Disney's The Muppets

One for the kids...written at the time of the film's release.


"Of Muppets and Meat-Puppets"
or
"Old Feelings Being Felt"

Back in the 1980's Lord Lew Grade made a ton of green with the syndicated "The Muppet Show," which took Jim Henson's cast of characters and had them stage a show in an abandoned theater every week, with practically every bi-ped celebrity host imaginable, ranging anywhere from Bob Hope to Johnny Cash, with the only possible exception being that of Steve Jobs.

Now it's the 2010's and (as the joke goes) not only do we have no Jobs, but no Cash and no Hope. But, at least we have legs. Pity the poor Muppets; they can't stand straight without somebody's arm supporting them!  Subsequently falling on hard times, with the prospect of their old theater being acquired and demolished for mineral rights by a greedy oil cowboy named Tex Richman (Chris Cooper, once again channeling his inner Shrub), Kermit the Frog (Steve Whitmire) must get the gang together to try and save the theater and protect the very integrity of the name "Muppet."  He has unlikely allies—Gary (SNL's Jason Segel, who co-wrote the hyper-joked, "fourth" wall-exploding screenplay with Nicholas Stoller) and Mary (Amy Adams, who is as goofily inspired in this as she was in Disney's Enchanted), who get mixed up in the plan because of Gary's devotion to his brother Walter (Peter Linz), who was born...a muppet.

Okay, okay, already the movie is straying into terri-story that has some under-pinnings of life-lessons to them.  Plug "muppet" into the "Mad-Libs" space where "developmental challenge" or "specified minority" would go, and you have a nicely anarchic spin to the usual "inspiring" story that...well, a studio like Disney likes to make every now and again. But, Disney always does best when it thinks "outside of the castle" and by re-tooling the Muppets for 21st Century kids* (and their parents who watched them in the 1980's), using Segel and Stoller's less-than-respectful approach to Muppets, mores and movies, a slightly hipper slew of cameos, and the musical supervision of Bret McKenzie (the part of "Flight of the Conchords" that is not Jemaine, and the songs are instantly identifiable as "Conchord" material), it has managed to breath new life into the franchise, while maintaining the integrity of the characters...and Henson's basic art-concepts of marionette-puppetry without resorting to CGI cheating. It's like watching a favorite performer make the artistic jump from vaudeville to a more challenging medium.**

It's easily the best of the Muppet movies, including (uh...) The Muppet Movie which this film makes loving tribute to. I still remember the fascination that first film had for me, being googly-eyed with puppetry at a young age and following Henson's first experimental work in the 1960's and marveling at how he was always pushing the form.*** With Henson's death in 1990 (it's been that long?), and the burgeoning directing career of fellow Muppeteer Frank Oz, the Muppet entity collapsed in on itself somewhat, as those two personalities (and accompanying arms) were the spines that kept the Muppets upright. 

But, this film gives one hope (even if Bob is gone) that the Muppets are in—and on—good hands. This film would be hilarious even without the Muppets, with the scripters and director James Bobin having a fine time playing with the concepts and the whole movie-musical world, and doing so very economically. All it takes is one shot for them to skewer or explain away a movie-magic cliché (a particular favorite—the end of a rousing musical number when the principals leave the screen and the dancers and extras hear "Okay, they're gone" and collapse in an exhausted heap), then move on to the next joke.

Everything works, and there's enough material seen in images and bits of trailers that didn't make it into the movie to assure that only the best stuff made it into the movie, with no "down"-time. It's solidly entertaining, fresh and funny, with surprises around every corner. It's not easy being green, but it's extraordinarily hard to re-boot a franchise when the principals can't even wear boots..and don't have a leg to stand on. The Muppets is highly recommended...for everybody.

You knew something was up, when this rather surprising trailer first appeared.

And only the most churlish could roll their eyes at the way the stars were "revealed."

* It's rated "PG" (so as not to kill a more generalized audience than toddlers, I presume).  But, the only things I thought might warrant the rating was Fozzie Bear's invention of "fart-shoes" to generate cheap laughs, and the mere suggestion that Miss Piggy's "replacement" might be a transvestite (in itself a great joke and another instance of the movie "taking chances").

