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#10. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

The reaction to this was very mixed. Even a favorite political cartoonist of mine is joining in on the act of blasting a movie expanding a children's book with only a few lines into a feature length movie that's more often than not aimed directly at grown-ups. But you can't lump this into something like the movie adaptation of The Grinch, which really did pad out a perfectly fine Christmas story into an ugly tedious movie. Rather, Where the Wild Things Are captured the complexities that come with adults looking back on their innocent past. Spike Jonze, is his previous two movies, captured some odd disturbing emotions that are challenging to express conventionally. This time he taps into the nostalgia some might feel when they're packing their old childhood things away and see that fading dog-eared copy of a children's book they gobbled up with all their senses when their minds were wide open. The disturbing, mature elements that creep into the movie are just those bits of reality creeping into unfettered imagination, the types of elements that begin to necessarily take over when the world gets more complicated. But it's a low but respectable number 10 because even I couldn't completely love a movie so single-minded as this one, mostly because Being John Malkovich and Adaptation were so far-out that I expected something more after 7 years of waiting for Jonze's next movie. I think this is a movie of incredible quality if thought of within the confines of the realm of children's literature, and in the restricted but in cases boundless world of a 10-year old's mind.