What Kids Think About the “Where the Wild Things Are” Movie

I started a book bloggers club this year partly so that kids who had blogs with me in 4th grade could continue with them in later grades and those from other classes who wanted to start blogs could.  Currently it is a lovely, if small cohort of 6th grade girls. Curious about what they’d think,  I took them to see “Where the Wild Things Are” last week.  Check out their very insightful reviews:

• dn’s Movie: Where the Wild Things Are (This one was up earlier this week so I tweeted it and quite a few people have already visited and commented)
• rc’s Very First Movie: Where the Wild Things Are
• uw’s Where the Wild Things Are – Movie
• lw’s Where the Wild Things Are

Adaptations and Such

I’ve seen several expressions of relief by children’s book folk after they viewed the new Where the Wild Things Are movie featurette in which Maurice Sendak expresses confidence and appreciation for Spike Jonze’s vision for his book.  While I too am happy that it has met with Sendak’s approval, I also want to point out that Jonze is a very, very unconventional filmmaker and the film is likely to be a very different aesthetic experience from the book.  The two movies of his I’ve seen were smart, engaging, and seriously weird.  Just be prepared is all I say.

The first one I saw was Being John Malkovich — incredibly strange and very endearing, I thought.  Here’s the trailer:

The only other one I’ve seen is Adaptation. Given that its plot involves someone trying to adapt a book for a movie, well isn’t that what Jonze is doing with Where the Wild Things Are? In the case of Adaptation, it is a real book, Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, and things go from bad to worse — hopefully that doesn’t happen with Max’s story! Here’s the trailer:

And here’s the new featurette mentioned above for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it.

Fear for Children

Ryan Gilbey on the importance of taking children to scary movies | Film | The Guardian

Distressed Metal

Thanks to Karyn Silverman for pointing out an intriguing steampunk competition.

Eeriness, Spookiness, and the Two Neils

When Neil Gaiman announced that another Neil, one Neil Jordan, was going to do The Graveyard Book film, I was puzzled as I associated him vaguely with The Crying Game, a terrific movie, but a very different genre indeed.  However, just now I did a little investigating and I totally, totally get it.  I hadn’t realized that he was the director of  The Company of Wolves, one of the coolest fairy tale films I know.  Based on Angela Carter’s story, “The Company of Wolves”  (you can read an excerpt here), it is definitely of its  time (1984), but nonetheless a very eerie and unique film.  I was then very intrigued to see he has just done Ondine. If it is about the nymph  Ondine or some variant of her, that will be very cool.  My only quibble is that of the two Jordan films mentioned first (as far as I know the only ones of his I’ve seen), they are pretty serious.  I just hope that he gets the humor of the graveyard as well as I’m sure he’ll get everything else.

Here’s the first ten minutes of that Little Red Riding— I mean, Jordan’s The Company of Wolves:

The Horn Book Review of The Tale of Despereaux Film

Horn Book editor Claire E. Gross provides an excellent movie review of The Tale of Despereaux.

The Elfstones of Shannara Film?

According to the IMDB, Mike Newell is directing the first adaptation of a Terry Brooks novel. The Elfstones of Shannara is also listed as being “in production” from the online source Production Weekly, so perhaps this is more than just rumor.

Powell’s Books – PowellsBooks.BLOG – Read It Before They Screen It: Dark Star and The Elfstones of Shannara

I have not read the Terry Brooks’ Shannara series myself, but have heard many praise it highly.  Newell directed one of the Harry Potter films, by the way.

A. O. Scott Reminds Us To “Never Forget. You’re Reminded.”

If the Holocaust can inspire a great work of art, then it can also incubate the ambition to achieve such greatness, and thus open itself up, like everything else, to exploitation, pretense and vulgarity. Worse, the aura that still surrounds this topic — the sense that it must be treated with a special measure of tact and awe — can be appropriated by clumsy, sentimental and meretricious films or books, which protect themselves from criticism by a cloak of seriousness and piety. Thus the immodest indecency of a movie like Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning “Life Is Beautiful” was, during its initial period of triumph, deflected onto those with the temerity to criticize it. Those who resisted its manipulative juxtaposition of sweet, childlike innocence with barbarity were accused of lacking the gravity and sensitivity that Mr. Benigni’s travesty required.

And a similar defense is invoked, explicitly or implicitly, so routinely that it calls forth cynicism. Why do opportunistic, clever young novelists — I won’t name any names — gravitate toward magic-realist depictions of the decidedly unmagical reality of the Shoah? For the same reason that actors shave their heads and starve themselves, or preen and leer in jackboots and epaulets. For the same reason that filmmakers commission concrete barracks and instruct their cinematographers and lab technicians to filter out bright, saturated colors. To win prizes of course.

Film – Never Forget. You’re Reminded. – NYTimes.com

Asimov’s Foundation Series Headed for the Big Screen?

According to New York Mag’s Vulture Blog, yes.  Writes contributor Ehren Gresehover,  “Now we know what you might be saying. Spaceships and ray guns are cooler than elves and hobbits. But trust us. We were clutching our Asimov close to our chest during our formative years, weeping bitter tears into our pillow while we watched the comparatively cooler fantasy nerds get all the girls.”

So what about the girls who also read these books during their formative years?  What are we?  Pimply chopped liver?

But anyway, do check out the post where they compare LOTR to the Foundation series.  Of course the former is high, high, high fantasy while the latter is quintessential science fiction, but I think the Asimov would be a cool film series, myself.

The Magic Suit

When Cary and Eva Marie walk from the train into La Salle Street station the next morning, he’s wearing a purloined red-cap’s outfit, open at the neck and showing a triangle of snowy-white undershirt. She has the same white triangle peeping from under the jacket of her dark suit, which rather matches the suit James Mason wore the night before. But here are two little white triangles who spent the night together on the train. There might be an opportunity here in Chicago for a shower, you itch, but it looks like he chooses merely to loosen his shirt and have a quick shave, with Eva Marie’s minuscule razor. His suit was temporarily stuffed into her luggage while he made his exit from the train in disguise. Has it suffered? Has it hell. It looks like a million bucks; his shirt still blazes out. But now comes the suit’s greatest trial, the crop-dusting scene at ‘Prairie Stop’.

Cary Grant’s Suit | Granta 94: On the Road Again | Magazine | Granta