Cast: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick

Director: Jason Reitman

Screenplay: Jason Reitman

Running time: 1 hr 49 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


In the recent Hollywood cinematic landscape filled with commercialist gunk, it proves hard to evade the relentless (and pointless) sequel-making (yes, that’s you Saw and Transformers), ripping offs (well hello, Avatar), and even spin-offs (that’s you, Wolverine), chugging from one uninspired script to another in the intention of robbing your pockets off whilst studio bosses light up their Cuban cigars and clink their Jack Daniels. It’s a revitalising surprise, then, that once in a while, braving through the whippersnappers, a film of such substance and value emerge from the dream factory. This is Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, an incredibly good film that may now be considered a modern American classic. This deceptively clear-cut, bracingly smart and slyly crafted comedy-satire that address the contemporary corporate-driven world has enough mixture of resonance, wits and composure without ever insulting our emotional intelligence. And to mention that it has George Clooney as the film’s central protagonist should not hinder this as a typical vehicle to another suave and besuited Clooney typecast. In fact, Clooney is so wondrous in the role that he seems to be born to play the corporate assassin, and also baring a vulnerability this actor rarely portrays.


He plays Jack Bingham, all sleek charisma, sharp suits, droll speechifying and no hint of compassion as he travels around America, hired by cowardly bosses to downsize their employees. Beneath the charm, he’s an atrociously cold-blooded character, whose ultimate ambition is to clock-up a million airmiles, collect granite-made elite cards, take comfort in business class flights, live around airports and bed women effortlessly without having to call them back the next day. It’s a central conceit so terrifically pulled off, and the chemistry between Clooney and the sassy and sophisticated Vera Farmiga is effortless. One of the best scenes here is Clooney’s Bingham and Farmiga’s Alex swapping their airmile cards, turning the pick-a-date-in-a-bar around its head. And just when it becomes a rom-com all of a sudden, Reitman sidesteps this by introducing Anna Kendrick’s Natalie Keener, a young, hotshot college graduate poised to introduce a new firing system by using web-video devices, meaning totally economising their company, with Bingham’s job on the line. It becomes a battle of wits – until subtly, the screenplay introduces a heart. Kendrick’s vibrant performance here as the lovelorn Keener softens Bingham’s sharp edges, showing character cracks as the film progress, that when Bingham returns back to a family wedding, he understands what he’s been missing. Cue a widely clichéd dash-to-the-airport sequence common to most romantic comedies, Reitman once again surprises us by wringing pathos and the angst of loneliness in double swords. He cuts the central protagonist wide open, as Clooney’s Bingham stands at the middle of the airport, looking up to a hundred destinations. It’s a melancholic, poignant shot of a man who is everywhere yet nowhere at the same time.


VERDICT:

This may be 'Unbearable Lightness of Being' for the modern corporate age, but consider this a contemporary American classic. Reitman crafts here a slick, glossy satire-comedy about the slickness and glossiness of high-flyers, with a veneer that conceals a cautionary tale of a man untethered to any human relationship. A smart, sobering experience.



RATING: A

Cast: Abbie Cornish, Ben Wishaw

Director: Jane Campion

Screenplay: Jane Campion

Running time: 1 hr 59 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Deconstruct Bright Star and we have very familiar elements on our hands. It’s a British nineteenth-century-set period drama crossed over with a biopic of a literary icon, with a central romance between a poet and his strong-willed woman of inspiration. Expect flouncy frocks, a fusillade of upper-class accents and upstairs-and-downstairs class conflict – and blame those endless Jane Austen never-ending adaptations and Merchant Ivory prestige productions for making these elements de rigueur to the many archetypal British films. Jane Campion’s newest cinematic flourish understands these elements, and for that Bright Star very nearly trundles into that well-worn path. Except that Campion is unprepared to compromise her vision. Eschewing rudiments that suffocate many starchy period dramas (although its first half-hour introduces us with an obligatory local town-hall dance) and common biopic tropes, Campion instead focuses her narrative perspective not on the poet himself, John Keats, but rather on Fanny Brawne, a neighbouring seamstress turned love object. This is a point-of-view so wisely chosen, putting the heartbeat of the film on the very source of inspiration that breathed life to a poet’s being.


