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Oct. 19th, 2009 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickMovie review: Where the Wild Things Are. Also, Product Review: Thief Gold on 64-bit Ubuntu.
Where the Wild Things Are is a pretty decent movie if your intent is to gently and thoughtfully illustrate the idea that Max's journey to the Island Where the Wild Things Are is primarily a journey of self-discovery and stuff wherein he thinks his own thoughts to sort them out to himself. It's a fantastic movie to teach the notion of extended metaphor to, like, twelve year old kids. Or ten. Whenever they teach Extended Metaphors these days, if, in fact, they teach them at all and have not removed them from the curriculum to make way forduckingsSelf Esteem. That age, there. It is not particularly a great movie to take your five year old to see, even if he *has* got the book at home. The five year old will be bored, like many of the ones that were in the theater with us during the 3:30 matinee on Saturday.
In the movie, there is Max. Max has a dog, a mom, an older sister, older sister's boy friends, mom's boyfriend, and an absentee father. (All of this is sketched for us, very deft, very minimal-line, like that line drawing of Alfred Hitchcock from the opening to Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In clean, simple lines, they are limned. You get all you need to know of these players, and all you need to know is enough to match them up with their Wild Thing counterparts. Interestingly, the pretend Wild Things are more human and more fully-realized than the human things in this movie. Except Max. Max gets to be all kinds of real.
Okay, so Max is chasing the dog down the stairs in his barbaloot suit, which is probably the best unmarketed item On The Planet now that they actually make Tauntaun sleeping bags. I know there have to be some kiddies (and some not-so-kiddies) who would like a Max suit of footie pajamas with whiskers and Batman ears and a tail. Why, the furry community alone... but I digress. Max has a snow fort. It gets mashed by the boy friends, not so much out of malice as out of Max being a little kid and trying to play with big kids (teenagers) like the boy friends. (Max's sister is a lot older than he is. Her boy friends can drive.) They're a lot bigger. A certain amount of crushing is inevitable. Later, Max stands on the table: "Woman, Feed Me!" but there's only frozen corn and not real corn. Not a good day for Max. He's sharing days with Alexander, here. And things come to a boil when Max bites his mother on the shoulder. He runs out the house and down the street and on and on until he gets to the shore where there is conveniently an unattended single-user sailboat (not a Laser, or Max would have been delayed several times on the way to the aforementioned island to right the boat) which Max gets into and sails away on. Did anyone else feel reminded of the X-Files episode with Scully in the boat (See item 5 in this list) or is this just me-and-boats? Also, the thing with the boat-to-somewhere-else-inside-your-head was also done in The Pirate Movie... but her boat was a Laser, M-rig. ANYWAY.
Where the Wild Things Are is populated by the following Wild Things.
1. Carol (a dude Carol. Probably Carroll or something. I'm pulling spellings off Wikipedia), basically, this is Max's ID
2. Alexander (the goat one), Max's rational and easily-ignored brain, aka the SUPEREGO
3. Douglas (the parrot), best buds with the ID, tries to make the ID happy. Max's EGO
4. KW, Max's sister
5. Judith, Max's mom
6. Ira, Max's mom's boyfriend
7. The Bull, Max's Absent Father (He isn't with the group of Wild Things, but off by himself. He also doesn't talk a whole lot but when he does talk, he wants to know if the report about him back home will be a good one.)
8. The Dog, Max's dog
9. two owls. These represent Max's sister's boy friends.
I wasn't going to go all Freud on this but these are not just cigars. This is a very carefully-done extended metaphor and, yo, the three unaccounted-for Wild Things are all Max. Go me! Tie it up neatly with a bow!
So on the island, Max becomes King. There is a Wild Rumpus Me, personally, I'd be worried a lot more about crushing injuries than Max is. The Wild Things are a lot bigger than he is and yet he just goes along not even worrying about being crushed. Ah, innocence!
