Where the Wild Things Are Warner Bros. Pictures
2009 • 101 minutes • PG
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Maurice Sendak, author of the beloved children’s book about a boy who finds a secret land populated by playful beasts, spent ten years searching for a director who could bring his story to life with the right spirit. Yet in his feature-length adaptation, director Spike Jonze takes the story in such a strangely new direction that, upon seeing it, Warner Brothers allegedly considered scrapping the entire $70 million film and restarting with something more kid-friendly. Like the book, Jonze’s Wild Things is about Max, a 9-year-old boy who, in a fit of anger at his mother, discovers a magical island where he meets the Things, whom we learn have names like Alex and Judith. Brought to life with a mix of computer effects and old-fashioned giant suits, the Things are wondrous creations. But rather than being a story for children, Jonze’s Wild Things is merely a story about children, young and old, and it runs headlong into Jonze’s penchant for dissecting adult neuroses, evident in his previous films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Those movies sat on the oak-solid framework of screenplays by Charlie Kaufman; Jonze’s Wild Things script, sadly, has nothing to say. The first half superbly evokes childhood’s fears and fancies, but by the end Max’s entire journey seems to come to nothing. Jonze might have done well to revisit Adaptation, which posits that adapting a great work of fiction is not about enacting events, but about bringing to life the idea behind the original story. Sendak’s book, for now, remains more magical on paper.
The Invention of Flying Warner Bros. Pictures
2009 • 99 minutes • PG-13
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In the 1993 comedy Liar Liar, Jim Carrey played a man who found himself unable to lie, and it wreaked havoc on his life. Imagine what would happen, then, if the entire world were unable to lie! That is what British comedian Ricky Gervais has done in this deftly satirical and oddly trenchant comedy, co-starring Gervais and Jennifer Garner. The premise is simple, yet ingenious enough to create a host of comical and philosophical predicaments, some of which are milked dry and some of which leave you wanting more, as well as attract a parade of stars in cameo roles: Tina Fey, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, etc. The Invention of Lying presents a world where humankind simply never evolved the ability to conceive of speaking untruth. So when Mark (Gervais) and Anna (Garner) go to a restaurant on a date, the waiter calmly informs them that he’s embarrassed to be working there, and that Anna is way out of Mark’s league. Asked about her life, Anna says she’s basically happy, except for the times when she sits in bed all day eating and crying. Such bald news is typical in this world, until one day when, in a burst of firing synapses, Mark tells the first lie in history. After a rollercoaster of consequences, the story loses direction, but the hilarity of the early scenes—and some surprisingly moving scenes involving the inventions of heaven and fiction—carry this little film about a world where nobody gets that “it’s funny because it’s true.” Thankfully, Gervais does.
The Hurt Locker First Light Production / Summit Entertainment
2009 • 131 minutes • R
No one has yet made the great Iraq War film, a work that captures the conflict the way Platoon and Apocalypse Now are said to embody Vietnam, and Kathryn Bigelow won’t be the first—but that could be because she’s not really trying to. Bigelow, the obscure but talented director of Near Dark and Strange Days, gives it a try—and though her effort, The Hurt Locker, comes up short, it is unique in its approach and more captivating than any recent film set in the Middle East. (Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha is the only other American film on the conflict I can name worth seeing.) With no mention of politics, she focuses on a tiny unit of bomb technicians in Baghdad, soldiers whose job it is to disarm the city’s ubiquitous and insidiously planted explosives, and her vision doesn’t waver for 131 overwhelmingly tense minutes. This may be the first Iraq War film that is not about the conflict at all, but uses the conflict as the premise for an unapologetic suspense thriller. The primary technician for most of the story is Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), who, with his teammates Sanborn and Eldridge (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty), careens from one excruciating situation to the next. By the end, The Hurt Locker loses direction and sinks under the weight of too many sequences, but calm moments along the way are so spare that the viewer hardly has breath to contemplate the story arc. At the end we may be left wondering whether there was really a point to the whole thing, but, measured in plain adrenaline, Bigelow has made a film more suspenseful than any blockbuster yet released this year.
