..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

..The Images & Trailer ..MCN Weekend ..Wilmington on DVD

Where the Wild
Things Are
Law Abiding Citizen, Couples Retreat
and A Serious Man

Where the Wild Things Are (Three Stars)
U. S.; Spike Jonze, 2009

Some children's stories work primarily for children. Some please both children and adults. But some are mostly for adults -- and I think that may be the case with Spike Jonze's new movie from Maurice Sendak's famous 1963 picture book Where the Wild Things Are. Jonze film takes Sendak's spare little book, which consists of 18 big bountifully colorful picture panels and the slightest of texts, and turns it into a wordy, beautifully visualized, but sometimes strangely enervated show, a film full of personality and intelligence, but lacking in punch or drive.

That isn't the case with the book, which is sly and naughty, and serves as barely more than an outline and character gallery, as far as the movie concerned. Sendak's original Where the Wild Things Are, in its few pages, tells the story of a bad little boy named Max -- a juvenile hard-case who is sent to bed without supper for his infractions, and then, like Winsor McCay's sublime Little Nemo perched on his long-legged galloping bed, watches his own bedroom turn into a tangled wild dreamland of big, wide-eyed, ferocious-looking, but fuzzy-cuddly beasties, a child-wild bunch who make Max their king and then dance around in a beastie-bash called the Wild Rumpus. Like many parties, Sendak's is over too soon (though Jonze's movie isn't.) Then Max wakes up, ready for breakfast, and the story is over.

Not much there for a movie, but one-time UPA animator Gene Deitch -- who animated Tom Terrific, Krazy Kat and some of the later, bad Popeyes -- made a previous 1973 animated version, with music by Peter Schickele, or baroque musical comedian P.D. Q. Bach to you. (Deitch also animated Sendak's later 1970 picture-book In the Night Kitchen.

And Jonze has spent a lot of money on this live action show, which features lavish, craggy, ocean-sprayed Australian locations and huge, meticulously crafted suits of six Sendak monsters, all of whom have expressive animatronic faces, and new names and personalities dreamed up for the film and partly supplied by some famous voice actors -- including James Gandolfini as the feisty but sentimental Carol, and Lauren Ambrose as self-sacrificing K. W., plus Chris Cooper as Douglas, Catherine O'Hara as Judith, Forest Whitaker as Ira, and Paul Dano as Alexander.

Max Records, the juvenile actor who plays the 9-year-old movie Max, doesn't suggest too much of the rascally, impish quality Sendak put into his drawings. Even though Max's Max goes on a bad-behavior rampage in the film's opening scenes (which tend to be the best things in the show), Records tends to look and sound more like a Macaulay-Culkin- Home-Alone style cutie-pie grown a little older.

And it seems a waste that the movie's best-performing actor -- Catherine Keener as Max's Mom -- only shows up in the bookend reality scenes, and that Mark Ruffalo, as her boyfriend, barely shows up at all. If I were Jonze and his co-writer Dave Eggers (of Away We Go), I would have pulled a Wizard of Oz riff and sent a suited, animatronically transformed Keener and Ruffalo somewhere into the Wild Things' land, maybe along with an altered version of the older kids who chase Max. This movie badly needs conflict -- or at least more conflict than we get now, which is mostly limited to Wild Thing squabbles and often exhausted-sounding banter.

Great children's movies, like the early Disney cartoon features, are more reckless and intense. They tend to seduce or enflame our imaginations, and that's not the case here; Jonze's Wild Things is never more than just good, no matter how intelligent the dialogue or scintillating the visuals. Toward the end, when Gandolfini's Carol, feeling betrayed, begins to break down, ready to run even wilder in grief and disappointment in Max, the movie begins to generate some tension. But it doesn't last long, and when Max starts to sail away (ignoring those magically eerie Little Nemo-ish bedroom transformations in the book), dreamland is far, far away.

Spike Jonze is certainly capable of unleashing dreams on screen -- Being John Malkovich is one of the dreamiest of recent American movies . But this one needs more wild things, more rumpuses, and far more of the unbuttoned spirit of that Sendak inspiration, Winsor McCay and Little Nemo. Here, the rumpus is over too fast and the Wild Things don't make your heart sing.