One may easily gripe on Bright Star’s slow-burning and overly-familiar affair, with a central conflict concerning an unconsummated romance between these two star-crossed lovers due to socio-economic issues and untimely mortality, but you can never mistake Campion’s unhurried direction and sublime grasp of Keat’s beautiful poetry. In her arguably last best work, The Piano, she draws sensuality and character nuances through the beauty of framing, filmic cadence and screenwriting – and here, she employs that craft, capturing languid, evocative shots courtesy of Greg Fraiser’s photography with a painterly approach. Transposing poetry into film is never an easy job, which could end up either lethargic or begrudgingly pretentious, but Bright Star has images that convey the quiet, sumptuous power of poetry itself. Shots of butterflies fluttering around a room, a field of lavenders, letters melding into the screen as Fanny reads them, and Keats lying atop a tree under a curtain of sunlight – these are wordless scenes harbouring such exquisite beauty its beyond verbal description.


But it’s not only loveliness and visualisations. Campion’s screenplay provides an aching paean to Romantic love, unfettered and unalloyed, and also untainted by the cynical modern mind. It has also performances that veer between tenderness and power – Ben Wishaw is spectacularly cast as the willowy Keats, remarkable for not reducing the poet’s lines into mere poetry reading but with sincere conviction. But this Abbie Cornish’s finest moment, the ‘bright star’ of the film, giving Fanny Brawne a feminist stance common to Campion’s films. It’s a vivid performance up there with Campion’s women, The Piano’s Holly Hunter and Portrait of a Lady’s Nicole Kidman. Her Brawne is one feisty, straightforward, unapologetic woman, who believes her tailoring can earn more money than the “two scribblings” of Keats and his poet friend Charles Brown (an oily Paul Schneider) put together. But when she fell in love with Keats and his work, she gives an emotional, headstrong intensity that is utterly convincing that when the doomed finale comes, her cry of anguish is truly heart-wrenching.


VERDICT:

It's unimaginable for a film to match John Keat's sublime poetry, but Jane Campion captures a visual panache and elegance that gives Bright Star that exquisite, aching beauty that could make Romantic poets proud. Forget the trappings of a period drama, this is a beautifully understated and quietly moving film that has the power of an intimate poetry reading, delivered by Cornish and Wishaw with heartfelt sincerity.



RATING: A-

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zöe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver

Director: James Cameron

Screenplay: James Cameron

Running time: 2 hrs 42 mins

Genre: Action/Adventure



CRITIQUE:


It’s almost a major tenet in Hollywood to respect James Cameron for what he’s worth, after his revolutionary contribution to American blockbuster filmmaking. We have to admit Hollywood would never be the same without the likes of Aliens, Terminator and the behemoth Titanic. He is, by all means, many things at once, a multi-hyphenate multi-tasker – director, screenwriter, producer, innovator, visionary – and now adding to his job description, a digital engineer who fashioned a formidable, groundbreaking high-definition Fusion Camera System, a specialised camera equipment light years ahead of the now rapidly becoming outmoded red-and-blue 3D lens technology.


And by now, almost everyone in the planet of Earth has probably seen Cameron’s latest sci-fi space extravaganza Avatar, and experienced the Pandora terra firma in eye-popping 3D. In less than no time, it’s also set to eclipse Titanic’s all-time box-office haul, also Cameron’s last directorial gig before he had gone AWOL for 12 years. Turns out he’s been tinkering with his filmmaking mechanics to bring us this blue beast, setting to change cinema forever and shunting his detractors to shame. Talks about a new cinematic revolution had been buzzing long before Avatar’s release, with some seismic power comparable to what The Jazz Singer did to the sound era. Apparently, we are on the threshold of the 3D age, and Cameron is the messiah prophesying the goodwill of a Hollywood game-changing event.


That is all very jolly and terribly electrifying news, until, of course, when one sees the film itself. Count me off from licking Cameron’s boots. Avatar, for all its technical, technological ingenuity, is no masterpiece. The visuals may be of grand scale, bleeding the eyes of those who watch it, immersive in detail, especially in glorious IMAX, and often gorgeously realised – but like any other beauty contest, set out to bedazzle its audience whilst overlooking brains and heart. There’s no contention that Pandora is a world to be engrossed with, with Earth-like environs both surreal and photo-real; lush rainforests, skyscraper trees, floating mountains, luminous flora and fauna and enriched with creatures entrancing to the eyes. And the native creatures of this planet, the Na’vi are mesmerising blue-skinned, 8-feet tall, cat-like folks with their tribal culture and deep connection to their Mother Nature, Eywa. It’s a world to revel in and be drawn to. That’s until the narrative cracks.


