Individual moments of story evaporate and the second half of the film becomes an exercise in tone, creating an indistinguishable narrative of utter despondency. The film, which promises to be an authentic recreation of love, becomes one of dread and loss, which is fine, and in doing so more or less succeeds, but it sacrifices narrative. Nothing notable happens in the second half of the film outside of some minor character development of Charles Brown. Keats is absent from the second half too, so we’re stuck with Cornish, who’s emotional range is limited to sad eyes and hysterics. Cornish needs Whishaw’s Keats to stabilize the film. Whishaw plays Keats not as any person or individual, but as the human embodiment of Keats’s poetry. He longingly looks into the sky, fails to express himself in simple emotions, and has the countenance of a dying puppy. In one scene, Keats, because of his lack of funds and resources, explains to Brawne that they cannot marry. Cornish’s crying reaches levels of histrionics, but the scene works because of the amount of thought behind Whishaw’s heartbroken eyes. Later, after Keats dies off-screen and Brawne is informed of her lover’s demise, she screams, and King Kong is nowhere to be found.

-Jason Bardin