Where the Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things Are is an adaptation of the long-beloved children’s book by Maurice Sendak. But although children will enjoy the gentle good humor and moments of well-done slapstick, this movie is made to touch the hearts of adults. Its treatment of loneliness, despair, and interpersonal relationships is incredibly well-done considering its main characters could be performing on the stage at Chuck E. Cheese.

The sets and the cinematography are unique and enjoyable. In an era of precocious, worldly young actors like Jeremy Sumpter (Peter Pan), Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense), and Dakota Fanning (everything else), Max Records stands out as a fresh, unaffected young actor. Everything he does seems to come from inside him, as though he just went on the set and played and formed real relationships, instead of being coached on Method acting.

Still, this film is not for everyone. It’s no chick flick or epic drama, no blockbuster or Harry Potter fantasy. It is a beautiful adventure that requires your imagination to stretch but rewards that stretching by delineating the most human of emotions on a whimsical stage.

For those of you looking for more childhood/coming of age adventures with unaffected young actors, I recommend My Girl with a pre-Party Monster Macauley Culkin or Bridge to Terabithia, an adaptation of the Newberry Medal-winning book.

Surrogates

It’s fall, traditionally the season for thoughtful movies like Finding Forrester (or as I like to call it, Good Will Hunting II) and A Beautiful Mind. So what am I in the mood for? A good shoot `em up, explosive summer blockbuster. I want it to be short and sweet, containing at least one scene where a man rescues a woman while an exploding car rockets through the air behind them, and end in the quiet, gold-backlit scene of relief where we realize the man and the woman who have just met will now be in love forever.

I thought Surrogates would fit the bill, being a 90-minute thriller with Bruce Willis. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a sci-fi thriller, long on plot and VERY short on dialogue and depth. Willis’ acting didn’t disappoint, but it was clearly a big budget /big star/big fat B movie. It would not have been so bad if they hadn’t taken themselves so seriously, or if Willis had been allowed his trademark dry one-liners.

The one thing that surprised me was the originality of the romance. Willis and his costar, Rosamund Pike (Jane from Pride and Prejudice), had great chemistry despite their difference in age. Their relationship embodied the adult feeling of painful, tender, hard-fought intimacy rather than the hot-to-trot lust portrayed in many movies. However, it wasn’t enough to make the 90 minutes time well-spent.

See Surrogates only if you want to ask yourself this question: “I wonder if there’s anything else they could possibly have done to make this movie worse?”

For a good shoot `em up flick with depth, rent 310 to Yuma. For an adrenaline-packed, explosive show, I recommend Live Free or Die Hard, or one of my personal favorites, Eagle Eye.

Couples Retreat

Some slightly mediocre movies are worth going to just because of the set, or the location. I’m talking about the icebound, gothic castles of Van Helsing, the soaring shots of the Pacific Northwest from Twilight, or the sun-soaked Greek isles of fall release Mama Mia. And now that I’ve alienated both men and women, let me say that setting was my major motivation for going to see Couples Retreat. Who wouldn’t enjoy spending a couple hours seeing how the richer half lives at a Tahitian resort most of us will only ever dream of?

The movie lived up to my expectations of pure escapism, without many original things to say. The most inspiring moment of the night was when I learned, during the Screenvision program that runs before the movie, that there are 3 versions of the Mona Lisa under the original one, as they’ve proven by X-ray technology. Guess the 4th time’s the charm, and I shouldn’t give up so quickly.

Couples Retreat was a breath of fresh air in a heavily post-modern society that tries to avoid any semblance of a happy ending. Instead of ugly caricatures of unhappy people tearing one another apart with caustic sarcasm, the movie portrayed busy, lonely, kind adults who were willing to put in the work but worn down by life. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny, as Vince Vaughn and Jason Bateman deliver their signature character humor peppered with one-liners. Its main downsides were moments of cheesiness, a few bawdy scenes that added little humor and could have been avoided, and several characters in the resort staff that were drawn as two-dimensionally as a comic strip.

Truly, the best part of the movie for me was seeing Vince Vaughn get to be funny while portraying a mature, happy character. Mature, and happy…two characteristics that often coincide after the “Breakups” and “Four Christmases” of your twenties.

Don’t go to see Couples Retreat if you’re in the mood for something deep or original. Do go if you’re in the mood to laugh or if you simply need to be warmed up.

FAME

I give Fame an 8 out of 10 as far as dance movies go. Because that’s what it is, a dance movie. It aims to capture the broad, American-dreamy audience of "American Idol," but only succeeds in picking up the same girls who watch Dirty Dancing (10 out of 10), Center Stage (9), Step Up (6) and Save the Last Dance (-2). It was entertaining and beautiful, giving me goosebumps at several points, but ultimately unmemorable. A movie called “Fame” should, of all things, be memorable.

Any movie attempting to cover an ensemble cast over four years of their lives has its work cut out for it. The scenes lacked the deep emotional appeal they could have had, if any scene had been given more than 4 minutes to play itself out (at least, that’s what it felt like).

Fame is still worth watching, most notably for its stand-alone performances and the rollicking, adrenaline-soaked lunchroom jam session at the performing arts school.