The XX Factor: What women really think.

"Where The Wild Things Are" Is Depressing

Hanna, I think you’re exactly right that Where The Wild Things Are is alternately too boring and too scary for kids. And as counterintuitive as it might sound to say about a beautifully shot movie featuring overly emotional, jeering, violent, hybrid beasts who bicker, build forts, and knock holes in trees, I think it just might be a failure of imagination as well.

If Wild Things existed in a cultural universe that was not saturated with twee, quirk, and thirtysomething ennui—if, in other words, it existed in a universe where the McSweeney’s aesthetic was fringe—this movie might be fresh. Even as it is, the decision to make the wild things neurotic, angsty, misbehaving, and nitpicky initially plays like a surprising choice. When we first come upon the monsters, arguing in the forest, it’s jarring that they sound like unhappy versions of the teenagers from Dazed & Confused. Whatever you imagined the wild things to be like when reading the original, this wasn’t it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).