USA Today has a batch of new pictures from Where the Wild Things Are, the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers adaptation that will finally hit theaters October 19th, with the first trailer attached to Monsters vs. Aliens this Friday.  Jonze said of his star, Max Records (who plays a kid also named Max) “I can’t imagine anyone else playing Max. Max is the soul of the movie. He’s a very special sort of kid. Deep and thoughtful. Sweet and sincere.”

Records, who previously appeared in videos for Cake and Death Cab for Cutie, is becoming something of a commodity.  My imaginary sources even tell me Brett Ratner wants him for his next project, calling Records “sexy as hell.”

Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers’ Where the Wild Things Are has a poster now, which gives me hope that we might actually be able to see it sometime this century (the release is set for October).  In related news, I have some pajamas just like that.  They’re my “special occasion” pajamas.

[via SpikeJonzeFan]

I like most of Sam Mendes’ movies, though I avoided Revolutionary Road because it looks like a more boring version of American Beauty.  With fedoras.  But as luck would have it, he already has another project out. I hadn’t heard a thing about it until the trailer hit today. Away We Go stars John Krasinski (Jim from The Office) and Maya Rudolph (formerly of SNL) with a script by Dave Eggers and his wife, fellow writer Vendela Vida.  It sucks that hipsters like Dave Eggers, because now I have to defend it any time I say something good about him.  Hey, trust fund hippies, you know what’d be great?  You could hate everything I like!  Wouldn’t that be, like, so ironic?
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Tom Tykwer, best known for directing the good but overrated Run Lola Run and the upcoming The International, plans to direct the film adaptation of What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. Yay! I’ve actually read this one!  I love it when they adapt books that don’t have pictures in them!

The book details the life of Sudanese lost boy Valentino Achak Deng, who gave his story to Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, writer of the Where the Wild Things Are adaptation).  It’s a great book that should make for a pretty intense movie, considering damn near everyone the guy knows gets brutally murdered, and his shitty luck doesn’t stop when he leaves the Sudan.  It’s the kind of thing you read after a crappy day at work to remind yourself that your problems ain’t shit.  It should really be called Suck it up, Pussy: The Autobiography of Someone Way Tougher Than You.

[via FilmSchoolRejects]

Where the Wild Things Are is Spike Jonze’s Dave Eggers-scripted adaptation of the Maurice Sendak book, and has been bounced around a bit, release-date wise.  Earlier this year, it was officially set for October 2009 after having originally been planned for much earlier.  AICN recently sat down with Jonze, and like everything AICN does it’s super long, but here are some of the highlights:

AICN: …I think we try and make kids into saints in movies, and we kind of smooth off the rough edges, and it’s just so much more interesting to see a real kid, and to see how kids try and process the world.

JONZE: And I think that’s what freaked the studio out about the movie too. It wasn’t a studio film for kids, or it wasn’t a traditional film about kids. We didn’t have like a Movie Kid in our movie, or a Movie Performance in a Movie Kid world. We had a real kid and a real world, and I think that’s sort of where our problem was. In the end they realized the movie is what it is, and there’s no real way to… it’s sort of like they were expecting a boy and I gave birth to a girl.  [laughs]  So they just needed their time to sort that out and figure out how they were going to learn to love their new daughter.

…[making the film] just took a lot longer. And that was hard, but you know, in the end I got to make my movie. And with the version you saw, I was trying to get the money to do the pick-ups I wanted to do, and it just took a lot longer to finish it.

It’s good that he doesn’t sound bitter, and it gives me hope that the studio didn’t neuter his movie.  Still, I would’ve been more reassured if he’d said “It was like they were expecting a boy, and I gave birth to a Tyranosaur with a chainsaw cock.”  Those are easy to learn to love.  Harder to give birth to though.