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Law Abiding Citizen (One and a Half Stars)
U.S.; F. Gary Gray, 2009

In Law Abiding Citizen, a big, splashy movie thriller of astounding absurdity, costar Jamie Foxx plays Nick Rice, an overly ambitious prosecutor who makes one court deal too many, and costar-producer Gerard Butler plays Clyde Shelton a government tech-destroyer who's an odd cross between Charley Bronson's bereaved, revenge-mad father/husband of the Death Wish series, and Silence of the Lambs' Hannibal Lecter at his most sadistically super-villainish. It's not a good mix of characters, Bronson should be a roamer, and Hannibal is a prisoner -- and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer's main gimmick (a one-man war against the justice system waged from a jail cell) is so preposterous that it keeps driving you right out of the movie.

The movie begins with a bloody massacre, and then tries to keep building. Somehow, ten years after the two psychopaths who slaughtered his family are either free or due to be executed, Clyde starts running wild. (Why didn't he start earlier?) Soon, despite the seeming inconvenience of being tossed into jail for the first murders, he's busy outwitting the entire police force of Philadelphia, slaughtering killers, lawyers and cops alike, with outlandish impunity, while conducting all his operations from a solitary confinement cell that he seems to be able to enter and leave at will.

It is gross understatement to say that Law Abiding Citizen makes no sense. It doesn't even seem to be trying to make sense. I couldn't understand why Clyde let himself get arrested in the first place (except to make a big arrest scene), or why he wants to do everything in jail instead of the comfort of his own cave-like hide-away. I couldn't understand why he slashed his shaggy cellmate, or why he kept making such weird deals with Nick and the authorities: such trading the killer's buried-alive lawyer for a heart meal. Obviously, he's trying to make a point about the legal system, but couldn't he just have gone on Oprah or O'Reilly? And whence and wherefore this penchant for chopping off his victim's limbs and testicles, unless he wants to start another whack-'em-hack-'em franchise? (And Law is no Saw.)

I also couldn't comprehend why the entire city of Philadelphia went into a panic, when it was obvious Clyde was only killing people connected with his case, plus a few otherwise guilty souls like his cellmate. And I was definitely befuddled by Clyde's whimsical approach to incarceration, his taste in home movies, and why Nick and the D. A.'s office and the prison authorities couldn't keep a better eye on his comings and goings.

For sheer lunatic improbability and bad ideas (and even bad punctuation), Law Abiding Citizen will be hard to top. Even its social message (Don't make bad court deals, but kill Clyde before he kills Philadelphia) is foolish. Writer Wimmer and director F. Gary Gray (Friday and The Negotiator) seem to be intent primarily on cooking up and staging shocking scenes (like the one when one character has their head blown off by an exploding cell-phone) and mostly indifferent to whether they make sense or connect with each other.

The movie does have a good cast, all wasting their skills on cliché roles: Bruce McGill as the fatherly prosecutor, Colm Meaney as the tough detective, Viola Davis as the angry mayor, and Regina Hall and Emerald-Angel Young as Nick's steadfast pretty wife and adorable cello-playing daughter. (Typically for this film, in Young's brief cello solo scene at the end, Bach is drowned out by Brian Tyler and his frenetic-sentimental score.)

Foxx's Nick is another egotistical pro primed for learning a lesson. And Butler's Clyde is the latest example of a revenge-crazed citizen, mixed with that usually preposterous character, the all-powerful super-villain one man crime wave. like Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher, who can't be stopped, at least until the climax. It's hard to play someone like that, even if you're Anthony Hopkins -- and Butler, with his agitated eyes, is nowhere near plausibility as a killing machine. At first we feel sorry for him; then, as the corpses mount up ridiculously, we begin feeling sorry for the audience. What have we done to deserve Law Abiding Citizen?

