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	<title>Screen Machine &#187; Childhood is a scary place: &#8220;Where the Wild Things Are&#8221;</title>
	<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv</link>
	<description>Film criticism and cultural commentary based out of Melbourne, Australia.</description>
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		<title>Childhood is a scary place: &#8220;Where the Wild Things Are&#8221;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Within the first five minutes of Where the Wild Things Are the protagonist Max is caught in a freeze frame, a moment of reckless, furious playfulness suspended in time. Perhaps a reference to the shot that closes François Truffaut&#8217;s The 400 Blows, it&#8217;s a telling detail that indicates what a remarkable film Wild Things is, audacious even for a mainstream American film with a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Certainly I can&#8217;t think of a Hollywood film so dedicated to presenting childhood not as a privileged state of innocence but as a complex experience of confusing emotions.

The original book on which Wild Things was based (by Maurice Sendak) is the story of a mischievous boy disciplined by his mother who, reduced to Max&#8217;s level of anger, sends him to his room. Within his room, Max&#8217;s fury and wild imagination transports him to a dark, exotic forest populated by monsters over whom Max rules as king. The book spans a mere ten sentences which seems like it would be a daunting task to adapt the book to a film. What Spike Jonze and his co-writer Dave Eggers have done is not a simple faithful recreation of the text with some backstory filled in: In a lot of respects, the film is quite different from the book. Rather, Jonze and Eggers have retained the iconography of Sendak&#8217;s illustrations and Sendak&#8217;s storytelling ethos of taking seriously the fears and joys of kids and in all other respects left themselves free&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/12/15/childhood-is-a-scary-place/</link>
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