"No, YOUR Oscah's queah."

Matt Damon was set to make his directorial debut with Gold Mist (which I assume is a love story between a queef and a golden shower), co-written by Damon from a first draft by author Dave Eggers (who also wrote Where the Wild Things Are and Away We Go). Only now, Deadline reports that Damon couldn’t commit the time for prep and pre-production, and has handed directing duties to Gus Van Sant, who directed Damon and Affleck’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting.

The catalyst for the project was John Krasinski, who is making the transition to features as he wraps the final season of the NBC sitcom The Office. Krasinski had an idea for a film that had resonance in the current climate of economic hardship caused by corporate greed. Krasinski paid Eggers to write the first draft, then showed it to Damon and Producer Chris Moore while the latter were making The Adjustment Bureau, which starred Damon and Krasinski’s wife, Emily Blunt.

Gold Mist, is a Capraesque tale in which Damon and Krasinski play rival corporate executives. Damon plays a sales executive who arrives in a small town only to have his whole life called into question. [Deadline]

This is probably unfair, but when I imagine the three of them writing this together, I picture Matt Damon and Dave Eggers bouncing ideas off each other while John Krasinski just sits there making the occasional smug douche face.

(Hot chicks dykin’ out?  Hell yeah, now it’s a wild rumpus.)

Where the Wild Things Are is one of the weirder mainstream movies I’ve ever seen.  The pacing is… off. It drags in spots. You’re not sure where it’s going, it feels like an imprecise parable, and it’s full of non-sequitirs.  But in a way, it’s a perfect adaptation of the book — a book which is only ten sentences long and, if you read it as adult, isn’t even that well written.  But there’s something strange and fantastic about it that it’s stuck with so many of us as a pleasant feeling well into adulthood, like an awesome dream you can’t fully articulate and doesn’t make sense after you wake up.  Like the memory of reading the book for the first time, much of WTWTA is like being trapped in the mind of a 10-year-old, but it’s more like the 10-year-old you remember being, rather than the idiot 10-year-old Michael Bay makes movies for.

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Warner Bros just released a second batch of character banners (first batch here) for the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are.  Prepare for another month of torture, because that’s how long it’s going to be until this comes out.  This batch includes Alexander (voiced by Paul Dano), Douglas (Chris Cooper), Ira (Forest Whitaker), and Bull (Michael Berry Jr.).

The chicken guy is easily my favorite.  It’s funny because chickens don’t have ears, you see.  Also, I suspect “Ira” was originally supposed to be called “The Bear Jew” until Tarantino and Eli Roth stole it.  And is it just me, or does Alexander kind of look like Willem Dafoe?  They should’ve just made one of the Wild Things Willem Dafoe.  That would be a way better book.  “My mom was being mean and sent me to bed with no dinner, but I showed her, I snuck out the window and partied with Willem Dafoe.” The moral of the story would be that parents just don’t understand. But Willem Dafoe does.

(trailer below, to refresh your memory)

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The New York Times just published a batch of new images from Where the Wild Things Are, but since we’ve been talking about this movie since this site started and there’s still a month to go before it comes out, I’m gonna make you head over there for the in-depth character descriptions.  For now we’ll just call this guy Jar-Jarceratops, this one will be Labia Goat, and this thing is the Little Birdhouse in Your Soul.

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Via MySpace, here are the new character posters for Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers’ Where the Wild Things Are, opening October 16th. Pretty cool, but I miss some of the old characters from when Michael Bay was directing.  Like Badonkadonk, who was illiterate and had gold teeth and a boombox.  Or KY, the Catholic teen who loves to pole dance.  “Kids love this stuff,” he’d say, exploding a car.