THE FELT-LINED COUNTDOWN: The Muppet Movie
PREVIOUSLY: It’s all been building to this: the beginning of it all, if you don’t count, y’know, the TV show and the talk show appearances and the general omnipresence. This was huge. And it was. Box Office Mojo doesn’t have the opening weekend numbers for The Muppet Movie, but it does list the overall gross at $65.2 million in 1979 money, which adjusts to $234 million today, kicking the revival success of The Muppets at a comparatively mere $101.8 million into a cocked hat. It was wildly successful financially, and continues to be a massive emotional touchstone for fans and families.
And what’s weird is that it doesn’t even start with the banjo. It feels like it should. The DVD does. The Blu-ray does. The Blu-Ray’s “Intermission” feature does. It’s hard to imagine that this iconic picking wasn’t something that pre-grabs an audience and transports them back to memories of this film, but was once an eight-bar intro to an unknown quantity. And its even weirder that the film takes forever to get there, with a truly extended bookend sequence, that’s incredibly slowly paced and does little that’s iconic, with two exceptions: Kermit’s dialogue to Robin (“It’s sort of approximately how it happened…” and the fact that the theatre screening seats that were designed to hide Muppeteers beneath them have now become the standard for cinemas.
However, it would be remiss of me not to point out that The Muppet Movie does open with an absolute goddamn public service: it not only names Staler and Waldorf — names I can’t remember not knowing, but which seem to be largely opaque to much of the general public… a comprehensive text search of transcripts of current podcasts as well as conversations around me at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Jim Henson exhibit would reveal that hardly anyone knows that “those two old Muppets in the balcony” even have names — but also tells us which is which, something even I have trouble remembering on occasion. The film then very leisurely introduces the various personnages with a series of small in-character moments. The whole thing is very unhurried, maybe even deleteriously so. So it’s a welcome gag that Animal and the various Muppets (while displaying the worst cinema-going etiquette ever… something that they apparently were wont to continue thirty-two years later) get impatient for the film to begin and bully Kermit into starting the film without thanking everyone involved. (A joke, of course, continued in Muppet Caper‘s credits, as well — as I’ve previously mentioned — as in Bloom County in 1982.)
So it’s a full four and a half minutes before the banjo strings do their thing and our heartstrings do ours. Read the rest of this entry »
THE FELT-LINED COUNTDOWN: The Great Muppet Caper
PREVIOUSLY: As Fran Kubelik tells us, “Some people take, some get took — and they know they’re getting took — and there’s nothing they can do about it.” Well, Manhattan done got taken, that fool of a Took.
While Manhattan is my brother’s favorite Muppet film, and while I think some of his comments and perspective helped me appreciate it as a sketch-movie, my comments about its utter lack of an earned ending do stand. And after finishing watching and reading about Muppets Take Manhattan, I was looking forward to revisiting my personal favorite of the Muppet franchise, and seeing how well it holds up and how well it might weather the scrutiny I’d been applying to the other Muppet offerings.
The disappointing news is: not well. I’ve been doing a whole bit over the course of this series where I’ve found a Group of Three, highlighting it early in the write-up, and eventually using it as the way of rating the film as a Success, a Mixed Bag, or a Basic Failure. The obvious way to do that with Caper is with Fozzie, Kermit, and Gonzo’s shipping containers. My notes say that my alternate take for ratings of this movie were going to be “A) Credit Card, B) Cash, or C) Sneak Out In The Middle Of The Night.”
Which would mean, if this film was only middling in its success, I’d have to give it a RATING between Bears, Frogs, and Gonzos of Frogs, which seems mildly insulting to Kermit. Surely a rating of Frogs should be excellent! Something that’s a mixed bag should be a rating of what is says on Gonzo’s crate, which is Whatever, but that’s the lowest rating, which this film doesn’t deserve. Or, at least, my twenty-year upholding of this film as the pinnacle of Muppet filmmaking won’t let me allow it.
Because, unfortunately, what I love about this film is the strange tone and pacing and the excellent post-modern wall-breaking, and almost all of that goes out the window in the final act, leaving us with a badly-paced, badly-assembled mess that needs more than charm to let the audience feel like their earlier generosity was justified. The deconstruction and chaos need to either pay off in a manner that shows that the clash of fiction and metafiction was purposeful, or need to build to a complete explosion of structure that just abandons structure altogether.
But, in order to show how it goes wrong, we do have to start at the start. Which is pretty wonderful.
