Who exactly is supposed to like this movie: Wild Things

Have avoided till now seeing "Where the Wild Things Are" because the combo of Spike Jonze (nee Spiegel) and David Eggers seemed far too hip for me, but Josie brought home the DVD so we watched last night, and I'm left with the question: Who, exactly, is supposed to like this movie? Or, another way of putting it: Why would you make a 100-minute movie out of a thin but intriguing picture book? Does it ever work? Leave the book as is! Some things are meant to be short, or short subjects. But no - anyone who read the excerpt of Eggers's novelization that ran in the New Yorker would know that this project was doomed - bloated, pointless, wandering, chaotic. First 15 minutes were pretty good, a quite realistic and credible portrayal of a young boy with some place on the spectrum of social disorder (autistic? aspergers?) - no friends, prone to violent tantrums. After a spat with his kind but harried mom (Katherine Keener, who's everywhere all of a sudden), he runs away. She chases, can't catch him (and inexplicably goes home without him, leaving him somewhere at night wander the streets of LA? Impossible!), as we blur to the inevitable dream sequence - boy, Max, sails off to an island inhabited by the Wild Things. After some initial tension (and a pretty good sequence of his beaching the sailboat on the shore), Max convinces the Wild Things that he is a king, and they therefore treat him with great deference (yet another echo of colonialism, the white guy, no matter how puny, always seems to merit the obeisance of the natives, cf Avatar). And then, not much happens. He doesn't face any crisis, offers no yearning for home, learns nothing, changes nothing - big so what. About half-way through, Josie says: And I'm supposed to care about what, exactly. Exactly! Nothing. Eventually, Max decides to go home - and just think of the comparison with other similar movies, e.g., Wizard of Oz, with the great yearning for him, the perils of the journey, will she ever make it back to Kansas - but here he just hops in his sailboat and goes. Nothing's ever prevented him. Of course he "wakes," runs home, and his mother embraces him, end of story. So, again, whom will this appeal to? Kids won't like it and not because it's too dark but because it's too vapid. Some put this on their top-10 list, perhaps in our own obeisance to the stature of Jonze and Eggers, perhaps impressed by the technical difficulties of the live-action filming with Gargantuan puppets. But did anyone actually like this movie? Or did critics like it because they expected others - children? - would? Not that top-10 lists can be political - heavens, no!