Posts Tagged ‘James Gandolfini’

Where the Wild Things Are

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

October 23rd, 2009

where_the_wild_things_are
Spike Jonze has made an unenviable adaptation a wonder.

In 1963’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” Maurice Sendak spun a concise and evocative tale of a young boy named Max immersed in make-believe with pictures reminiscent of a muted ukiyo-e woodblock print and verse like haiku. It was a brief, transcendent book, so dissimilar from many of the current voluminous kiddie tomes which read like the step outline for a film franchise; its brevity was a portal to the reader’s own fantasy world. With this reverent and innovative movie, Jonze and his fellow screenwriter, the sedulous author Dave Eggers, delve beyond the page by expounding on the original theme, no more than suggested by Sendak, of how children cope with and express unverbalized frustration through simultaneously reassuring and intense invention. “Where the Wild Things Are” probes outside the margins to create an emotionally rich and technically absorbing vision.

In Sendak’s primary version, a mischievous Max is sent to bed without any supper, and as he pouts in his room, he sets sail in a self-inscribed boat. Jonze places modern-day Max (Max Records) in a wintry locale where a kid can build an igloo of which he’s most proud. The igloo is also a sanctuary, like his imagination. Astutely, Jonze, in a few taut scenes, details the 9-year-old boy’s disquiet. The structure is smashed by his teenaged sister’s roughhousing friends in a boisterous snowball fight started by Max. He feels a keen sense of abandonment when his older sibling drives off with her pals. The young lad becomes more agitated that evening as his divorced mother (Catherine Keener) entertains her new, serious boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo, in a wisp of a cameo). Increasingly petulant and attention seeking, he bites his mom on the arm. Max, wrapped in a whiskered cat suit, runs from the house, into the woods, and begins his fantastical journey to the fabricated island where the wild things live.

The mythical beasts in the book are anonymous hybrids with “terrible roars,” “teeth,” “eyes,” and “claws.” Here, they physically resemble Sendak’s illustrations and are showcased in a combination of costumed puppeteers and animatronics devised by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. This melding of techniques is generally undetectable so that live action meshes seamlessly with the CGI. But, unlike the source, the movie’s chimeric creatures are given names and seven distinct psyches. Their personalities wouldn’t be out of place in a saturnine (albeit furrier) Ingmar Bergman flick. It’s a grown-up septet with formidable ensemble voiceover work. The allegorical wild things are introduced in thick woods as the lovelorn Carol, the most demonstratively tortured, as soulfully spoken by James Gandolfini, squashes their huts with manic delirium. Chris Cooper is Douglas, the mediating chicken. Judith and Ira are the perfectly suited mismatched couple; Judith (a biting Catherine O’Hara) is the provocateur of the bunch, while Ira (a kindly Forest Whitaker) is an affable get-along sort. The diffident Alexander, who looks like Seth Green trapped in a billy goat’s body, is rendered with tremulous melancholy by Paul Dano (“Little Miss Sunshine.”) The most reticent member of the group is The Bull (voiced, rarely, by Michael Berry Jr.). And the independent KW (Lauren Ambrose, “Six Feet Under”) is Carol’s love interest who pines to leave the forest with new-found friends, a pair of owls named Bob and Terry, whose presence unnerves her former beau. Through his own cunning, Max is quickly made king of this complex collection.

In Sendak’s original, Max and the wild things engage in a wild rumpus, and in Jonze’s film there’s playful bounding and a group hug which makes a mountain out of a troll hill. But there’s also the construction of an intricate fort and a hearty dirt-clod fight to underscore the rivalries and vulnerabilities. Each event is mired in psychological reverberations, especially when Max picks the teams and reveals his favorites during the dirty battle. It also shows how often children’s games hinge on violence; the undercurrent of malice in a dirt-clod fight, dodge ball clash, snowball skirmish or Red Rover tussle can so easily be exposed in one well-aimed instant. The aftermath of the game, though, generates a genuine moment of reflection between a wounded Alexander and Max. The music by Karen O, lead singer of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Carter Burwell, a frequent composer for the Coen brothers’ films, is a constant compliment to the myriad moods, especially captured in the deeply felt, lyrical lullaby “Hideaway.”

A storied picture book has come to life in a wise, ambitious and thought-provoking movie. Seven years since his last film, and with full artistic control over this project, Jonze, you’d imagine, is presenting “Where the Wild Things Are” as he dreamed it.

Posted in Where the Wild Things Are | Tagged Carter Burwell, Catherine Keener, Catherine O'Hara, Chris Cooper, Coen brothers, Dave Eggers, Forest Whitaker, Ingmar Bergman, James Gandolfini, Karen O, Lauren Ambrose, Little Miss Sunshine, Mark Ruffalo, Maurice Sendak, Max Records, Michael Berry Jr., Paul Dano, Six Feet Under, Spike Jonze, Where the Wild Things Are | Comments (0)

In the Loop

You Spin Me Round

August 7th, 2009

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Armando Iannucci sharpened his rapier wit on British radio and television in the 1990s. He helped pen seminal shows such as the surreal news program takeoff, “On the Hour,” and the kaleidoscopic talk show “Knowing Me, Knowing You…with Alan Partridge” starring Steve Coogan. By the aughts, he’d moved behind the camera and in 2005, he directed, produced and co-wrote the masterful BBC political satire, “The Thick of It.” Filmed in an intimate hand-held camera, documentary style, the six episodes and subsequent two hour-long specials cudgeled the duplicitous machinations of a fictitious government department and, by inference, the entire British bureaucratic infrastructure. With “In the Loop,” his first feature film, Iannucci, in a sequel of sorts, mines familiar political territory with a similar visual technique, but sweeps his unmerciless satiric scythe across the Atlantic in this profane and wickedly funny send-up.