Max is an imperfect king. He doesn't have the powers he claimed to have. Dissention is not gone from the Wild Things since the arrival of Max, not like he said it would be. And Carroll, he rages at this. Carroll... Max can see his ID-like behavior when it happens outside himself. In case we don't *get* the point that letting the ID (unbounded) rule the roost tears one's (social) world apart, Wild Thing Carroll busts up his miniature-train-set diorama thing of Where the Wild Things Are because it's all gone wrong now, all wrong. But Max is unswayed and makes a little heart shape for Carroll out of the twigs that are left after it's all broken up. Love endures even through tantrums. (This is good to know.) Carroll still rages, though. KW (who, we recall, is the stand-in for Max's big sister) hides Max from Carroll in her mouth. She doesn't eat him. Her caring is real even though she carries around nonsensical stoned (literally) owls (the boy friends) and spends a lot of time with them nowadays. Carroll is off raging but all the other Wild Things say goodbye (without eating Max) and then Max gets in the boat and sails home, to the real world, where there is supper and it is still hot. Also, the sun will one day go out.
So, that was the movie. Good, but not the kind of movie that the theater-going parents and their kiddies expected.
Onward and upward to Thief Gold on 64-bit Ubuntu. Thief (the Dark Project) was a 1998 video game that I admired at the time -- it sounded really cool -- but I didn't have the hardware to run the damn thing. Thief Gold was released as an update or re-release or whatever in 1999. It required a smokin' hot 200 Mhz pentium processor and 32 Mb of RAM and DirectX 6 and a 4Mb video card and a 4x CD drive and stuff. Now I have a smokin' hot (compared to 1998-era hardware) 2.2 Ghz processor and 3 Gigs of RAM. Even my low-end nvidia card (8400M GS) looks good when compared to 1998-era video cards. So, I ought to be able to play the game, right?
Except...
I am not running Win98. I am not running Win-anything. There's an emulator, sho'nuff, and it pretty much works. Tweak a few options, be careful not to run the mouse out of the emulator screen, et voila! My laptop can pretend to be a ten-year-old computer with a different operating system, sufficient to run Thief Gold (with cutscenes and many, many death sequences) fairly competently. I love the future.
Where the Wild Things Are is a pretty decent movie if your intent is to gently and thoughtfully illustrate the idea that Max's journey to the Island Where the Wild Things Are is primarily a journey of self-discovery and stuff wherein he thinks his own thoughts to sort them out to himself. It's a fantastic movie to teach the notion of extended metaphor to, like, twelve year old kids. Or ten. Whenever they teach Extended Metaphors these days, if, in fact, they teach them at all and have not removed them from the curriculum to make way for
In the movie, there is Max. Max has a dog, a mom, an older sister, older sister's boy friends, mom's boyfriend, and an absentee father. (All of this is sketched for us, very deft, very minimal-line, like that line drawing of Alfred Hitchcock from the opening to Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In clean, simple lines, they are limned. You get all you need to know of these players, and all you need to know is enough to match them up with their Wild Thing counterparts. Interestingly, the pretend Wild Things are more human and more fully-realized than the human things in this movie. Except Max. Max gets to be all kinds of real.
Okay, so Max is chasing the dog down the stairs in his barbaloot suit, which is probably the best unmarketed item On The Planet now that they actually make Tauntaun sleeping bags. I know there have to be some kiddies (and some not-so-kiddies) who would like a Max suit of footie pajamas with whiskers and Batman ears and a tail. Why, the furry community alone... but I digress. Max has a snow fort. It gets mashed by the boy friends, not so much out of malice as out of Max being a little kid and trying to play with big kids (teenagers) like the boy friends. (Max's sister is a lot older than he is. Her boy friends can drive.) They're a lot bigger. A certain amount of crushing is inevitable. Later, Max stands on the table: "Woman, Feed Me!" but there's only frozen corn and not real corn. Not a good day for Max. He's sharing days with Alexander, here. And things come to a boil when Max bites his mother on the shoulder. He runs out the house and down the street and on and on until he gets to the shore where there is conveniently an unattended single-user sailboat (not a Laser, or Max would have been delayed several times on the way to the aforementioned island to right the boat) which Max gets into and sails away on. Did anyone else feel reminded of the X-Files episode with Scully in the boat (See item 5 in this list) or is this just me-and-boats? Also, the thing with the boat-to-somewhere-else-inside-your-head was also done in The Pirate Movie... but her boat was a Laser, M-rig. ANYWAY.