At the heart of Avatar is actually a postmodernist mélange of many other Hollywood epics, direly assembled together to create a yarn that would fill up a three-hour running-time. If Cameron has promised us that we’ve never seen anything like Avatar before – he’s lying. We have seen this before, if you look closely: Dances with Wolves, Apocalypto, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and if considerably Pocahontas and Fern Gully. It’s a hodgepodge of storylines wrapped in a brand-new glossy package delivered to silverscreen. To mention, it also follows a revisionist Western narrative, with cowboys (read: middle-American rednecks) set out to conquer the lands of the native Indians (read: the species of Na’vi), with a reckless ‘white’ hero permeating the tribe’s culture, learning their mores, falling in love with one of its women (predictably someone in the line of authority, oh, perhaps the tribal king’s daughter, I dunno), and a change of vision and heart afterwards, begins fighting for their side and the clan’s survival, despite of betrayal, disloyalty, cheating etc etc. Cue in riding to the West and riding to the East, with some pre-battle elocution of speeches, and amassing a battalion of warriors all screaming for war glory. Really, it’s old hat.


There are even moments in Avatar that creaks with woodenness. Its opening denies its audience of a comprehensive set-up, with Sam Worthington’s voice-over narration feels automatically written by one of Cameron’s tech-gadgets. We are plunged directly to an insensitive death scene of Jake Sully’s brother, his sudden replacement in the Avatar programme, and the introduction of the aquamarine creatures themselves, the surrogates of Na’vi bodies, without bothering to explain how it got there. Worthington presumably has done his best, but his Sully feels like a cardboard-thin character cut from the “How To Make A Hollywood Epic” guidebook. And so are the rest of the characters, a roll call of stereotypes churned from Cameron’s brainbox, from Stephen Lang’s one-dimensional tough-baddie Colonel Miles Quaritch, employing a post-9/11 militarism strategy to exploit the riches of Pandora, fighting “terror with terror”, to Giovanni Ribisi’s corporate-minded simpleton, and even Michelle Rodriguez suffers from clichéd proto-feminist battle-cries of “I didn’t sign up for this shit” or “You’re not the only one with a gun, bitch”. Only Sigourney Weaver gives a compelling presence here, but her unyielding yet compassionate Dr. Grace Augustine remains frustratingly underwritten.


Whilst it’s a fact that mainstream cinema wouldn’t be complete without Cameron and his game-changing visions, there’s no bullshitting that at the essence of Avatar is a revisionist Western-cum-gung-ho version of Fern Gully masquerading as an epitome of cinematic revolution. If there’s something that needs revolutionising in this film, it’s the script and storyline, so lacking with gravitas, originality and most of all, a pulsing, invigorating heart. The videogame-simulated generation will lap it up. But let’s not forget that at the end of the day, it is story, not spectacle, which really counts.



VERDICT:

Avatar’s achievement is technically a visual one, fully realising to microscopic detail the lush world of Pandora and shoring up the boundaries of FX-driven, 3-D cinema to dizzying heights. But for all its staggering technological whizz-bang, peel away the spectacle and we see nothing but a piece of storytelling so staggeringly hackneyed, if not buried in an ancient civilisation of lazy Hollywood pastiche. Cameron has obsessed himself with his three-dimensional technology, whilst leaving his characters one-dimensional and dialogues robotically automated.


RATING: B-

Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Ralph Fiennes

Director: Katherine Bigelow

Screenplay: Katherine Bigelow

Running time: 2 hrs 01 mins

Genre: Drama/Action/War



CRITIQUE:


Okay, we get it. War is futile. Thousands of men are deployed in distant lands to fight distant wars and unseen enemies for some politically unjustified and obscure cause. And if men don’t get killed, they go back home to their domestic lives psychologically scarred and almost defunct. War movies have this recurring thread of philosophy, from the mainstream glories of Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Thin Red Line, Saving Private Ryan and even the leftfield arthouse ones like Waltz With Bashir, all saying the same thing – war is pointless. Meanwhile, in the face of a more modern war being fought, the Iraq war has recently found its own niche cinematically, founding a sub-genre that both portray and speculates the Middle-Eastern excursion of the West. And since we’ve had so much philosophising, politicking and parodying (check out Syriana, The Kingdom, Jarhead), it’s quite refreshing to see that Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker sidesteps all that moral sermon and personifies war “as a drug”, a hallucinogenic, adrenaline-fuelled, grit-covered operation that puts men in fatal situations. Good, then, that this is not just another recent addition to the ever-increasing canon. It’s probably the most irreverent yet most insightful movies ever made about the Iraq war.


