A friend told me that Maurice Sendak based the beasts in "Where the Wild Things Are" on members of his family. Though I wasn't aware of this while watching Spike Jonze's film, it makes sense. They're a diverse but decidedly urban Jewish collective in the movie, if one wants to analyze them that way. First and foremost, though, the slim original material simply emphasizes all the more that this is really a Spike J. movie, and as such, it's one of his best. "Adaptation" is still my favorite, but mostly because of Charlie K.'s script. Here, the real vision is Jonze's, approved of by the author who, I think, saw that Spike was making an original, difficult and complex film that is both fantastical on a primal level and peculiar on a personal level. This is a portrait of a boy injured by divorce and filled with uncontrollable urges that I think are part and parcel of the experience most boys endure, overwhelmed by testosterone and emotional chaos. I know it's a fair reflection of my overwrought emotional cataclysm at that age, and the spirit that still propels my basic creative punk energies. It ain't easy and it ain't pretty. And WTWTA is probably the first film I've seen in a long time (going back to early Truffaut) that spoke to that chaotic mess that is a boy's childhood as seen from the inside.