WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
The Story: Based on the Maurice Sendak book, little Max leaves behind his gloomy family and travels to a land of giant forest creatures.
The Pitch: Spirited Away meets Rushmore
Who It's For: Man/boys who dream of fleeing their dismal existences where they are surrounded by people who don't pay them enough attention, and sailing off to a land where they can spend the whole day riding skateboards and throwing things with cool but sensitive dudes like Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers.
Cause for Hope: The monster suits look pretty neat.
Cause for Concern: This is not a Spike Jonze movie based on a Charlie Kaufman script; after spending years teaching writing to children, Dave Eggers appears to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and believes that grown-ups should write like six year olds rather than for them.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 3

THE STEPFATHER
The Story: A young man (Gossip Girl's Penn Badgley) returns from school to find his mother has moved in her new flame (Dylan Walsh), a man whose helpful nature may hide some terrible secrets.
The Pitch: Shadow of a Doubt meets Poison Ivy
Who It's For: People who are too young to remember the dregs of the 80s — 90s sexy thriller era.
Cause for Hope: Well, um...the Executive Producer is friends with Madonna? Does that count?
Cause for Concern: Your great-grandchildren will do the math on how much the money you spent on a night out at The Stepfather would be worth a hundred years hence, with interest, and curse your spirit forevermore.
Bonus Fact: J.S. Cardone, the screenwriter, has one of the most thrilling IMDB pages ever recorded. A secret giant of Hollywood.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 2

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN
The Story: When a man (Gerard Butler) sees his daughter's murderer get off easy thanks to The System, he takes justice into his own hands, first killing the murderer and then from behind bars, attacking The System while an ambitious young prosecutor (Jamie Foxx) fights to stop him.
The Pitch: Death Wish meets The Dark Knight meets Silence of the Lambs meets a bunch Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford movies whose names we can't remember.
Who It's For: Those who want to be jolted into forgetting their troubles.
Cause for Hope: Seems at least ambitiously pulpy; director F. Gary Gray made the cult classic Set It Off.
Cause for Concern: How many minutes of screen time will it take just to portray the set-up described above before the actual film starts.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 6

NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU
The Story: A series of short film homages to the Big Apple.
The Pitch: Manhattan meets Hotel Chevalier
Who It's For: Manhattanites who love to love themselves
Cause for Hope: Some very great film makers involved including Fatih Akim.
Cause for Concern: There is also a segment by Brett Ratner. And honestly, (and I say this as a frequent visitor from California) isn't every second of every day in Manhattan the time that New Yorkers devote to telling themselves how much they love themselves and their quaint little island. Does there really need to be a special film devoted to that? Isn't that basically, every film made by every New Yorker ever? Isn't that why the world took your filmmaking capital status away from you and gave it to California in the first place?
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 6

BLACK DYNAMITE
The Story: A satire of 70's blacksploitation fims.
The Pitch: Shaft meets Airplane
Who It's For: Comedy nerds
Cause for Hope: Hilarious trailer; very strong buzz when it debuted at Sundance.
Cause for Concern: One joke premise walks down well-trod lane.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 8

• Young women having personal drama in dangerous places seems to the theme of the CW's upcoming development slate, revealed yesterday. In the works: a drama about women at the CIA's spy school, a soap opera by Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas set in space and a show featuring original music by country star Brad Paisley about a young woman headed for Nashville stardom. [Variety]

• Hollywood perennial war — the battle between distributors and theater owners has heated up again, sparked by Paramount's attempt to sell the DVD of GI Joe and The Goods a mere 88 days after their theatrical debuts, within the 90 day window traditionally given to the multiplexes. "We don't know what Paramount is up to, but it's highly objectionable," was National Association of Theatre Owners president John Fithian's response to the plan. [THR]

• Anheuser-Busch has signed a deal to be the sole and exclusive sponsor of this week's Saturday Night Live, buying out the entire ad space. The brewery will also be hosting sponsored watch parties of the branded episode around America. [LAT]

• The Wrap reports on Warner Brothers contradictory marketing plans for their upcoming Where the Wild Things Are release, selling it simultaneously as an adult film, with a campaign of branded merch sold at Urban Outfitters and as a kids movie. Having just seen it, given the choice between where its a grown-up and kids film, we'd like to vote neither. [The Wrap]

• Former Friends star David Schwimmer will direct Clive Owen and Catherine Keener in, Trust, the very un-Friends-like tale of a couple whose lives are turned upside down when their daughter is stalked by an online predator. [THR]

So we were warned from the outset that Smith brought a certain, er, perspective to the table.

Normally mere readers are not privileged to see the workings of a celebrity interview; that is, the long minutes of kissing up before the tape goes on. And even the kissing up when the tape is rolling usually discreetly finds its way to the cutting room floor before the final version of a Q and A goes on. In the interviews of my own career, I have worked tirelessly to shield my readers from the shamelessness that goes on in your typical profile.

But seeing as Smith was interviewing his five-year buddy, it seems he wanted to paint a scene not just of interviewer and interviewee, but of two bros just you know, like, hangin'.

Below are a few of the gotchas Smith threw down at Jonze, talking about his new adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are:

• Well, I think you did a great job on the writing, but when I was watching the movie I was thinking to myself that this must have been a hard sell to a major studio for a tent-pole release. This is obviously a big film, but it's also so intimate and artistic…

• I was thinking that this was a very brave film for you to have made because you made art even though it's financed by a conglomerate and there are so many millions of dollars involved and so many pressures against it. That's incredibly brave, and I'm proud of you.

• It's going to be huge. Are you nervous about that? You're not a public guy, and you made this thing for five years and it's your little baby and everything, and now it's going to be in, like, People magazine. You're gonna be in People! Can you believe it?

• Wow.

