In reference to the "What Have You Seen Lately" post, my opinion of the movie is generally positive, but not as high as I had initially anticipated. Going in, I think it would have been fair to say that it was my most-anticipated movie of the year, save perhaps for Watchmen, which feels like it was more than a year ago now. It was a movie that, generally speaking, we knew very little of. I mean, we've all read the book, but how it would transfer to film was anyone's guess.
What Spike Jonze did, I think, is create a flawed masterpiece. In terms of look, it is absolutely beautiful on every level. The "Wild Things" themselves are simply amazing, considering that they are real, tangible objects that actually exist. The score reflects the feeling of every scene in just the right way. But where things start to get muddled is in the storytelling. While I loved the overall feeling, and the message at the end (which I think will be different for everyone), some of the characters were a bit too complex for the target audience for this movie. Which of course begs the question, who exactly was the target audience in the first place? The great success, of course, is that I was immediately attached to Max and his problems. I grew up in Michigan with a single Mom, who had to deal with an occasionally unruly son with a wild imagination. Jonze got the feeling of being a nine year old kid down to a science. The forts, playing war, insane ideas on how the universe works, and dealing with the first conceptualizations of your own mortality. Absolutely brilliant.
By day's end, it is not entirely the movie that I had expected. While I still loved it, it just didn't meet my own personal expectations that had largely been blown up by the positive reviews (occasionally too positive). Still, go see this movie. Jonze deserves an award for receiving an IP, staying faithful to the material, but making something entirely different. Visually, it is absolutely brilliant, and the story isn't bad to boot.
