We Know That It's Probably Magic

Year: 1979

Director: James Frawley

Cast: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: G

I just made the best decision of my life. Because I’m a huge fan of the Muppets and their new TV show on ABC is just unlawfully good, I decided to drag myself and Sergio through a marathon of their 8 theatrical features, only three of which I have previously seen (and just one of which – Muppets Most Wanted – I have previously reviewed).

Jim Henson’s Muppets have withstood the test of time with grace and flair, bringing their enterprisingly meta comedy to the masses for over half a century. Although The Muppet Movie is not where they got their start (they debuted on Sam and Friends in the ancient year of 1955 and were already three seasons deep in The Muppet Show by the time the movie was released in 1979 – totally incidentally, the same year that Mad Max injected fuel into the engine of action cinema), it’s nevertheless a great place to start: their origin story.

It’s like Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, but only slightly less violent.

The Muppet Movie opens on the World Wide Studios lot, where the Muppets (including Kermit’s terrifyingly waifish nephew) have gathered for a screening of their first film, depicting how the felt-covered crew came into being.

The film rolls and we’re immediately plunged into the single best scene in the history of children’s entertainment: Kermit the Frog (Jim Henson) sits on a log, strumming a banjo and wistfully crooning the Willliams & Ascher tune “Rainbow Connection,” the ethereal paean to following your dreams that has landed at number 74 on AFI’s 100 Best Movie Songs list, been covered dozens of times by artists including The Carpenters, Weezer, Justin Timberlake, and Kenny Loggins, and caused more teary eyes than a century’s worth of animal dander. “Rainbow Connection” is a goddamn perfect song. This film was, is, and always will be “Rainbow Connection,” and thus can be forgiven if nothing to follow ever adequately reaches those heady heights.

Following his sojourn into unadulterated joy, Kermit meets Bernie (Dom DeLuise), a Hollywood agent who tells him of an upcoming audition for frogs, wanting the opportunity to make millions of people happy, he takes a trip from the swamp to sunny California, making friends along the way and taking them with him. These fine furry folks include failed comedian Fozzie Bear (Frank Oz), traveling plumber Gonzo (Dave Goelz), down-home beauty queen miss Piggy (Frank Oz), and the band Electric Mayhem, of whom the only one that matters is Animal (Frank Oz, who I hope got a dozen different paychecks for this).

There’s a lot of hippy-ish free love ride sharing going on, but the gang is pursued by the very un-New Age Doc Hopper (Charles Durning), a fried frog legs magnate who will stop at nothing to make Kermit the spokesfrog for his restaurant chain, even if I means killing and stuffing him.

Kiddie flicks used to be DARK, man.

Now, this is a movie from the 70’s, and it more than betrays its vintage. Of the dozen or so cameos that pack this film, today’s kids would only recognize two – Steve Martin and Big Bird. And Sergio and I hardly fared much better, though we at least had heard of everybody featured. Between that and the older, more threadbare puppet designs, The Muppet Movie doesn’t quite bridge the gap to the modern age, though it really doesn’t need to with its universal themes and cheery humor.

The real trouble with The Muppet Movie is that it never truly tells a cohesive story. It’s more a loose string of vignettes with the same broad theme, a problem endemic to many road trip movies (except, oddly, Bride of Chucky). There are some hazardously dull patches on the rocky road from point A to point B, especially any scene featuring Electric Mayhem, who I must admit I’ve never cared for except as an Animal delivery system. This story structure also allows some self-indulgent breaks from tone, like a bizarre and pointless Western interlude (which is almost made up for by the hyperbolically adorable sight of Kermit in spurs and a ten-gallon hat).

The soundtrack has its equal set of rough patches. I know that comparing any song to “Rainbow Connection” is like comparing a glass of water to the Pacific Ocean, but Piggy’s “Never Before, Never Again” is still a bit wan, pepped up only by Frank Oz’s gonzo performance (pun not intended, with all due respect to Dave Goelz). And I think if I badmouth Electric Mayhem one more time, I’ll be run off this blog with torches and pitchforks, so I’ll just say that I wish they’d ended along with the 70’s.

Unfortunately, puppets hardly ever have contract disputes, so we’re stuck with ‘em.

But for all that The Muppet Movie isn’t the greatest film ever made, it’s still an unimpeachably fun motion picture. While the broad-as-a-barn vaudeville comedy stylings might not be everybody’s cup of tea, the humor is so sweet and gentle that it’s impossible to dislike. Plus, several of the cameo performers are downright uproarious, including Mel Brooks in an explosive turn as a sublimely evil German doctor and Steve Martin as an uncouth waiter. Any time they’re pulling their absurdist antics onscreen, the only way you’ll stop laughing is if your lungs fall out.