** And, really, are "The Muppets" any different from The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello and other vaudevillians?  It's why stage performers worked so seamlessly with them and why they match the "our heroes against the world" formula of such movies.  They also faced the same danger—being pigeon-holed into formula films that ill-suited them.  A Muppet Christmas Carol?  It was only a matter of time before The Muppets Go West!

*** Parents, don't let your kids read this asterisk!  One of the things about The Muppet Movie that I loved was seeing how Henson and crew moved their critters with hidden people attached to them out of the world of medium close-up into full-figured reality without missing a beat, like watching Kermit ride a bicycle (a simple employment of marionette techniques)...or the opening number, which featured Kermit playing a banjo sitting on a log in the middle of a real water-filled lake.  Hey, he's a frog, it's only natural (well, except for playing the banjo).  But, think of it, the puppeteer (actually two of them, one of whom was undoubtedly Henson himself, who "played" Kermit) had to be submerged in a water-tank to pull off that sequence.  It cemented for me the fact that the Muppets and movies were made for each other—both arts depend entirely on what is in the frame and what isn't to pull off the illusion of reality.

Despicable Me

Written at the time of the film's release and before I developed my distaste for Minions. 

 
"Assemble the Minions!"

You can't swing a pixelated bug-eyed cat in a multi-plex these days without hitting a new digi-toon, being ground out like so many linked sausages, but with different degrees of quality.  The technology is now such that the makers no longer have to worry about working around the complexities of the images; such strides have been made in the field over the last 15 years that the work approaches photo-realism, if that is the intention of the pixel-wranglers. What is exciting now, with the constraints no longer a factor, is seeing what the various creators around the world DO with it, and the visions that they create, whether their source be in the world or the mind. Now that reality is no longer a problem, the makers of these visions can effectively throw it away.

So, here's Despicable Me.  You've been seeing the trailers for months, and for me, the impression has been a little "meh." Oh, the comic timing has been crack and the sensibility behind them a little twisted. But, whether that translated to a 90 minute feature is always the $20 million dollar question.

And Despicable Me is terrific. Frequently laugh out-loud funny, with breathless timing and a constant willingness to push the envelope in technology and story-telling. Sure, it has the obvious arc of a children's story, and you know how things will turn out, but the journey is the fun thing.

Gru (Steve Carell) is a "Fester-ish" super-villain on hard times. Oh, sure, he's not exactly hiding out in some super-secret headquarters somewhere—he only drives vehicles that pollute outrageously with a maximum of sparks and smoke, his is the only house in the neighborhood painted in dark, dingy colors and furnitured with Bondian uber-tech and stuffed animal corpses. Underneath is a vast gleaming complex linked by pneumatic tubes and what look like habi-trails, kept running by what appear to be thousands of animated twinkies.*He may seem like a villain who has everything (and what he doesn't have, he can obtain by ice-shackling the person who does with his "freeze-ray"), but there's a new villain named Vector (Jason Segel, voicing a character who's equal parts Bill Gates and Phil Silvers) who's just topped everybody by stealing one of the Pyramids. Good score. And the Bank of Evil ("formerly Lehman Brothers") likes the reaching entrepreneur with enough gall to think big when it comes to crime (call it "professional courtesy"), so they'll only dispense loans to those baddies with outlandish schemes. There's no greater "out-land" than The Moon, and so Gru sets his sights on it—a dream he's held since it was first pa-shawed by his crank of a Mum (Julie Andrews, wickedly unrecognizable).

But, you need a plan.  And his involves orphans ("We got adopted by a bald guy...I thought it would be more like Annie"), a "Spy vs. Spy"-style industrial espionage plot, and...cookie-robots.

The thing is witty in look and happenstance: the people are bulbously malleable as in The Incredibles, and the sets have a Burtonesque retro-engineering feel to them, but because the animation is done in France, the flow and pace, and attention to detail, is quite unlike things state-side, making it intriguing and refreshing. The voice-actors are spot-on by being nearly impenetrably unidentifiable...you won't recognize Will Arnett, or Kristen Wiig (two of my favorite comic actors of the moment) or Russell Brand, and Steve Carell's Gru is an amazing comic performance featuring crack timing, muttered asides and a nicely Slavic accent that tortures its way through idioms. 