THE FELT-LINED COUNTDOWN: The Muppets Take Manhattan
PREVIOUSLY: The Muppets Take Victorian London. Those Muppets. It’s always take, take, take…
The film opens with a helicopter shot of New York City, and if you couldn’t already recognize parts of the skyline as dated, then the lack of a gyroscopic stabilizer on the camera would thorough date this footage as from the ’70s or ’80s. Immediately, the music starts with a loose series of dooting by Kermit, kind of scat singing — harkening forward to Whitmire’s excellent caroling with Tiny Robin in 1992 — but not really deviating from the melody as much as I associate with true jazz scat. Regardless, it is a pleasant introduction to the melody of “Together Again”, the song so catchy that they used it again as the closing number to Most Wanted thirty years later.
During this charming ditty, the name of the composer to the song comes up, and I have no idea who this is. “Music and Lyrics by Jeff Moss”? Who is this workaday imposter, I pre-emptively bristle. Well, allow Wikipedia to allay my immediate suspicions, as it turns out that Mr. Moss is the writer of “Rubber Duckie” and “I Love Trash”. This explains the catchiness of both the opening number and the later appearance of “I’m Gonna Always Love You”. I probably should have been able to let the music speak for itself, but it does help to know that the compositions come from the Muppet stable, as it were. It gives some faith in the proceedings to come.
That faith, unfortunately, is largely squandered in my eyes. The film has a perfectly fine notional story, with the Muppets taking their senior college revue to New York to try and get it produced on Broadway. Perfectly ordinary Rise To Fame narrative that would be pleasant… if it wasn’t basically the plot of The Muppet Movie from five years before. But that!, I hear the movie implore, was a film about a ragtag group of strangers coming together and finding each other; their success is based on the fact that they were stronger with each other! So the stakes of this movie will be that initial failure forces them to separate, and we are anxious about getting them reunited. All of this is encapsulated by the opening, which is the finalé of Kermit’s revue! So the film starts with its eventual conclusion, and it will all be full circle!
Which is a pretty great pitch. Which the film, I say again, squanders in many ways. I realize that I’m jumping straight to the end of the film, but the ending is very much what makes me stamp out of the cinema — or, now, my living room — irritated at the logical inconsistencies in the construction of this film. A film is not its ending, but the ending is the last thing a film leaves you with, and it can absolutely sour the previous hour and a half. The fact that the film doesn’t end with “Together Again” is nuts. Everything about the musical that they stage is nuts. It defies belief, it leaves me frustrated and irritated, and it makes me want to buy Muppets Take Manhattan Burger King glasses on eBay just so that I can smash them.
So let’s establish how the film violates our faith. Read the rest of this entry »
THE FELT-LINED COUNTDOWN: The Muppet Christmas Carol
PREVIOUSLY: A “Muppet” movie is made where the primary character dynamic is between Tim Curry and young actor Kevin Bishop. Because it’s a Muppet movie. With Muppets.
In the opening commentary for Muppet Treasure Island, director Brian Henson talked about the complexity of the opening pan, and the way it transitioned into the studio set, but that he’d opened Muppet Christmas Carol the same way. I gave him a little stick for the mild — very mild — grandiosity of the claim, as it didn’t seem to be a major stylistic flourish. However, in watching the opening here, I see why he wanted to recapture the idea, and even kick it up a notch by using a helicopter to incorporate real ocean and island footage. It works very well, in that it’s a slow, graceful pan over a model village of London rooftops, and despite being a solid two minutes in length, it’s not boring. Which is surprising, but a testament to the craftsmanship of the model.
And maybe that’s part of what gets lost in the Treasure Island recreation. The giant pan over rocks and water should convey natural beauty, but instead captures the audience abstraction of distance. It doesn’t explode with natural splendor, it just is. In contrast, the the rooftops and chimney pots in Christmas Carol are close to the camera, and noticeable in their detail, and so even in the moments between credits, there is atmosphere and hand-built care to absorb.
The vibrant camera work continues during the opening number, “There Goes Mr. Scrooge”, which employs both interesting visual angles and inventive compositions for the Muppet interactions and framing. The song is a really good mix of the Dickensian language and front-loading the themes of the larger work, and the tune is fun and catchy. Paul Williams, notably the writer of some of stone-cold Muppet classics, brings some enjoyable playfulness to the opening. The only odd thing that struck me is that the beginning scenes do the typical thing of establishing a world in which Muppets and humans work and live alongside each other, but only the Muppets sing in the song. This becomes particularly apparent as the camera allows Caine to swish and stride through the streets, that while there are occasional other humans in shot, all non-felt people are noticeably silent.
This establishes the three pillars of the production: Michael Caine as Scrooge, the Muppets teetering between comedy and pathos, and the original content from the novel. Read the rest of this entry »
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