We all know the hipster adage that when it comes to entertainment, “If it has mass appeal, I’m going to stay home and listen to The Smiths instead.” So why is it that the entirely mainstream movie, Where the Wild Things Are is getting so many of our hipster buddies to spend their hard-earned parents’ money on tickets? For months the trailers have been glowing before pink, plastic sunglasses and Kanye shades. But why? Have the advertisers launched an ad program on the side of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans?

Nay, dear reader. This must be the work of legendary hipster director Spike Jonze. His career is a tapestry of music videos and freestyle BMX, and some jackass thrown in there for good measure. Sometimes it takes a true genius to realize the trick to giving a movie a sense of documentary realism is to violently shake the camera so frequently and needlessly that one might think Michael J Fox was the Director of Photography. Or was that 28 Weeks Later? Truthfully though, to a hipster, he’s merely a poor man’s Michel Gondry.

Perhaps it was really the music that pulled the hipstery NYU masses in. If the Arcade Fire in the trailer is too “Pitchfork reviewed” for his royal high-ness, then it may have been Karen O’s yodeling throughout the film that titillated those American Apparel tights. Or could it have been the combination of the beautiful Jim Henson Company monster suits, with the occasional nine-year-old doing the robot, with just enough pseudo-intellectual musings to be the fodder for hipster foreplay. The foreplay may sound something like the following conversation:

“When Max said that the sun would eventually die, it was just so…Kafkaesque.”
“Totally PoMo.”
“If you think about it, that could happen like, tomorrow. The sun could burn up and kill us all. We should probably have sex before that happens.”
“Okay, but don’t come so quickly this time.”

The most likely reason is much more practical, however. It is a well known fact that the tight pants worn by the hipster constricts his bladder, giving him a urination frequency comparable to that of your grandmother, so of course hipsters should be excited about Where the Wild Things Are, a movie which moves so slowly that the official bladder management iPhone app, RunPee, has noted that this 100 minute-long movie has no less than six opportunities for a successful pee break. If you’d like, you can compare that to the mere four recommended pee breaks in the glorious two hours and 33 minutes of Inglourious Basterds. Finally, there is a movie that lets us spend more time peeing than watching the movie, without missing any of the plot.

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