• That's really pretty amazing.

• It must have felt insane to finally see it all put together.

• Are you excited?

• Eat it and then lick it? 

Answers to these bold inquiries available at Vice.

What with the swooning Arcade Fire song, the lazy, sad late-afternoon sunlight spilling everywhere, and the hand-drawn title cards and all. Jonze is a certified whiz kid director, and there are some striking visuals on display in this trailer, but we're a little wary of just how hip it seems. We knew that one day soon (read: already) kids would be cooler than us, but it happened so fast. Ah well. Judging from this preview, aside from the Urban-Outfitters-for-Kids vibe, we're pretty psyched for this movie.

But we're blaming the whole hipster children phenomenon on these parents, displayed in similarly twee fashion in the trailer for Away We Go, the new indie pregnancy travelogue from Dave Eggers:

Fittingly, the monsters have made their debut on skateboards released by skate aficionado Jonze. Have fun mixing and matching the monsters to their vocal portrayers (including Forest Whitaker, Catherine O'Hara, and James Gandolfini). No word yet on when you can use these intriguing, wistful boards to terrorize small children.

• Sneak Peek: The Monsters of Where the Wild Things Are [/Film]

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.

It could have been worse, Spike: We hear Baz Luhrmann's newborn faced a full-blown sex-change over at Fox.

• Moriarty Sits Down With Spike Jonze... [AICN]

And while the release has now been postponed indefinitely and Horn assures us that Jonze is staying on the project, tell us if Horn's comments after the jump read as one of the less emphatic endorsements you've seen from a studio boss this year:

"We've given him more money and, even more importantly, more time for him to work on the film," Horn said. "We'd like to find a common ground that represents Spike's vision but still offers a film that really delivers for a broad-based audience. We obviously still have a challenge on our hands. But I wouldn't call it a problem, simply a challenge. No one wants to turn this into a bland, sanitized studio movie. This is a very special piece of material and we're just trying to get it right. ... The jury is still out on this one. But we remain confident that Spike is going to figure things out and at the end of the day we'll have an artistically compelling movie.""

Goldstein brings up a good point that for better or worse, Warners gambles (or used to, anyhow) on directing talent more aggressively than most studios are prepared to do, but that for every Christopher Nolan franchise reboot there's a Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain) or Oliver Hirschbiegel (The Invasion) lurking in the distance. The worst thing Horn and Robinov could do, though, is nudge Jonze somewhere toward the middle — somewhere ostensibly "safe," where the edge and the bloom wear off in short, mediocre order, leaving everyone dissatisfied.

Which, of course, is where it's headed considering Warners' recent hard right turn. Thanks a pantload for the pep talk, Horn.

• Can Spike Jonze save 'Where the Wild Things Are'? [The Big Picture]

We're on the verge of losing a movie.

If the entire film gets reshot you will hear that the decision came because of technical issues, specifically the animation of the Wild Things' mouths and facial features. The film uses people in huge Jim Henson Creature Shop suits, and the plan was to shoot the suits and animate the Wild Things' faces later. That has been proving to be more technically difficult than anyone had foreseen [...]

This is a bad situation, obviously, but one where some footage could be salvaged, meaning that a complete and total reshoot of the film wouldn't be necessary.

Yet I'm hearing that just such a massive reshoot is what is on the table right now. And it's not because of technical issues, unless you want to consider the lead kid actor and the script technical issues..

Sadly, when you agree to embark upon a major studio release—particularly one positioned as a family tentpole—marketability will always wind up trumping vision. Just ask the creators of Surf's Up, who had originally envisioned their CGI epic as an all-field-rodent Watership Down for the Iraq War generation, only to find it reprocessed into the virtually unrecognizable penguin surfing movie that made its way into theaters.

• WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE... BEING COMPLETELY RESHOT? [chud.com]

That was a very early test with the sole purpose of just getting some footage to Ben our vfx (visual effects) supervisor to see if our vfx plan for the faces would work. The clip doesn't look or feel anything like the movie, the Wild Thing suit is a very early cringy prototype, and the boy is a friend of ours Griffin who we had used in a Yeah Yeah Yeahs video we shot a few weeks before. We love him, but he is not in the actually film...Oh and that is not a wolf suit, its a lamb suit we bought on the internet. Talk to you later..."

Despite his assurances and excuses, he has bigger fish to fry than bloggers and their readers; Slashfilm is also reporting that Things test screenings are scaring the kiddies! After hearing feedback from their target audience, the "extremely unhappy" execs at Warner Brothers are reportedly pushing the film's release date to 2009. What could be so scary that kids are crying and begging their parents to go home mid-film? Said one tester, "The things are not cute. Max comes off a bit weird and off-putting. He slaps his mom! And he seems confused and not charming at all." Stranger still, IMDB has an actor named Max Records listed for the role, which may explain all the tears. Apparently Records once "led a protest for vegetarian options at his school cafeteria" at 8 years old. Now that is scary.

[Photo Credit: SlashFilm]

• SPIKE JONZE RESPONDS TO 'WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE' VIDEO CLIP [SlashFilm]

The leaked footage above, featuring a quiet moment between the fearsome Max and Wild Thing Carol —rumored to be voiced in the movie by James Gandolfini—was the source of much dispute over the weekend. A few frantic dispatches placed by Warner Bros. to various blogspots, however, has led to the consensus that the scene, bathed in golden hour and possessing a near pitch-perfect tone (try imagining the sub-in actors' voices replaced with the sound of Tony Soprano talking to a nine-year-old AJ at a Yankee's game) is, in fact, a screen test. If we start now, we should be able to produce our own offspring in time to accompany us to its opening weekend, at some point in 2009.

• Where the Wild Things Are [IMDB]
• Wild Things Clip [thebadandugly.com]