The World in my Mind

This post serves as both one of those new ideas I've been mulling over, and a slight diversion from regular goings on here at my blog. I cannot say if this will become more frequent from now on, but the kind of content found here may begin to vary as per my very first post. No worries though, I'll try and keep movie reviews and such coming as they interest me.

My dad recently told me that, to him, photography is a person's attempt at showing others the way that they see the world. I've carried this around with me the last couple of weeks and it occurs to me that it is very profound in its own way. At a most basic state, a photograph is really just a still representation of something that exists in this world. In other words you could say that it is mundane. When one thinks then as my dad does, a picture becomes something much more interesting. The way a picture is taken, its subject, and even the location all inform the viewer of the unique way that a person views the world; the mundane can suddenly mean a lot more. Taken this way, the act of photography is actually intensely personal, however intentionally a picture is taken.


With this thought process recently in mind, I set out to not only take a few new pictures, but to search out some of my old ones and figure out something about myself. Why did I take the picture? What did I feel? And what was I trying to say to everyone else about my world view? It's actually a very interesting process to discover something about yourself that you may have only been subconsciously aware.

I consider myself a bit of an artist, or more realistically someone with an artistic mind. I often find myself looking for detail and symmetry. Colors that really stand out. I especially like light and especially that at night. With this in mind I found it intriguing that it apparently seems in almost all of my own photography I'm desperately trying to capture whatever it is that I am seeing and feeling in that moment. The funniest part about this endeavor, as with most art, is that I often times struggle to succeed. Very seldom does it seem I ever really capture the essence of my own vision. I find this frustrating, but admit freely that sometimes the most beautiful moments can be captured by accident. Allowing myself to accept this fact, I poured over the last six months of pictures stored on my computer with an eye to spot not only the beauty in any particular moment, but my own emotional and artistic intention...


... And found lots to look at. Sometimes the picture felt close to what I was aiming for and in some cases I'm so far removed from those moments that the pictures become something else. Nevertheless I started picking out images that I felt I was relatively close to capturing and decided to see if I couldn't maybe coax the last bit of personality out of them. In other words, make those visions uniquely mine to the world. This involved a heavy amount of photo manipulation on my part. Normally I am trained to scoff at the practice, but it occurs to me that by adjusting these images I am only making the effort to expose in some manner the feeling of the things I am seeing.

Now, in a lot of cases the editing began slowly and I attempted to keep the changes minor. In some cases this was all that was necessary to achieve my desired effect. In others I made a discovery that perhaps the moment I was in and the picture I was taking were an attempt to emulate the scene I wish I could see. It's natural to want your own perfect version of life and it's also natural to never really achieve that. As I slowly pushed the contrasts and the color balances in differing and more dramatic directions I realized I could turn the world I've seen into the world in my head. There's something oddly poetic about the process that I really appreciate -- taking the real world and adjusting it ever so slightly to match the ideal version in my brain.


I realize the practice is slightly counter-purpose to photography. There are some that would argue that when you take a photo, you're trying to capture that moment as real as it is forever. And while I can imagine the practical applications of such a practice I cannot help but be bored by it. If, as my dad so helpfully put it, the purpose of photography is to share your unique view of the boring everyday, then maybe what I've done is an extension of that. Some of the pictures featured here say a lot about me, or at least how I'd like to think I see existence. They represent places I've been and, at the same instant, places I'll never be. That's a really tough nut to crack, but I can't help but believe that it's a lot like living.

Review: Where the Wild Things Are

Greetings and salutations noble people who may happen to read these things that I write! It's been some time, and in the interim between then and now I have been pondering what else I can do with this space. Suffice it to say I have many ideas, and with the summer movie season winding down movie reviews just don't entice me the way they have been. Make no mistake though, I'll continue to review the ones that warrant doing so and hopefully in a more timely manner. I suppose the point of this introductory rambling is to say sorry for being gone so long (as if anyone legitimately cares), and to promise perhaps differently purposed posts in the future. Without further adieu then, onto the review.

At the outset here before we really get into the heart of the review, I must admit that I don't have a close or intimate knowledge of the original Maurice Sendak penned Where the Wild Things Are. To wit, I have probably read this source material maybe three times in my life; the last of which was likely a decade ago or more. I am familiar enough with the general plot of the book and of course the art style and the monsters within. When I heard that Spike Jonze was going to be making a movie based on what essentially amounts to a thirty-five sentence short story, I was intrigued yet wary of the extra material that would be needed to fill out a feature length. Still, after viewing the fantastic trailer and reading a few interviews with director Spike Jonze (of whom I've always assumed good things, but never really acclimated myself with), I was genuinely excited to go and see the movie.

Most will know the basic three part plot of Where the Wild Things Are. Main character Max misbehaves (what a little monster?) and is sent to his bedroom without dinner. Upon said banishment, Max suddenly finds himself in a deep jungle where he meets a group of monsters of which he becomes King. From here on he has wild and exciting adventures which eventually culminate in him finding his way home to his dinner and assumingly good vibes with his mother. The film version is essentially the same story though fleshed out and buffered to both evoke a more real connection with the audience, and give slightly more purpose to the existing narrative. Max is now a troubled nine year old with an estranged father and a sister he adores who is becoming tragically more adolescent and less concerned of his time. To top this all off his mother is a workaholic who cares but has trouble dodging distraction. Adding to Max's childhood frustration is his mother's new boyfriend (a blink and you miss it appearance by Mark Ruffalo). The Max of this film is clearly a troubled kid who acts out not because he's a brat, but more because he's dealing with anxieties that he doesn't quite know how to handle in his young experience. He's still a real nuisance, but you get the sense he's acting out. The movie follows suit, but instead of following the book Max runs away from home and finds a wooden boat which he of course takes and sails away to a mysterious land.

Max then meets the Wild Things and they have many dangerous if not bordering on non-sequitor adventures. This is where Jonze's film really establishes itself from its source material. The monsters who befriend Max are much more realized characters now all with their own neuroses and personality traits. Audiences at first will try to assign analogues in Max's real life to the monsters in his fantastical life. One of the most intriguing and bold moves perpetrated by the filmmakers is that no one Wild Thing wholly embodies a part of Max's real life. Instead much of the interpretation is left to the audience; a practice becoming more and more rare in big Hollywood movies these days. While the main Wild Thing, Carol (James Gandolfini), may at first seem to be an embodiment of Max's unseen father, moments of anger and jealousy over being displaced by easy-going KW (Lauren Ambrose) suggest a completely different association. This element of the film is what ends up being its strongest suit. By never deliberately taking the viewer's hand and bashing them over the head with the meaning behind each and every story beat, Where the Wild Things Are allows much like its source the ability for the audience to assign their own personal experience to the film. While the film never strays far away enough to confuse its narrative concerning Max and his own struggle, it leaves the actions of the characters within ambiguous enough that the motivations and effects of them are entirely up to the viewer. While I feel that this may deter younger viewers who perhaps would be the main draw for such a title at first glance, the value of this film I imagine will reveal itself through time as that same young audience grows to understand more deeply some of the things that are alluded to.

Where the Wild Things Are is an ambitious movie. Moving at a nearly break-neck pace, the adrenaline-fueled chaos of the proceedings effectively evokes the confusion and frustration of being a child. The monsters at once symbolize the myriad dangers both real and imagined that can surround one as a child, while at the same time being the most extreme visualizations of the disarray, anger, joy, and sorrow one feels during that time of life. The film's biggest strength may lie in its ability to remind us all of what it felt like to be a kid; that it may not have been as innocent and easy as we always remember, and that while we all grow up eventually we may have forgotten how tempestuous it was getting there.