The Muppets

What The Muppets succeeds at doing best is being a Muppet movie. That's the best praise you can give it. For a while there, back when they were coming to the end of their tenure as pop culture darlings (they haven’t been in theatres since 1999) it seemed as if they had forgotten how to be themselves. The characters and voices were there but what convinced the world they were special in the first place wasn't.

But the Muppets were a staple of many a childhood (mine included) and although The Muppets is more nostalgia for those days gone past than an exercise in rebuilding a new generation of fans (when I saw it there was surprisingly only one kid in the theatre), a love letter to one of the treasures of those lucky enough to know it in their childhood is welcome in these parts any day.

What The Muppets gets absolutely right, under the loving hands of director James Bobin and writer/star/devoted Muppetaphile Jason Segal, is exactly what Jim Henson gave them in the beginning to render them so timeless: distinct personalities with distinct human characteristics. The Muppets, when they were succeeding, did so not because they were cute and cuddly but because kids and adults alike could recognize a little bit of themselves in each of them.

Kermit the Frog was their noble leader but not above failure, Miss Piggy was vain, Fozzie was sincere but naive and Gonzo just wanted to find his place within a world where no one else like him existed. It’s the difference between pieces of felt with plastic eyes and real characters that make you feel warm and comfortable in their presence. Throw in that Henson was a mad comic genius (I still discover new winks and nods in the original The Muppet Movie all these years later) and you have the perfect family entertainment.

And like The Muppet Movie, The Muppets doesn’t so much tell a story as wrap a lose narrative around a collection of episodes (The Muppets were always at their best within the 30 minute confines of television sitcom). We start with an introduction to a new Muppet, Walter, who lives in a place called Small Town and loves his older brother and best friend Gary (Segal) more than anything. Their bond is touching and pure, but as Gary grows older, gets taller, makes human friends, and such, Walter continues to be the same, always loved and backed by Gary, but not quite fitting in. He finds, as maybe most kids did, refuge in the wonderful world of The Muppets, a place where he feels safe and where he is understood. The other kids may poke fun, but the Muppets give Walter everything he needs.

So when Gary plans on taking his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) to L.A. Walter is elated when, despite some reservation from Mary, he is invited along as well. It will be a dream for him to finally visit the famous Muppet Studios and see where all the magic happened.

But the gang arrives in L.A. only to find the studio to be forgotten and run down. And then, when Walter sneaks away from the tour (led by a funny Alan Arkin), he discovers a plan for an evil oil barren (Chris Cooper) to purchase the studio, demolish it and drill for oil. Unless the long forgotten about Muppets band together again, an unlikely prospect, and raise the money to the buy the studio, it’s lights out on the last standing piece of Muppet history.

So in a desperate attempt to not lose the most meaningful thing in his life, Walter tracks down Kermit in hopes of convincing him to put on one last show to raise the money to buy back the studio. The first half of the movie is thus, in a tribute to The Muppet Movie, a hilarious and self-aware road picture as Kermit and his new friends travel around the country to collect the other Muppets and convince them to come back for one last show leading up to, not unpredictably, in a fitting tribute to their original televised form, that one last show.

That’s all there is to The Muppets. Anyone who knows the Muppet world knows that plot description doesn’t even begin to describe the manic comic energy of these characters and indeed, The Muppets is all smiles from beginning to end with several big laughs and some catchy songs littered along the way.

But no matter how clever the sight gags get, how inside the jokes go, how constant the celebrity cameos are and how shameless the lengths the film will go to get a laugh, The Muppets works because it leaves one with a warm and fuzzy feeling. That’s why the Muppets have endured for so long. They are our friends and neighbors who exist in this world without the slightest hint of irony. It’s what Jim Henson worked so hard to create. He couldn’t have asked for a more fitting tribute to his legacy.

