Posts tagged as Spike Jonze
Spike Jonze And The Pharcyde on the Making of 1995's "Drop"
This is very cool! A short documentary clip (put up on Youtube by someone named Unahmean) about the making of "Drop," the famous 1995 video Spike Jonze directed for the Los Angeles rap group The Pharcyde. He filmed the guys walking and rapping backwards—they hired a linguist to help them memorize all the Satanic-sounding gibberish—and then reversed the tape for the final product. READ MORE
Arcade Fire, "The Suburbs"
"Where the Wild Things Are": Where Is the Place Where They Put the Things?
Maurice Sendak said it first: "I thought it was never going to end." If you've ever been through family therapy, you've had the same thought. And this is what director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers have reduced Where The Wild Things Are to-a glum ninety-minute session where emotions are projected onto big fuzzy creatures who look like nested Russian dolls bleached of color, blown up and covered in hairy mildew. The creatures serve therapy, not dreams or fantasy. They embody the vexations of a boy named Max, but none of his desires or imagined ecstasies. And if you've read Where The Wild Things Are, you probably think it depicts the work of a fertile young mind trying to escape grownups and their fat, dopey buzz-killing. Jonze and Eggers, in an audacious sidestep, decided to side with the buzzkillers and render Wild Things as a wintry march of afflictions and psychological donkey work done at the expense of children. If this movie represented the reality of juvenile imagination, I would get my kids hooked on drugs as soon as possible, just to spare them the agony of Having Their Own Thoughts, because that seems like a seriously raw deal. READ MORE
Where are the Wild Things At? Magical Story About Magical Movie-Making Totally Picks Narrative
Well here is the big Where the Wild Things Are Spike Jonze profile, for this Sunday's New York Times magazine. The piece is made up of the idea of the struggle between a brilliant, unusual director and a stultifying studio system. Gosh, it is hard to make a good movie in the studio system! And gosh, directors are difficult little children. This is probably a thing that is always true! And here, not at all appearing in the article, are the names of the producers of the film (except Carls and Sendak, who, you know, were shopping a movie version together for ages), which sort of leaves the article as being a giant heap of nothing, to be rude. But that there is an entire depiction of a back-and-forth between Spike Jonze and the studio, without the producers as participants, is absurd. I'm sure none of the producers would go on the record, because what does it gain them? But to have no view of the roles of extremely powerful people (um, Tom Hanks?) in this process is ridiculous. There are some coded suggestions lurking in the piece however! Let's annotate. READ MORE
You Love Dave Eggers Sooooo Much
Ooh, a good old-fashioned comments brouhaha is taking place regarding Maurice Sendak, Dave Eggers and the Where the Wild Things Are remake. Our concerns were pretty much about the editorial pimping policies of the New Yorker? But you can have at it, Spike Jonze fanboys! Oh also you can purchase the forthcoming adult action toy here, while you're debating art and commerce. Heh. xoxo, The Snarky Bloggers Who Don't "Make" Anything.
