It’s that time of year when critics look back and decide which movies were their favorite of 2009– and we’re honored that so many people have included Where the Wild Things Are on their lists! To namecheck a few: Chicago Sun-Times critic and star of At the MoviesMichael Phillips, NPR’s David Edelstein, Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday, Movieline’s Kyle Buchanan, and maverick New York Times critic Manohla Dargis all payed tribute to Max and his Maximonsters in their year-end rankings. A.O. Scott of the New York Times even went so far as to name Where the Wild Things Are the #1 movie of the year. Thanks, dude!
It’s awesome and humbling to see this film connect with kids of all ages– even kids who grew up to watch movies for a living. We love you all. Also, a belated congratulations to Karen O and Carter Burwell on their best original score Golden Globe nomination. What a great way to end the year. Thanks to everyone who reads this blog and loves this movie as much as we do. Have fun tonight and we’ll see you in 2010!
Thu Tran’s cooking show Food Party is simply eggcellent. From its humble beginnings as a video art project put together by a group of friends in Tran’s Ohio apartment to the airwaves of IFC, Food Party has only gotten crazier and more hilarious. It’s a sickeningly adorable puppet show spattered with moments of intense evil, coated with a sauce of irrational genius and deep fried in a vat of unicorn poo. Even the Grey Lady is hip to Thu Tran, for good reason– the hostess and of Food Party is a fascinating character, with a deliciously demented mind that seems to come up with brilliant ideas faster than even the rococo excesses of Food Party can accommodate. Perhaps her wild origin story can help us understand the way Tran thinks:
…Whenever [our father] would make a stew he would make us guess what animal we were eating. “It’s a goat!” “It’s a kangaroo!” “It’s a deer!” “It’s an alligator!” Normally my brothers and I would be wrong, but we didn’t care, we would eat it anyway. The weirdest thing might have been cubes of solidified pork blood, or fresh coagulated duck blood topped with its chopped innards, basil, and roasted nuts.
I didn’t realize it was weird until I would talk to my friends at school about it, and they would wrinkle their faces like ogres in total disgust. I would have to change the subject immediately to something like the kind of mousse and gel combo I had to use to make my 5th grade permed hair look lustrously wet and beautiful.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs headlined the Austin City Limits festival on Friday night, and the New York Times had this to say, in a story entitled “Austin City Limits: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs Deliver.”
…the Yeah Yeah Yeahs delivered a stupendous set, even stronger and more focused than the very good show they played in Brooklyn earlier this week. Karen O, the band’s front woman, approaches every stage as a frontier to be conquered, and here she was both impish and imperious. In the guitarist Nick Zinner and the drummer Brian Chase, she has something much more than support: their output, which came in surges, was often enveloping.
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