The real core of The Muppet Movie is its earnest desire for you to have a good time, a goal which it indubitably accomplishes. It has no higher purpose than creating smiles, the simple compositions and unchallenging plot line serving only as a means to an end. But, oh, what an end. Jim Henson’s Muppets have always had an uncanny level of emotional life thanks to their mind-bogglingly terrific puppeteers, but the earnest and sentimental approach to storytelling here is uncannily effective.

From the heartstring thresher that is “Rainbow Connection” to the open-faced, generous enthusiasm with which Kermit chases his Hollywood dream, The Muppet Movie very frequently taps directly into the human soul. Perhaps no scene is more potently sincere than Gonzo’s solo song “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday,” a piece that is literally about him wanting to be a stuntman but rings with percussive emotion about optimism, passion, and reaching for he stars. I’d say it’s inhumanly powerful, and I’d be right. It’s muppetly powerful. That unfettered sappiness which never ever feels dishonest is the reason that this film is a classic.

It never hurts to feel like a kid again.

Soon, just like the film’s jaunty recurring theme, we’ll be “Moving Right Along” to later, occasionally better Muppet pictures. But let us never forget the sacrosanct pleasure of watching these good friends get together, even if there were some bumps in the road.

MVP (Most Valuable Puppet): Kermit the Frog

Kermit is usually the straight man (well, straight frog) among his zany friends: but this movie is his and his alone. His earnest desire to make people happy drives this occasionally uneven film with all the Jim Henson sentimentalism he can muster.

TL;DR: The Muppet Movie has its rough patches, but is unfailingly earnest and sentimental.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1207
Reviews In This Series
The Muppet Movie (Frawley, 1979)
The Great Muppet Caper (Henson, 1981)
The Muppets Take Manhattan (Oz, 1984)
The Muppet Christmas Carol (Henson, 1992)
Muppet Treasure Island (Henson, 1996)
Muppets from Space (Hill, 1999)
The Muppets (Bobin, 2011)
Muppets Most Wanted (Bobin, 2014)

Criminally Inane

Let’s take a brief break from the horrors of Halloween to kick back, relax, and laugh before diving straight into more killer classics. Here’s a couple mini reviews of flicks that prove I’m not demented! Maybe.

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!

Year: 1988

Director: David Zucker

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, O.J. Simpson

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A bumbling member of Police Squad! uncovers a lot to assassinate the visiting Queen Elizabeth.

I live for David Zucker comedies. Airplane! Is my favorite non-horror movie of all time, and his absurdist stylings just tickle me wherever I can find them. That said, The Naked Gun is not my favorite entry in his sprawling canon of spoof movies, though it is assuredly very good. My current working theory is that, as a movie version of the pre-existing Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker series Police Squad!, the writers were a smidge too familiar with the material to give it that extra sparkle.

However, please remember that my complaining is completely relative. The Naked Gun is still a damn sight better than most of the mangy pups the studios call comedies nowadays. It’s a relentlessly upbeat marriage of cop movie tropes and zany slapstick, a subversive and ribald genre picture that clearly adores the films it’s skewering. Perhaps my somewhat muted appreciation for this film comes from the intoxicatingly high level of that Stooge-esque slapstick, a form of comedy that fails to completely resonate with me. But the fact remains that it’s being perpetrated by experts of the craft, and I have nothing but respect for that.

Plus, it’s not like The Naked Gun doesn’t have a dozen other outlets for humor. A ZAZ picture is like an immense pipe organ. The air pressure that builds up can be releases through a huge variety of valves and avenues, but they still coordinate to make beautiful music. Or at least “Yakety Sax.” Among the irresistible subversions of generic clichés (even the partner cop’s own wife calls him “Nordberg”) and general buffoonery (an attempt to kick down a door sends a cop’s leg smashing ineffectively through the paneling) are subtle background gags (a sign on a building that says merely “The Police Station”), sly double entendres, choice celebrity cameos, and just plain inimitable line readings (Ted’s forlorn “Why?” after being hit with a tranquilizer dart).

So, yeah. It’s funny. And it wouldn’t be half as funny as it is without the grave, deadly earnest Leslie Nielsen at the helm. The key to terrific comedy is characters who don’t realize that they’re being funny, and Nielsen’s background in self-serious B-movies (including our very own Prom Night – we can’t escape the Halloween season) perfectly matches him to this kind of material.