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Couples Retreat (Two Stars)
U. S.; Peter Billingsley, 2009

Ever since Swingers, Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau have make a pretty fair buddy-buddy comedy team, but in Couple's Retreat, co-written by the chums, they're way better than their material. As two of the male members in a four couple bunch that go off together to a Caribbean resort called Eden -- it has one island for couples and one for singles, and the guys keep trying to cross over -- they provide some laughs, if not much illumination (despite satirized therapists all over the place. The rest of the eightsome includes Jason Bateman and Faizon Love as the other guys, and Kristen Bell, Kristin Davis, Malin Akerman, Tasha Smith and Kali Hawk as four wives and a mistress. I laughed some at them, and at Peter Serafinowicz and Carlos Ponce as the most obnoxious of the Eden resort employees. And I liked the song score. But I felt bad about it on the morning.

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New York, I Love You (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S./France; various directors, 2009

As in his previous multi-part great city of the world valentine, Paris, je t'Aime producer Emmanuel Benbihy gives us an all-star-all-the-time look at New York, with ten prominent international directors (ranging from Mira Nair to Brett Ratner) taking on the challenge of making a separate eight-minute shortie in two days' shooting time tops -- all of which are then woven together with Randy Balsmeyer-directed transition scenes without chapter divisions or episode titles.

The movie is variable and if you wander into it unawares that it's a ten part movie and not a Manhattan Crash or Short Cuts, you may get irritated with it fast. (New York would work better with episode titles and breaks; it really needs breathers.) But the good episodes are quite enjoyable, and the middling ones at least have good actors and New York backdrops (nine in Manhattan and one -- Joshua Marston's compassionate take on an elderly, bickering couple (Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman) -- in Brooklyn's Coney Island).

My favorites: Nair's humane and sharp interracial vignette with Irfan Khan and Natalie Portman; Jiang Wen's crackling triangle duel with Randy Garcia, Rachel Bilson and Hayden Christensen; Yvan Attal's surprise double seduction scene with Ethan Hawke, Maggie Q, Chris Cooper and Robin Wright Penn; writer Anthony Minghella's mystical hotel romance with Julie Christie, John Hurt and Shia La Beouf (shot by Shekhar Kapur after Minghella's death) and Fatih Akin's Chinatown love story with Ugur Yurcele and Shu Qui.

Benbihy's melting pot intentions are obvious, but I'm still surprised he used so many foreign-born directors. The best New York films tend to be from the guys who were raised there, like Sidney Lumet, Spike Lee, Woody Allen and Marty Scorsese. But the movie still made me miss the city where, like many, I used to live.

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A Serious Man (Four Stars)
U. S.; Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009

The Coen Brothers' typically dark, typically wry look at a Jewish boyhood (and fatherhood) in the Midwest, with references ranging from Jefferson Airplane to Job and the Dybbuk, was one of the movies I missed reviewing during my recent sad time. But you shouldn't miss it. It's one of the year's very best, and I'll get to it as it deserves next week. Promise.

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In Search of Beethoven (Four Stars)
U. K.; Phil Grabsky, 2009

This great movie about the life and music of genius composer Ludwig van Beethoven, returns now to the Gene Siskel Film Center for a week run -- along with a concurrent run of Grabsky's equally good documentary on one of Beethoven's few peers, In Search of Mozart (Four Stars). If you love the music of Beethoven and Mozart, and I do, you have to see these movies. Expertly, they weave the melancholy, tragic life stories of these two great composers, together historical/critical discussions by writers and performers, and powerful excerpts of their great works played by many first rate musicians and conductors, of the likes of Emmanuel Ax and Claudio Abbado. (In Beethoven's case, from works as tiny or delicate as Fur Elise and The Moonlight Sonata to The Fifth or Emperor Concerto and the 9the or Choral Symphony.)

Their music does heal. Recently, when I stayed long hours in my sick mother's hospital room, I kept playing her music from E.M.I. anthologies of Beethoven, Mozart and Bach -- and I know it meant a lot to her, and even to some of the nurses and doctors on the same floor. The dark, tragic life stories of deaf Ludwig and child prodigy Wolfgang would have struck a chord too. These films, eventually on DVD, will be beautiful and essential additions to any music or film lover's library. And they work wonderfully in a theatre as well. (Gene Siskel Center, Chicago.)


- Michael Wilmington
October 15, 2009

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