From first frame to the last, it’s plain to see that Bigelow is not interested in the geopolitics and the powers that loggerhead nations against each other. Instead we are pummelled into the perspective of bomb disposal experts around the dust-beaten environs of Baghdad, disposing explosives deceptively hidden in the most mundane locations, may it be streets, under tires or inside car hoods. The actual war barely enter the screen, as Bigelow reduces combats as off-screen hints – helicopters flying around, sounds of missiles being fired – turmoil is all over the city, but this film is about the men with a dangerous mission, and all is at stake. It’s a rough, battering experience being shoved into this panorama of danger, so meticulously and precisely detailed with shaky, documentary-like camerawork, an intense in-your-face portrayal brimming with authenticity. As this is an action movie, so astonishingly directed by a woman, Bigelow focuses on the episodic narrative that swirls along Jeremy Renner’s Sgt. William James, a reckless bomb expert with such swaggering bravado, as he breaks rules and ignores team protocols. There is a sequence that could even make Hitchcock break a sweat, as James locates a complexly wired series of bombs buried under a street, proving that explosion isn’t the answer to genuine suspense, but rather the ticking of bomb and knowing that it’s going to blow off in a minutia of technical fault.


Nevertheless, Bigelow never lets her action set-pieces override her artistic credibility. When bombs do go off, the cinematography suddenly shifts from hand-held grittiness to a super-sharp, stylised observation of details; a mushrooming explosion, the tremor on sand particles and the force field that wipe out a place. The characterisation also becomes stronger throughout the film, as Bigelow studies masculinity and the male ego in the face of war, bringing a remarkable performance from Renner to the fore. His bomb expert is almost surgical in disposition, understanding the intricate wires of bombs as does a surgeon knows veins in a human body, and the whiff of danger keeps him high like a drug that when he’s sent back to domesticity, he couldn’t function like every other human around him. It’s a numbing allegory about the sacrifice of soldiers and the obsession of nations that deploy them to war.



VERDICT:

Impressive. The kinetic tension in this film is so compellingly orchestrated that it puts you at the edge of your seat and your heart in your throat. Don’t let the ‘Iraq war movie’ label misguide you; this is perhaps the best film made about the Iraq excursion, mainly because it eschews hectoring and politicking and rather portrays men in the face of a war bigger than their egos. Bigelow does this with a visceral eye and bleak, rough-hewn war poetry.



RATING: A

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon

Director: Peter Jackson

Screenplay: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh

Running time: 2 hrs 15 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


One cannot mistake Peter Jackson to be so absorbed with honing his CGI expertise that his last handful of directorial work was all laden with CGI bombast, from The Lord of the Rings trilogy to King Kong. As spectacular as they were, hitherto worshipped as the zenith of computer-graphics cinema just before James Cameron began trumpeting his 3-D limelight-stealer around Hollywood, Jackson’s sudden return to somewhat low-key, more personal human drama in the vein of his pre-Middle Earth jaunt Heavenly Creatures made most of his followers nattering with disbelief, whether Jackson was going to relinquish CGI and go for verité instead.

Cast: Christian Friedel, Bhurgart Klausner

Director: Michael Haneke

Screenplay: Michael Haneke

Running time: 2 hrs 24 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


It is practically impossible to love a Michael Haneke film. His oeuvre is deeply entrenched in the dark vestiges of human moralities, with films that touch the ambiguous, the psychologically disturbing and the unnerving. In The Piano Teacher, he dissects a woman’s sexual repression and subsequent descent to pathos. In Funny Games, he played mind-games with his audience about the philosophies of cinematic violence. And in Hidden, he provokes our contemporary culture with attacks on privacy. Most of all, in one common strand, Haneke’s films are built to rouse our judgments and then finish off without payoffs. It’s like having sex without reaching a climax, really. So it’s relatively rational one barely enjoys a Haneke celluloid.


His latest work, crowned Palme D’or in Cannes, would seem to be a difficult chore to watch through for any average mainstream shlub. Filmed in a monochromatic black-and-white, clocking for almost three hours and involving a cast of virtual unknowns, anyone with an attention span of a bored spaniel will be harrumphing at the roll of subtitled scenes. There’s no question about its existence as an antithesis to mainstream spunk. For The White Ribbon is war film without a war, a whodunit without that final exposé of who-had-done-it, a mystery without any easy answers, a ghost story without ghosts, and just like the two inquiring policemen in the film, they’ll never know what is happening in the sleepy village for sure.