Nielsen approaches each and every scene with such confidence and gravitas that it’s incessantly surprising when it all falls to pieces. His performance also keeps the central plot in focus, preventing the attention deficit that oh so frequently scuttles similar parody movies. Or, you know, unfunny wrecks like Meet the Spartans or Vampires Suck that we all thought were the pinnacle of hilarity back in middle school.

The only place where the movie falls truly flat is the baseball stadium finale, which has too many narrative switchbacks to properly follow the plot and acts as a showcase for the film’s least effective gags. At this level, “least effective” would still be funny in any other movie, but here they’re just too typical to match the dizzy heights the film has set for itself.

The bottom line is that The Naked Gun is funny 99 percent of the time. It might not always be funny in ways that I personally appreciate, but that doesn’t prevent it from worthy entry into the pantheon of spoof classics. Surely you can’t object to that.

Rating: 7/10

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

Year: 1982

Director: Carl Reiner

Cast: Steve Martin, Rachel Ward, Carl Reiner

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Rigby Reardon is a private eye investigating the possible murder of the father of a local femme fatale.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is one of my all time favorites comedies. Not only is it a ribald send-up of classic black and white detective flicks, it pits Steve Martin’s Reardon against character from real film noirs, expertly cutting him into footage from scores of old films. It’s not often that you find a spoof comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, and Vincent Price. It’s true they’re not exactly in on the joke, but that’s a killer cast, to say the least.

Though some of the continuity editing is a little shaggy DMDWP’s construction is awe-inspiringly tight, utilizing matching sets, clever dialogue cuts, and blended color schemes to create one continuous, totally viable film. And although some of the comedy does come from structural humor (non sequiturs present in the borrowed dialogue, absurd match cuts), the best thing about it is that it’s genuinely funny in its own right. The spliced-in footage might be a gimmick, but it certainly isn’t what keeps the movie afloat.

Just as film noir exists in a heightened reality where everything dark and grimy about the human condition is amplified tenfold, DMDWP subverts that charged atmosphere, using it as a springboard into the heady heights of ludicrous absurdity. The movie bends the rules of reality, making every act – from brewing a pot of java to flirting with a woman to talking about cleaning women – a bold triumph of ecstatic silliness.

And my oh my is it startlingly lewd. Maybe some of the raunchier jokes just seem amplified by the film’s apparent vintage, but either way they work like gangbusters. Just like Leslie Nielsen, Steve Martin’s über-serious work here informs the hyperbolic parody, though he’s certainly a touch more aware of himself as evidence by his mugging for the camera. Luckily he finds a counterbalance in Rachel Ward (of Night School – thank you, Halloween spirit), whose every word drips with sheer, oblivious sincerity. Perhaps that might be all she’s capable of, but boy does it every work wonders in this particular context.

The humor of DMDWP is sterling and pretty much untouchable, but the film’s not entirely flawless. In the second act, it gets a little too caught up in its own mystery. The joking abates for brief periods while it delicately lays out its oddly complex system of clues and suspects like they’re fragile china on a tea tray. Because of the sheer mass of threads and characters plucked from other movies, the storyline never quite makes sense, and the intricate algorithm required to keep them glued together only mucks up the narrative works something fierce.

The film settles down once it simplifies itself again in the finale, but for a while, it’s merely a string of funny gags dangling precariously from a single loose plot thread. But damn are those gags entertaining as hell. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is an utterly singular comedy that, if you haven’t seen it, I’m marvelously proud to have introduced you to. Go to it now. I want to kiss this movie with every lip on my face.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1220

Bore Of The Worlds

Year: 2015

Director: Tim Johnson

Cast: Jim Parsons, Rihanna, Steve Martin

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

I am neither a child nor a drunk frat guy. As such, farts utterly fail to amuse me. If you disagree with this sentiment, please feel free to skip the rest of this review and go play Call of Duty. If you are a child, feel free to win. Knock those frat guys down a peg, why don't you?

Home, according to people who are far more educated on the topic than me, found DreamWorks Animation on a precipice. The studio that brought us Shrek and How to Train Your Dragon has fallen upon hard times and the success of the company hinged upon the box office take of a little film starring a pop star and that annoying nerd from Big Bang Theory. 2015 isn't exactly the Golden Age of animation.

Luckily for the studio and B-level animation fans everywhere, Home pulled its weight in the theatrical market. Unluckily for just about everyone, it's probably the most listlessly generic family comedy in a generation. In the wake of genuinely intelligent and entertaining kiddie fare like The Lego Movie and Big Hero 6, perhaps it just seems more egregiously wan that it truly is. But the case remains that the film is nothing but a prattling, pop music-shilling wisp, providing naught but the most base level quality at every turn.

