Closing Out Wild Things

Most of the critics have spoken and the two big holdouts are Ebert, and the LA Times’ Kenneth Turan who wrote, “When faced as a director with the rudderless screenplay he co-wrote with Eggers, he’s been powerless to energize it in any involving way. Sometimes you are better off with 10 sentences than tens of millions of dollars, and this is one of those times.”

The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis and the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday both give the film raves.

Hopefully you all got the chance to see the HBO short on Maurice Sendak by Spike Jonze. It presented an intricate portrait of the children’s author and exposed a deep-thinking, death-obsessed, dog-loving gay man. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to his musings on life. He drifts between the profound and the profane and seems to feel like 80 is just too old. My favorite part was probably the bit about the Lindbergh baby – how he saw a photo of the dead baby and then everyone thought he had gone mad because such a photo could not exist. He was vindicated, of course. What a brilliant human being, what an odd duck, what a wild thing.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOWSzb0wmJs[/youtube]