Kevin's Digital Week 16: Wild Things Galore

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 11 March 2010 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-Ray of the Week

Where the Wild Things Are
(Warners)
Spike Jonze long wanted to bring Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are to life, and he does—to an extent. Some sequences in Jonze’s film are as magically childlike in their simplicity as anything in Sendak’s illustrated classic. Then there’s the rest of the movie, which overstays its welcome—what Sendak sketched brilliantly as a short-lived but lasting fantasy is bludgeoned to death by Jonze early on, and soon falls apart from the repeated (and cloying) showdowns between the boy Max and the monsters he befriends. Those creatures are further undermined by the cutesy voices of various Hollywood celebrities, which are too gimmicky by half—and help arrest the story’s dramatic momentum, along with our sympathy for poor Max, played by the charming Max Records.

Visually, Where the Wild Things Are is often dazzling: on Blu-ray, the stunning contrast between the bright and the pitch-black sequences are demonstration quality. Too bad the score is an ungainly hybrid of kids’ tunes and alternative rock—Oliver Knussen’s score from his one-act opera would have worked, but I doubt that Jonze knows it exists. The extras comprise interviews with Sendak, Jonze, cast and crew.

DVD of the Week

Bitch Slap
(Fox)
With a title like that, you know what you’re getting: and you’d be mostly right. Rick Jacobson’s paean to trashy movies of yore—especially those starring B-movie queen Claudia Jennings like The Great Texas Dynamite Chase—isn’t very clever (although Jacobson thinks it is), but it does have what those movies had in spades: gorgeous women pounding the hell out of men…and each other.

Jacobson certainly has an eye for the ladies: Julia Voth, Erin Cummings and especially America Olivo are a pleasure to watch as they battle the bad guys (with the occasional cat fight thrown in for good measure) while wearing very little for no discernible reason. Bitch Slap could have been an irresistibly trashy entertainment if Jacobson wasn’t such a dull director. His fancy attempts to make this overlong movie “substantial”—slow-motion, jumbled chronology, ridiculous plot twists—fail miserably. Happily, though, with the three gals having a great time, Bitch Slap is a bloody hoot. The DVD’s lone extra is a thorough, 90-minute making-of documentary that includes on-set interviews with the filmmakers and the game cast.

• < Prev
• Next >