Haneke strips any colour away and tells this “mystery in a German countryside” circa pre-First World War in a stark monochrome, like a vintage, age-worn European postcard brought to vivid life. The story here presented here is almost unfathomable, as the narrative strand intercuts from one vignette to the next, roving tales from one household to the other in this almost nonexistent village. A local doctor meets a horseback riding accident from an unseen wire tied to trees, a farmer’s wife dies enigmatically in a ranch, a boy is tortured and hanged, and a barn is engulfed in flames. All these happen whilst the village children roam around in packs. The suspect could be anyone. The iron-willed Baron and his mischievous Baroness wife, the draconian Pastor, the vindictive farmer or the lovelorn midwife. It couldn’t possibly be the children. Or could it?


This is the epicentre, the throbbing core of Haneke’s evocation of Germany’s past. It is already speculated that The White Ribbon or Das Weisse Band is a glimpse into the root cause of Nazism, or the extreme socialist principles, in Germany. It could be that, or it could be also Haneke’s parable of evil innate in the face of humanity in every society. That once children are ostracized, severely punished and retained from being children, even innocence can become the greatest of monsters in the future. There is a scene that burns into the mind even long after viewing it: the ‘white ribbon’ represents virtue and purity, tied around the arms of those children who misbehave or tell lies, and in one chilling scene, a boy is chastised for his seeming dishonesty by his father. He cries, claiming not guilty, but a gut feeling tells us that this face of innocence is harbouring a sense of revolt and hatred.

Cast: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’nique, Mariah Carey, Paula Patton

Director: Lee Daniels

Screenplay: Lee Daniels

Running time: 1 hr 50 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire has a rather off-putting title that suggests of screaming teenage girls, sparkles, unicorns and glitters. But fear not, the film is not what the title insinuates. Anyone who thinks that an American film cloyingly named ‘Precious’ might be another addition to the artless Twilight generation, and that perhaps Sapphire is a new moniker adopted by Paris Hilton, is very wrong. This autobiographical tale of a 16-year old Harlem girl who goes through sadistic domestic violence and rape is barely the frivolous stuff that Hollywood is mostly made of these days. And to mention that the wretched heroine is of a hulking overweight, almost illiterate, inarticulate, intermittently vicious when provoked and very black doesn’t make this an ordinary portrayal of a life lived through hell. Especially when she has a ruthless father who rapes her and gives her two babies. Especially when one has a cold-blooded, potty-mouth monster of a mother who, instead of be repulsed by the atrocities of the husband, transfers her hate to the daughter, apparently ‘stealing’ him from her.


Lee Daniels makes a gruelling watch in Precious, almost a scatological view of despair in the worst recesses of humanity, those good-for-nothing, couch-potatoes who only wanted to receive welfare whilst their children estimate how much they’re really worth. When Precious is being asked about her pregnancy, she remains blank, even defensive. When she is taunted by jokey remarks, she lashes out at her tormentors. And in the face of her self-esteem demolishing mother, she launches into a self-created fantasy of fabulous frocks, red carpet walks and flashes of hundreds of cameras surrounding her. Amateur actress Gabourey Sidibe blows a portrayal of Clareece ‘Precious’ Jones out of the park, rendering the character warmth, empathy and a strong feminist value. And comedienne Mo’nique transforms as the nihilistic matriarch, with swearwords firing out her mouth like invisible bullets, but draws a breathtaking character arc that gives this terrible mother another dimension. Her raw, excruciating confession in the end, squeezed out by a world-weary, no-bullshit social worker Miss Weiss (Mariah Carey in a mindboggling metamorphosis, so utterly convincing), will have your heart torn apart – a savage truth that one cannot give love when love is deprived.


But it’s not all gloom – there’s hope somewhere in the future of Precious, and she knows it starts with herself. The movie is at its best depicting atrocious scenarios, but becomes obvious in the self-redeeming parts. Precious’ course in an alternative school is somewhat weighed down by a sense of conventionality in filmmaking. When you see so much school-set, overcoming-adversity school dramas, you’ll get the feeling where this is going to end. Good, then, that this doesn’t sugar-coats anything.



VERDICT:


A bruising yet ultimately redemptive 80’s Harlem hell drama featuring exceptional performances by its leads and supporting players. Sidibe gives a fearless screen debut defying any Hollywood glamorisation, Mo’nique creates one of cinema’s fiercest matriarchal monsters, and even Carey is astonishing. Some minor melodrama and absurd stylish choices by director Lee Daniels aside, Precious is a gut-wrenching watch that surely gallops as the dark horse for this year’s Oscar race.



