The Telegraph recently took time out of their busy schedule of making up monkey attack stories to do this Where the Wild Things Are featurette on original author Maurice Sendak.  I’m posting it because it shows a few small snippets of footage from the movie, and I know this stuff is like heroin for college types.  Jesus yak-touching Christ, could they release this g’damn’d movie already?   What the hell do we have to do?  I showed Dave Eggers my personal essay, I had my GRE scores sent to Spike Jonze, and still, here we are, another month and a half before the movie comes out. I wish I’d never been born an overprivileged white intellectual.

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Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are comes out October 16th, and they just released this new, longer trailer.  The plot’s pretty simple — Max gets mad at his family and then goes to live with some big hairy beasts in the woods, who make him their king.  I think it’s a metaphor for imperialism.  Anyway, I don’t like this trailer as much as the last one because it seems to focus more on Max and his emotions and less on Max partying down with his monsters.  It’s a shame, nothing brings me down like a child’s happiness.  So annoying.

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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]

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.

Last we heard of Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers’ adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, they’d bumped the released date to October 2009 and were doing reshoots that may or may not cut the balls off the movie.  The reshoots were meant to either correct visual effects problems or make the film more kid friendly, depending on whom you ask.

Still no word on how the reshoots are going, but MTV has this new "exclusive" picture.  It shows Max getting crowned by his monster.  Something about that sounds really dirty.  Maybe that’s why they needed re-shoots.  Rated-R for adult language and a graphic depiction of a kid getting crowned by his monster. 

*sigh*  Please, just release the goddamned movie already.  The thought that I have more than a year to try to make jokes about this movie and I’m already burned out is pretty depressing.