Simon Foster (Tom Hollander, but think Oxbridge Patton Oswalt) is a befuddled fop of a Cabinet Minister who is Secretary of State for International Development. During a radio interview, he utters one misguided word. This single utterance from this doltish Minister, who is not so much a tabula rasa as an Etch A Sketch, sparks a farcical march to war in the Middle East. He becomes a key figure but, essentially, a figurehead for both galvanizing sides of the debate in the UK and the U.S., played by an ensemble cast of pitch-perfect portrayals (including Chris Addison, Anna Chlumsky, Paul Higgins, Mimi Kennedy, and James Gandolfini particularly pungently foul-mouthed as Lt. General George Miller).

But no one hounds Foster more doggedly than Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s vituperative king of spin. Played by the tremendous Peter Capaldi, who resembles a psychopathic meerkat and reprises his role from “The Thick of It,” Tucker is vicious, venomous and unerringly crude. He masticates his unceasing insults, spitting them out at anyone who deigns to speak in his presence so that every vile slur from the Scotsman’s lips seems flecked with spittle; he not so much wishes to dent their dignity as he wants to resect their self esteem. Linton Barwick is Tucker’s American counterpart but exudes an antithetical public demeanor. Smooth, powerful and undetected, like a Long Island Ice Tea, Barwick (a slithery suave David Rasche, “Sledge Hammer”) is a Brooks Brothers-clad, Machiavellian philosopher as he prepares to manipulate a United Nations presentation that mimics Colin Powell’s February 2003 performance. “In the land of truth, the man with one fact is king,” Barwick boasts as the hoax is hatched. In the midst of this international intrigue, Foster must return to his constituency for a town meeting in Northampton where the most pressing issue is a constituent’s crumbling wall. (Steve Coogan turns in a devilishly understated performance as the disgruntled Midlands neighbor whose cause becomes a national sensation, and an embarrassment for Foster.)

With “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “The Colbert Report,” and “Real Time with Bill Maher,” audiences have been exposed to politicians’ opportunistic contradictions and prevaricating spin on an almost quotidian basis. The Orwellian jig is up. We’ve caught on. But Iannucci still scathingly captures the systemic deceit and narcissistic self preservation in an exciting, clever and unrelenting narrative buoyed by a hilarious script spewing with lusty wordplay and robust invective. However, the comedy in “In the Loop” is tinged with the melancholy realization that so long as the upper echelon of power is inhabited by, and rewards the disingenuous, then, in the words of T.E. Lawrence from “Lawrence of Arabia, “so long will they be a little people, a silly people – greedy, barbarous, and cruel.”

Posted in In the Loop | Tagged Anna Chlumsky, Armando Iannucci, Chris Addison, David Rasche, In the Loop, James Gandolfini, Knowing Me Knowing You...with Alan Partridge, Lawrence of Arabia, Mimi Kennedy, On the Hour, Patton Oswalt, Paul Higgins, Peter Capaldi, Real Time with Bill Maher, Steve Coogan, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Thick of It, Tom Hollander | Comments (0)

April 24th, 2009

Steve McQueen, first-time director of the critically praised “Hunger,” engages in The Hollywood Interview with Terry Keefe.

Bowie in Space. Well, his son, at least. Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son with ex-wife Angela Bowie, transports Sam Rockwell to outer space in “Moon,” which after a successful introduction at Sundance opens across the U.S. in June.

From Armando Iannucci, the creative force behind BBC Four’s devastatingly clever governmental satire “The Thick of It,” comes his feature film debut, “In the Loop,” a skewering of Anglo-American political relations which IFC Films will release in the States in July. The Independent profiles Mr. Merciless while The Guardian chronicles James Gandolfini, who appears as the movie’s major American presence as a Universal Soldier.

Opening almost imperceptibly, John Crowley’s “Is Anybody There?” stars Michael Caine as a nursing home denizen who befriends the managers’ young son fascinated by the afterlife. The indefatigable Caine chats with Newsday about Korean War service, mortality and his obsession with Google.

One Film Wonder: For more than 40 years, Lulu has been a superlative singer and entertainer. She also unleashed her pipes on an undeservedly underrated Bond theme song. But she delivered her only enduring film appearance as “Babs” in “To Sir, with Love,” the charming, heartfelt and human classroom drama notable for Sidney Poitier’s regal presence and her ethereal pop classic.

Posted in Beyond the Reel | Tagged Angela Bowie, Armando Iannucci, David Bowie, Duncan Jones, Hunger, In the Loop, Is Anybody There?, James Gandolfini, John Crowley, Lulu, Michael Caine, Moon, Newsday, One Film Wonder, Sam Rockwell, Sidney Poitier, Steve McQueen, Terry Keefe, The Guardian, The Hollywood Interview, The Independent, The Thick of It, To Sir with Love | Comments (0)

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