Ah, it's a rough life for the Tattooed Man, writing this whilst still cowering under the covers in a darkened hotel room to hide from an impending hangover after a night out drinking with Hong Kong legends John Woo, Johnnie To, Tsui Hark and Donnie Yen.
Okay, okay ... it may be a stretch to say that I was drinking
with them, per se, but we
were all in the same room and I'm reasonably confident that To, at least, has got to be feeling worse than I am this morning.
But enough with the gloating about my occasionally jet-setting lifestyle, I get paid the big bucks to write about movies here and the the theme this week is getting fuzzy. True, there is no fur to be found in horror flick
The Haunting In Connecticut but it seems to be the odd man out in that regard this week.
Monsters Versus Aliens, for example, features a giant furry bug. And then, of course, there is local production
Hank And Mike, with its pair of laid-off Easter Bunnies finally getting a local release. But the biggest, furriest news of all? The powers that be have finally seen fit to
release a trailer for Spike Jonze' adaptation of
Where The Wild Things Are.
Wild Things has become kind of a Holy Grail for film fans, a brilliant choice of director for what seemed like an un-adaptable children's story with production nearly derailed when the studio behind it decided that Jonze' vision for the film was too dark and too weird by far and made him go back and re-do virtually all of it after he turned his first cut in.
Now, if I were Jonze and the suits-that-be told me my movie was too dark that deep in to production my basic response would have been something along the line of "Screw you, you a-holes, it's about a kid who runs away from home and joins a tribe of monsters after being sent to bed without supper, so what did you expect? And would it have been too much to ask for you to have been checking the dailies to realize you didn't like where I was going with this sometime before I was almost done?" And then I would have quit.
But Jonze is a more patient man than I, apparently, or more dedicated to this film, or more severely contractually bound, and for whatever the reason he simply gritted his teeth and accepted the studio sodomy and went back to work. And ow there's apparently a version that everyone is happy with and, good golly, it looks glorious. So thanks, Spike. Thanks for helping warp my child's mind just a little more. We'll be there opening day.