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Giving you something to read on the toilet since 2009.

"The mistake lies in seeing debate and discussion as secondary to the recovery of meaning. Rather, we should see them as primary: art and literature do not exist to be understood or appreciated, but to be discussed and argued over, to function as a focus for social dialogue. The discourse of literary or art criticism is not to recover meaning, but to create and contest it. Our primal scene should not be the solitary figure in the dark of the cinema but the group of friends arguing afterwards in the pub."
-Don Fowler (1996) "Even Better Than The Real Thing"

Monday, October 19, 2009

30 Second Review: Where the Wild Things Are - By James King


Review by James King Idea by O’Dea

A visually stunning film that captures the mysterious highs and lows of childhood, Where the Wild Things Are is a political masterwork. In this thinly veiled chronicle of the first year of the Obama presidency, the film whimsically captures the rise and fall of a boy king, Max, whose promises of change collide with the limitations of a fragmented society. Carol, voiced by James Gandolfini and inspired by the wild and free spirit of the American people, crowns the boy king after he arrives on the island and proclaims himself a social savior. Max still believes in the American dream of wild rumpuses and hopes to use the unbridled energy of the Wild Things to construct a fort. Although the idea of a fort lends itself more to the Bush doctrine, the purpose of this fort is to unite the Things in a common goal and to provide universal shelter—or health care, if you will. Caught up in the exuberance of their new king, the fort actually nears completion before a brutal and destabilizing dirt-clod war exacerbates Carol’s fickle temperament, eventually leading him to turn against the king, and bursting with the disillusionment of expectation exceeding one boy ability, tries to eat him. I won’t reveal the ending, as it is still being written in legislative halls, but I will say that this adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s commentary of Kennedy’s Bay of Pig’s Disaster does not disappoint. A must see for anyone who remembers the breathless joy and secret loneliness of childhood and first-term presidencies.

2 comments:

  1. KDJOctober 21, 2009 at 4:32 AM

    David Brooks wrote an editorial kind of about this movie. He was talking about the psychological vs. the philosphical way of looking at our existance. He said this movie is psychological (funnel upside-down, lots of emotions and ideas from the bottom sifted through a smaller projection of ourselves at the top). As tyler pointed out, Arcade Fire accompanies the trailer. As you point out, this is totally and undeniably a commentary on power and the exercising of that power. Peace.

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  2. UnknownOctober 25, 2009 at 4:12 PM

    I cannot wait to see it and later buy it. Thanks for a fabulous review, James. You are great!

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