Where the Wild Things Are is populated by the following Wild Things.
1. Carol (a dude Carol. Probably Carroll or something. I'm pulling spellings off Wikipedia), basically, this is Max's ID
2. Alexander (the goat one), Max's rational and easily-ignored brain, aka the SUPEREGO
3. Douglas (the parrot), best buds with the ID, tries to make the ID happy. Max's EGO
4. KW, Max's sister
5. Judith, Max's mom
6. Ira, Max's mom's boyfriend
7. The Bull, Max's Absent Father (He isn't with the group of Wild Things, but off by himself. He also doesn't talk a whole lot but when he does talk, he wants to know if the report about him back home will be a good one.)
8. The Dog, Max's dog
9. two owls. These represent Max's sister's boy friends.
I wasn't going to go all Freud on this but these are not just cigars. This is a very carefully-done extended metaphor and, yo, the three unaccounted-for Wild Things are all Max. Go me! Tie it up neatly with a bow!
So on the island, Max becomes King. There is a Wild Rumpus Me, personally, I'd be worried a lot more about crushing injuries than Max is. The Wild Things are a lot bigger than he is and yet he just goes along not even worrying about being crushed. Ah, innocence!
Max is an imperfect king. He doesn't have the powers he claimed to have. Dissention is not gone from the Wild Things since the arrival of Max, not like he said it would be. And Carroll, he rages at this. Carroll... Max can see his ID-like behavior when it happens outside himself. In case we don't *get* the point that letting the ID (unbounded) rule the roost tears one's (social) world apart, Wild Thing Carroll busts up his miniature-train-set diorama thing of Where the Wild Things Are because it's all gone wrong now, all wrong. But Max is unswayed and makes a little heart shape for Carroll out of the twigs that are left after it's all broken up. Love endures even through tantrums. (This is good to know.) Carroll still rages, though. KW (who, we recall, is the stand-in for Max's big sister) hides Max from Carroll in her mouth. She doesn't eat him. Her caring is real even though she carries around nonsensical stoned (literally) owls (the boy friends) and spends a lot of time with them nowadays. Carroll is off raging but all the other Wild Things say goodbye (without eating Max) and then Max gets in the boat and sails home, to the real world, where there is supper and it is still hot. Also, the sun will one day go out.
So, that was the movie. Good, but not the kind of movie that the theater-going parents and their kiddies expected.
Onward and upward to Thief Gold on 64-bit Ubuntu. Thief (the Dark Project) was a 1998 video game that I admired at the time -- it sounded really cool -- but I didn't have the hardware to run the damn thing. Thief Gold was released as an update or re-release or whatever in 1999. It required a smokin' hot 200 Mhz pentium processor and 32 Mb of RAM and DirectX 6 and a 4Mb video card and a 4x CD drive and stuff. Now I have a smokin' hot (compared to 1998-era hardware) 2.2 Ghz processor and 3 Gigs of RAM. Even my low-end nvidia card (8400M GS) looks good when compared to 1998-era video cards. So, I ought to be able to play the game, right?
Except...
I am not running Win98. I am not running Win-anything. There's an emulator, sho'nuff, and it pretty much works. Tweak a few options, be careful not to run the mouse out of the emulator screen, et voila! My laptop can pretend to be a ten-year-old computer with a different operating system, sufficient to run Thief Gold (with cutscenes and many, many death sequences) fairly competently. I love the future.
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Date: 2009-10-19 04:59 pm (UTC)That caused me a lot of grief trying to run System Shock on (the Windows partition of) my iMac. The machine was displaying a 320x240 screen, but still felt it was OK for the mouse pointer to wander out in space on my 1900x1200-sized desktop. Naturally, as soon as the pointer left the screen the game locked up hard.
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Date: 2009-10-19 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 02:57 pm (UTC)The original wild things were, by the way, named after members of Sendak's family - aunts and uncles and things.