At the movies

What’s wild is beautiful

Where The Wild Things Are
DIRECTED BY: Spike Jonze
STARRING: Max Records, Catherine Keener
VOICES: James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper, Catherine O’Hara
CERT: PG

Where The Wild Things Are is an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, but the film is more likely to appeal to a grown-up audience than it is to kids who’ve been weaned on Shrek and its all-action animated contemporaries.
Max (Records) is imaginative young boy, prone to temperamental fits when things don’t go exactly as he would like. After having his newly-built igloo crushed by his sister Claire’s friends and seeing that his mom (Keener) is more interested in her boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) than she is in giving him the attention he needs, Max throws a wobbler, bites his mother and runs away, for the most part, to the world of his imagination.
Max sets sail in a small boat and after a couple of days at sea, comes ashore on an island inhabited by large monsters, one of whom seems to be in the middle if trashing the place when Max arrives.
The creature’s name is Carol (Gandolfini) and he’s a bit like Max himself – apt to go berserk when things don’t go his way. Max emerges from the trees and joins in Carol’s destructive fit. Naturally, the other monsters take offence and decide to eat the intruder for supper.
But Max convinces them that in the land he sailed from, he was the king and he has special powers. So the meal is postponed and Carol crowns Max king of the Wild Things. These include the bullish Douglas (Cooper), know-it-all Judith (O’Hara), mild-mannered Ira (Whitaker), the rebellious KW (Lauren Ambrose) and Alexander (Paul Dano), the smallest of the bunch.
Now their leader, Max decides that pretty much anything goes and they should do whatever they want. “Let the wild rumpus start” is his first royal decree and so they all proceed to pick up where Carol left off and run about trashing the place.
And it’s all fun and games until, well, until it isn’t anymore and some start to wonder if Max is really a good king at all.
Maurice Sendak told his famous old tale in just a handful of sentences and a bunch of wonderful illustrations and so Spike Jonze has naturally had to expand on that ­ filling in the details and padding out the story. Never short on imagination himself, Jonze does a wonderful job of it too. It may not all work and stretching the story to 100 minutes was probably unnecessary, but it’s a delight to watch – visually brilliant, not afraid to be genuinely thoughtful and brought to vibrant life by a fine cast, whose young lead has a very bright future ahead of him.

The Limits
Of Control
DIRECTED BY: Jim
Jarmusch
STARRING: Isaac De Bankole, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Bill Murray
CERT: TBC

How boring is The Limits Of Control? I’d tell you if there were words in the English language to describe such a thing.
It’s directed by Jim Jarmusch ­ whose last outing, the deathly dull Broken Flowers, was probably one of the most over-rated films in history. And so there is a danger that some people may actually go and see this, which would be a terrible mistake and quite possibly a threat to their health and wellbeing.
Here’s the story: A man with no name meets another man with no name and they talk about stuff that makes no sense. The first nameless man flies off to Spain, where he meets a violinist in a café and they talk about stuff that makes no sense and then they give each other matchboxes.
Then ­ well, the man with no name does the same thing for the rest of the movie. Meets someone, talks nonsense, swaps matchboxes, then goes back to his hotel, where some woman seems to spend the whole time hanging around naked, waiting for no-name-matchbox-man to return ­ perhaps hoping that one day he will come back to tell her that the stranger he met today knows exactly where her clothes are.
If this makes any sense to you, I’d love to hear your thoughts.