The New York Time Magazine has a feature article on Spike Jonze’s film.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazi…

The reporter tells us that he saw, scrawled on a legal pad in Jonze’s office, the following note: “There is no difference between childhood and adulthood.” Not so sure about that one, and Martin Bashir’s interview of Michael Jackson made it fairly clear that adults should not deny the differences but rather learn to value what the child has that we are missing (imagination, creativity, energy, joy, and so on).    Still, this film will be worth seeing, although the reference to its “narrative shortcomings” seems a recurrent theme. My bet: the direct visceral hits will come from visual effects rather than from the power of the story–just the opposite of what gets us in Sendak’s book.

An implicit question precedes his artistic choices: Wouldn’t it be cool if . . . ? Wouldn’t it be cool if we made Christopher Walken fly? Wouldn’t it be awesome if we rigged a staircase with blast caps?That sensibility pervades “Where the Wild Things Are” too, in the monsters’ propensity for jumping 20 feet in the air and crashing into trees, in the astounding skyscraper fortress they build out of logs and branches. And for some potential viewers, the sheer coolness of those moments will likely be enough to transcend what others might see as the movie’s narrative shortcomings.