RATING: A-

Cast: Max Records, Catherine Keener, (voices) James Gandolfini, Catherin O’Hara, Paul Dano, Forest Whittaker

Director: Spike Jonze

Screenplay: Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers

Running time: 1 hr 41 mins

Genre: Drama/Fantasy/Family



CRITIQUE:


Cinema loves childhood chronicles. From the glorious (Cinema Paradiso) to the painful (Les Quatre Cents Coups, Ivan’s Childhood), from the enchanting (E.T.: Extra-Terrestial, Spirited Away) to the darkly sinister (Pan’s Labyrinth), there is not a better landscape to explore the raw emotions of childhood experience other than the silverscreen. For any auteur with an artistic vision, there’s always a child lurking in the past, once filled with daydreams of flights and fancy. This is true with director Spike Jonze, who is pretty much a delinquent who works against the Hollywood system, returning back to his childhood roots to bring us Maurice Sendak’s universally popular children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. And there is not a better film this year that explores a child’s psychology than Jonze’s film.


Transposing a 30-odd line poem into a beating, breathing film is incalculably a difficult job – and in an almost two-hour length, we’d somehow expect Wild Things will be padded by sing-along show tunes and colourful monster merriment worthy of a Saturday morning children’s telly extravaganza between a very slender plotline. Except that these sheepish things do not happen, and shall never be under Jonze’s sensitive shepherding. Instead his interpretation of Wild Things is a melancholic, bittersweet evocation of childhood that isn’t really for children but for the adults to understand the condition of a child, of what it means to be innocent, to laugh, to cry, to run wild. Viewers could easily gripe about the lack of plot thereof, where nothing much happens. To disagree with that view, we seem to have forgotten that the best films about childhood in the history of cinema weren’t really plot-driven but rather explorations on psychology and situations. See Antoine Doinel’s embittered youth in Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows or Ivan’s brutal despondency in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, these are films that touch the subject matter without a deux-ex-machina ridden plot but instead told with scepticism, and at the same time, wonder, of a child’s psyche given the situations they are walled in.


The rambunctious Max, played to a vibrantly natural performance by Max Records, is sent to his room as castigation for unruly behaviour and biting his Mum (Catherine Keener) in his wolf suit. For anyone who grew up with Sendak’s tale, it’s a brief summary of a child punished, figuratively runs away to the land of the Wild Things, and comes back transformed in the eve of his childhood. Pain is scarcely told in the book, and with the collaboration of Jonze and writer Dave ‘The Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius’ Eggers brings out tenderness and sorrow in the screenplay that haunts Sendak’s work. Here, Max is an ignored kid, barely comprehending his parents’ divorce and his older sister’s swaying into adolescence, as he becomes detached, inarticulate, and emotionally impervious to the misery around him. Hence, when he runs away (he does not scamper into his room, as the book has shown), he barely understands that he is also ironically retreating into his imagination.


Which leads us to the Wild Things. Every single creature is a labour of love. The pack is a collective technical ingenuity, marrying vintage puppetry with CGI-motions that enhance the emotionality and corporeality of these creatures. Flawless rendition is also coupled with pitch-perfect voice-casting, with standouts James Gandolfini as tempestuous Carol, Catherine O’Hara as the insecure Judith, Lauren Ambrose as the outsider KW and Paul Dano as self-piteous Alexander. It also doesn’t take a genius to notice that these monsters are the incarnation of Max’s inner emotional conflicts, with each feeling represented in each creature. The symbolism here is wonderfully captured by Jonze, where the giant fortress the creatures build actually signifies Max’s pursuit of a caved-in comfort, which in the real world does not exist. And when Max bids goodbye to the Wild Things, we see him waving farewell to these inner childish creatures and sails back to the land called Growing Up.



VERDICT:

For anyone who expects a time-ticking plot de rigueur to a Disney film shall be immensely disappointed. But for anyone who wants to experience a nostalgic, melancholic, bittersweet evocation of childhood, watch Where the Wild Things Are with both an open mind and an open heart – and no sooner than you see young rebel Max returning into his mother’s embrace, in a beautiful, wordless epilogue, you’ll find yourself touched. Jonze’s film, just like Max, is flawed and it’s the way it should be.



RATING: A-

Cast: Liza Minelli, Michael York

Director: Bob Fosse

Screenplay: Bob Fosse

Running time: 2 hrs 04 mins

Genre:Musical/Drama

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Dominic Cooper, Olivia Williams, Emma Thompson, Sally Hawkins