Precious. Intimate. Immediate. Privileged. These are the ways we can describe the various moments that occur in Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. These terms, which any frosh film student should recognize, are generally associated with documentary cinema. They have become applicable here, however, because Mr. Jonze rightly decided to let the pomp and circumstance that comes with any major studio children’s film fall away, focusing this film on the rambunctious perspective of a child in flux.
Hyperactive and creative Max is a boy with seemingly no friends but his mother. Always looking for an adventure to go on, he is stuck in a life of suburban boredom and Oedipal rage (aren’t we all?). There are a bevy of Freudian signifiers which lead to Max’s escape from his home on a journey to the ends of the earth. There he meets the folks we lovingly call “the wild things” (Buber, anyone?) who take him in as their king. At home with the beasts, our young ruffian slowly finds that even life in his own private utopia can get complicated. Read on…
The candler blog is not just a movie review website, though we do plenty of that from time to time. Officially, when people ask me what kind of a website this is, I say “the candler blog is a film theory and criticism website”, which cinema civilians tend to get a bit confused by. “Theory?” they ask. What do we mean by that? Myself and Sunrise Tippeconnie have recorded a Candlercast to help explain that idea. Just like an egg candler holds an egg up to light to determine its health, we hold films and pop culture up to our own form of candle. In picking apart the minutiae of films and filmmaking, we hope to achieve a greater understanding of this art form.
I had never heard of Serge Bromberg before I went to the New York Film Festival’s screening of his. I thought I was going to see a restoration of a long lost film when I sat down to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno at this year’s New York Film Festival. However, once Serge Bromberg, the filmmaker behind this curious concoction, took the stage to begin introduce the film, I learned that it was something else entirely. Part documentary and part re-enactment, the film is an attempt to understand Clouzot’s most ambitious failure, a film that would have been called Inferno. and cinematic excavator who spent countless hours spelunking the depths of notes, dailies and interviews with every living person connected to the woebegone film, there simply wasn’t enough to resurrect Clouzot’s most ambitious failure. Luckily, he recognized that the story of Inferno could still be told even without all the elements of the original. 
Middle Eastern politics are as tenuous as ever. While filmmakers, artists, politicos and celebrities became entrenched in a controversy over the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to feature films from Tel Aviv this year, a very interesting thing happened halfway around the world. As voices pointed towards our neighbors to the north expressed beliefs for or against Israeli cinema, the jury at the Venice Film Festival gave their top honor, the Golden Lion, to Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon, a film which chronicles the 1982 Lebanon War from the vantage point of a tank gunner. We can learn a lot from not only a film like this, but the story that surrounds it given the timing of its release.
You may have heard of The Yes Men, two unassuming fellows who infiltrate business conferences and present outrageous concepts to captains of industry. Their hope is that people will see that Big Business has simply spun out of control, and hopefully bring enough attention to those who can effectively make a change: the people. Andy Bichlbaum is half of this rag-tag crew whose new film, The Yes Men Fix the World, chronicles some of their most daring exploits (they call them “actions”). While Andy may seem like a merry prankster, he and partner Mike Bonnano take themselves very seriously, as evidenced in this interview. They want you to laugh, but they also want you to take action. We chatted about his film, his beliefs, and “The Wave” (no, not that 
Oscars in tow, Joel and Ethan Coen don’t seem to know the meaning of a slow period. Their latest project, A Serious Man, just like Burn After Reading before it, is a small film with big ambitions. It is a family drama; it is a memoir of the golden age of American suburban rabbinic Judaism; it is a study of the intellect’s struggle with the belief (or disbelief) in a higher power. Acerbically funny and virtuously moody, this film is yet another feather in the cap of the brothers Coen.