WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE poster

Add comment March 18th, 2009

Here’s the poster for director Spike Jonze’s big-screen version of the classic Maurice Sendak book, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE…

The movie doesn’t arrive until fall, but according to Cinematical, the trailer for the movie will be attached to MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, which hits theaters next Friday, March 27. The story quotes a writer from the movie site CHUD who describes the trailer thusly:

Try as I might, I can’t verbalize how I felt about the trailer beyond the most grandiose superlatives: ‘beautiful’ and ‘gorgeous’ and ‘breathtaking’ … The environments in particular (there’s a sequence of cutting between 4 shots of Max running through different environments that is absolutely magical) are a work of incredible vision, especially in light of the production methods Spike opted for. It does feel like a ‘kids movie’ (not pejorative): the trailer repeatedly made me about eight years old, over and over again. Unless I’m an idiot, and you’ll see yourself in a week or two, the finalized monsters are some kind of incredible technical achievement.

There have been some rough times during the production of WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, but it sounds like the end result might be worth all the trouble. We’ll find out this fall.

‘Is this a movie about a duck?’

Add comment March 18th, 2009

This terrible image only hints at how bad HOWARD THE DUCK really is.

Over at the Onion AV Club, there’s a review of the brand-new HOWARD THE DUCK DVD. I’m linking to it for two reasons.

1. I shant be reviewing it myself. I’m sure it’s worthy of critique, but I’ve got other fish to fry, and life is just too short.

2. Their review sums the movie up thusly: “It’s where entertainment goes to die.” I don’t think I can improve on that.

The quote in this headline, by the way, comes from something a friend of mine said when a group of us went to see the movie way back in 1986. He had never heard of the (quite good) comic book it was based on, and was in disbelief that we were seeing a film about a water fowl. And, keep in mind, this is before we saw how bad the movie actually was.

And yes, that means I paid money to see HOWARD THE DUCK in the theater. What’s even more embarrassing is that I’m pretty sure it was opening night. Oh, the shame.