Where the Wild Things are

In my favorite picture book Where the Wild Things are by Maurice Sendak, Max is a bad little boy who is sent to bed without any supper. He then uses his vivid imagination to sail off over days and weeks to a monstrous world where he is made king.
In the modern day movie version - Max is not only a bad boy, he is an angry boy. A very angry boy. The movie starts out with Max violently “playing” with the dog. I didn’t notice one of those “No animals were harmed during the making of this movie” So I am pretty sure the dog, (and his stunt double) are dead.
Moving right along… Max’s older sister (Was she in the book?) ignores Max when he is crushed in his snow igloo by her friends, and drives off with a car full of boys. This prompts Max to go up to her room and violently trash it. And although his mother finds the wet mess (he was still snowy) she doesn’t send him to bed without any supper - she helps him clean it up. Later that evening, Max finds his mom on the couch sucking face with her boyfriend. (Whether Daddy is dead, or just run off with his crack-ho secretary I do not know.) Max defies his mother, refusing to set the table for dinner. And because that wasn’t nasty enough (for the director) Max climbs on top of the kitchen table in his wolf suit and proceeds to bite the shit out of her. (No, I am not making this up.) Before she has a chance to send him to bed without any dinner, Max takes off into the dead of night and ends up in the woods during a rain storm.
At this point in the movie, I wondered where the great movie trailer was I saw that made we want to see it in the first place. Where are the magical creatures that Max skips, jumps and plays with. We’ll get there. Max spies a boat… ahhh, here comes the sails off over days and weeks part. But wait - through a monsoon rain storm with Max clinging to the mast for his dear life in his drenched little wolf suit.
I was hoping it would be like in the Wizard of Oz. First Dorothy has to get knocked out in black and white, but ends up in the Techno Color world of Oz, and you forget the fact that the movie is making you suicidal. So when Max’s boat lands ashore the Isle of the Wild Things I still had hope.
Max has to climb a slippery wet cliff in the dark to get to the top where he has seen firelight. (Not at all like the yellow brick road.) When he gets there he watches from behind a tree while one of “the wild things” trashes his friends nests. I mean really trashes. He even picks up one of the other wild things and uses him like midget bowling to bash a hole in a nest. You could see Max relating to him, yes sir, you could. And sure enough Max comes out of hiding to help him. A few lies later, max has been made king. I am still waiting for the skipping and frolicking to begin. This will be the turning point in the movie. The costumes are amazing. They do Maurice’s illustrations justice. Now they all begin to play, and jump. Ummm… Tackle that is. The Wild Things are just ramming and jumping and tackling each other - and NOT in a playful way. (Almost like the “Pausenhof” at most German grammar schools.) Max ends up at the bottom of the pile. The director of the movie was going for a Juvenile boys home/ Street gang parody. The Wild Things have obviously all run away from home due to their alcohol/drug/sexually abusive families. Okay, little Max obviously has ADAH, and is a compulsive liar. His violent outbursts are enough to put him in a military school, but I think he was just a tad bit out of his league with the verbally and physically abusive wild things. Was it me? Was I having a bad day? Did the dirt clod war bring back suppressed memories from childhood? Maybe.
I’d like to tell you the movie ends with Max sailing home to find his supper waiting - and it is still warm. But I don’t know. That is to say I didn’t get that far. It was risk watching the movie in it’s entirety and swallowing a bottle of pills - or change the channel.
I assume Max got home to his dysfunctional family, snuck in the back door, ate some cold pizza and went to bed.