Leap Year Review

Leap Year, the new romantic comedy with Amy Adams and Matthew Goode provided many many things that I expected it to: silly comedy, an improbable plot, a contrived story, an all around forgettable experience and so on. And then it did one thing I never expected: It involved, as mainstream romantic comedies so rarely do, real people with real dimensions and not just broad generalizations of comic caricatures. Not the leads, not the support, and not even the old Irish bed and breakfast owners and their Italian borders. The film may go for easy laughs, but it avoids all the potential for cheap, lazy ones. That’s a quality both refreshing and unexpected in this kind of film. The story itself may be pure fairytale, but it still somehow manages to exist in a real world. These characters are not just the creation of some scriptwriter who needs a laugh or a way to connect plot points as romantic comedy characters so often are. This lends an air of authenticity to the whole project up to the point where, against all reasonable and logical odds, you actually care what will happen to these people as they travel the Irish countryside because they seem to grow together on their own terms. What more could one ask for? The story involves Anna (Adams) who has etched out a career in decorating houses with furniture and other such nick-knacks so that they look nice to potential buyers, until the deal is made at which point she packs up her stuff and moves on to the next project. She’s essentially a highly paid con artist.
After being given a pair of earrings over dinner by her surgeon boyfriend of four years when she was expecting a ring and a proposal, Anna is crushed. Jeremy, the doctor, then flies off to Dublin for a medical convention leaving Anna back home to be reminded of an old Irish tradition that states, on the eve of a leap year, a woman can propose to a man. I don’t know. It seems to me that if you need to chase a man around the globe for his love, maybe he isn’t worth the effort in the first place. Regardless, as Anna’s luck would have it, the leap year just so happens to be coming up in a few days. However, as these things must, bad weather forces Anna’s plane to land in a small Irish town situated hours from Dublin. She seeks out a taxi driver named Declan (Goode) who also doubles as the pub and hotel owner. It’s the kind of place where the same two or three customers haunt the stools every day like the ghosts of lives gone by. Declan initially rejects Anna’s need for a ride, until the possibility of losing the pub leaves him needing cash and without options. Predictably, the journey is not a nice one as Anna and Declan have a clash of personalities. She’s prim and proper and used to being in complete control of herself and he’s rough, unshaven, thinks the whole leap year legend is a bunch of bollocks and decides she must be crazy for naming her bag Louis (apparently Louis Vuitton isn’t big around the Irish countryside). This is a plot almost as old as the cinema itself, or at least since Spender Tracy and Katherine Hepburn made it popular so many decades ago. The story of a man and a woman of completely different backgrounds being forced together under unlikely circumstances, hating each other and then slowly growing to love each other as they talk like civilized people and begin to accept the others’ company. The film then must rely heavily on the presence of its stars, as half the fun of films like this is in seeing how new actors drop themselves into familiar material and transform it to suit their own personality. It’s also the ultimate testament to great acting in seeing a star being able to turn virtually nothing into something that even mildly shows signs of life. It’s no surprise that Amy Adams can pull a feat like that. She’s so unapologetically lovely, so chipper and yet so classy that she’s always a pleasure to be in the company of. Here is a woman who makes even the worst of films seem better than they have any right to be. Then there is Matthew Goode who is a real discovery. He’s starred in dramatic and intelligent fare in the past such as Brideshead Revisited and Watchmen but here he proves to have a real comic presence. He is as rugged and handsome as fellow U.K. star Gerard Butler, but has a lot more charm, depth and a better ear for comedy as he steals most of the films funniest lines. And then there’s the inevitable ending, which is as contrived as it is unlikely, and raises many logical questions that it has no intention of addressing. But by that point Adams and Goode have worked their charm and we can buy them as a legitimate couple, which we actually hope they will become. In my review for last year’s The Proposal I gave a positive rating but made sure to imply that it was simply out of desperation: the world has been subjected to so many horrible mainstream romantic comedies that sometimes feel strained to even fly by on autopilot that it was inspiring to see one with even the faintest sings of life. Now here is Leap Year, which follows the same kind of story headfirst into the same kinds of directions and I recommend it open-heartedly for all the same reasons but also because it is nicer, sweeter and more human.

Filmic Measures: The Chocolate Bar Movie

Hollywood, more often then not, has a constant tendency to churn out the same thing under a different name, with different actors with such determined regularity that it is sometimes hard to discern the decent stuff from the junk. It is therefore, I have found, somewhat fruitful to employ certain critical standards in which to place all like-minded films against in order to accurately evaluate their worth. I now coin for you the term: The Chocolate Bar Movie.
The logic and inspiration behind the phrase come form two separate sources. The term itself comes from a conversation I once had, while the actual theoretical logic behind it comes from Plato. In his dialogue Gorgias, Socrates has a debate with the title character over the profession of oratory. In trying to argue that oratory is not a skill of worth, Socrates outlines two categories under which all professions fall: crafts and knacks. A craft, Socrates explains, is something which produces a product that helps to better society: carpentry, medicine, etc.

A knack however is something, which provides simple pleasures that are enjoyable in the moment in which they are used or consumed. This pleasure however, only lasts in that moment and once it is gone so is any joy it provided. Socrates gives the examples of pastry baking and cosmetics as knacks. As George Carlin once answered when asked how he felt after taking drugs: "I feel like taking more drugs."

The other story involves me and a friend sitting in a car at a drive-in during intermission. My friend was asking me what I thought about some romantic comedy that she had recently seen and, as far as my memory serves me, enjoyed to quite some degree. "I enjoyed it," I said, "and then forgot about it." She tried to persuade me into thinking the film in question was more than forgettable. That's when the analogy dawned on me. "Movies like that," I said, Plato firmly in mind, "are like chocolate bars. You enjoy them while you are eating them, but once they are gone there is nothing memorable about the experience because you know there will always be another one exactly as good as that one waiting for you whenever you desire it." Has anyone, after all, ever eaten a chocolate bar that has changed their lives? I certainly have no experiences so singular that they stick out in my mind as being better than all the rest. It just doesn't happen.

A lot of mainstream films are like that too. You can enjoy them while they are playing, but they leave no lasting impression that exceeds the moment when the lights go up or the DVD is ejected because, well, there will probably be something almost exactly the same to be seen next week or next month.