"Kids love adorable sidekicks, right? Why not give the little bastards two? That'll really get them buying plushies. Hey Dave, quit hogging the Spray Cheez." - Some DreamWorks Executive, probably

Home tells the story of Oh (Jim Parsons), a small purple Boov. The Boov are an alien race that excel at one thing: running away. After their cowardly Captain Smeck (Steve Martin on Dramamine) panics at a treaty meeting and accidentally steals a valuable stone from their enemy the Gorg, they must find a new place for their race to hide. The solution? A little blue marble known as Earth covered in a self-destructive, hairy scourge known as the human race.

The Boov rampage the planet with their superior technology, relocating humanity to a planned living community in Australia. Honestly, it sounds kind of nice. There's no work to be done, and an amusement park made of ice cream dominates the landscape. But Home was made in America, so this socialist utopia is obviously unspeakably evil. Thanks, Obama.

When Oh accidentally sends a housewarming e-vite to the Gorg (a note to developers: maybe rethink that function in the next focus meeting), the Boov scramble to prevent their nemesis from finding their new hiding place. Oh becomes a fugitive and forms an unlikely team with the renegade human child Gratuity "Tip" Tucci (Rihanna), who just wants to find her mother (Jennifer Lopez), who was stolen from her during the Boov invasion.

On their journey together, Oh discovers that uniformity and cowardice shouldn't be his only tenets in life, and Tip discovers that they're both outcasts, learning that she is too keen on pushing people away. "The power of friendship" and "beauty isn't skin deep" and all that great stuff. Hooray!

"Never trust a guy with a mustache."

There are numerous film-breaking problems with Home, not the least of which is its devastatingly ugly animation style. The humans are nothing more than glassy-eyed Pop! Vinyl figurines, and the Boov are just unrendered Play-Doh excretions. Its dully functional narrative harbors exactly zero surprises, and the apocalyptic profusion of Rihanna singles that peppers the film renders it nothing more than a schizophrenic concept album. 

Especially in the first half, the muslin thin plot is torn to bits by odious slapstick, an alarming wealth of low rent scatological humor, and the utterly mystifying grammatical construction of the Boov dialect, which is something like a dyslexic Yoda being smothered with a thesaurus. It is perfunctory, feeble, and distractingly inconsistent. You're telling me that the Boov have such a mastery of human culture that they regularly fall to pieces at a terrible "Busta Rhymes" pun, but are unable to comprehend what a high five is? 

OK, that one is nitpicky, but give me a break. Maybe don't have a character wear a tire as a hat, then make a pun revealing that he knows exactly what function the object affixed to his cranium truly serves. It's damn sloppy is what it is, and I won't stand for it.

Though maybe the film in which a car runs on a Slurpee machine shouldn't be analyzed with a fine-toothed comb.

OK, despite my unbridled anger at that tire thing, Home isn't exactly the Marquis du Sade of children's movies. There's enough in there to be at least remotely entertaining, and the comedy does pick up once the endless setup flatulates its way offscreen. It's still generally broad and unenthusiastic, but several lines are gutbusters with a remarkably mature outlook on the world.

There's also some genuinely decent world building, especially regarding the clever design of Boov technology, which is generally soft and round with an efficient and engaging functionality, using a consistent and aesthetically pleasing bubble motif. And the "camera" engages with the material, creating motion more often than not, indicating that at least somebody cared about the film (for the record, it's not me).

And the voice cast is decent: Parsons and Martin milk their personas for exactly as much as they're worth nowadays, and Rihanna gives a performance that isn't exactly memorable, but is certainly more than anybody could have thought her capable of. Likewise, the film's commitment to diversity and racial representation is impossible to overlook.

The cherry on top? There's exactly one memorable image in the film. That's not necessarily a plus, but it's a doozy, and it's one I'll be thinking about for a long time to come. So there's that.

All in all, the film as a whole is pleasant enough, but it's nothing to write home about. And that pun is better than about 75 percent of the movie, so you're welcome.

Peace.

TL;DR: Home is a tragically generic, relentlessly mercenary kiddie picture, but it has at least a couple moments of real entertainment.

Rating: 5/10

Should I Spend Money On This? I'd say no. It's already earned enough to save DreamWorks and prove that minority protagonists are viable in the market, so save your hard-earned cash. And also I'm sorry for the delay in getting this review out. I'm a busy boy.

Word Count: 1083