And I love the buried movie references, little echoes of the past that tweak the unconscious, be they from It's a Wonderful Life, The Wrath of Khan, The Empire Strikes Back, or The Godfather (the last is so wickedly placed, I couldn't believe the writers were so sick to think of it). But, it's all done with its heart in the right place and a warmth of spirit tough to find in movies these days. It'll yank your heart strings to a ridiculously cartoonish length and never let them go.  This is one for the whole family, even though the parents will need to do a bit of explaining along the way (some of the jokes will just sail past the heads of kids, which is always a sign of a good cartoon).

I saw Despicable Me in 2-D, but it might actually benefit a 3-D screening, especially for the end-title sequence where the Minions attempt to bridge the gap between the screen and the audience—a hilarious concept that's a bit mind-blowing when you think of it (and evidently there's a phone app that allows you to translate what they're saying during it—will wonders never cease?).

* Called "Minions," they have all sorts of uses and are voiced by the co-directors and "Flight of the Conchords" Jemaine Clement.  Yee-es.

Despicable Me

Written at the time of the film's release.

"Assemble the Minions!"

You can't swing a pixelated bug-eyed cat in a multi-plex these days without hitting a new digi-toon, being ground out like so many linked sausages, but with different degrees of quality.  The technology is now such that the makers no longer have to worry about working around the complexities of the images; such strides have been made in the field over the last 15 years that the work approaches photo-realism, if that is the intention of the pixel-wranglers.  What is exciting now, with the constraints no longer a factor, is seeing what the various creators around the world DO with it, and the visions that they create, whether their source be in the world or the mind.  Now that reality is no longer a problem, the makers of these visions can effectively throw it away.

So, here's Despicable Me.  You've been seeing the trailers for months, and for me, the impression has been a little "meh."  Oh, the comic timing has been crack and the sensibility behind them a little twisted.  But, whether that translated to a 90 minute feature is always the $20 million dollar question.

And Despicable Me is terrific.  Frequently laugh out-loud funny, with breathless timing and a constant willingness to push the envelope in technology and story-telling.  Sure, it has the obvious arc of a children's story, and you know how things will turn out, but the journey is the fun thing.

Gru (Steve Carell) is a "Fester-ish" super-villain on hard times.  Oh, sure, he's not exactly hiding out in some super-secret headquarters somewhere—he only drives vehicles that pollute outrageously with a maximum of sparks and smoke, his is the only house in the neighborhood painted in dark, dingy colors and furnitured with Bondian uber-tech and stuffed animal corpses. Underneath is a vast gleaming complex linked by pneumatic tubes and what look like habi-trails, kept running by what appear to be thousands of animated twinkies.* He may seem like a villain who has everything (and what he doesn't have, he can obtain by ice-shackling the person who does with his "freeze-ray"), but there's a new villain named Vector (Jason Segel, voicing a character who's equal parts Bill Gates and Phil Silvers) who's just topped everybody by stealing one of the Pyramids. Good score.  

And the Bank of Evil ("formerly Lehman Brothers") likes the reaching entrepreneur with enough gall to think big when it comes to crime (call it "professional courtesy"), so they'll only dispense loans to those baddies with outlandish schemes. There's no greater "out-land" than The Moon, and so Gru sets his sights on it—a dream he's held since it was first pa-shawed by his crank of a Mum (Julie Andrews, wickedly unrecognizable).

But, you need a plan. And his involves orphans ("We got adopted by a bald guy...I thought it would be more like Annie"), a "Spy vs. Spy"-style industrial espionage plot, and...cookie-robots.

The thing is witty in look and happenstance: the people are bulbously malleable as in The Incredibles, and the sets have a Burtonesque retro-engineering feel to them, but because the animation is done in France, the flow and pace, and attention to detail, is quite unlike things state-side, making it intriguing and refreshing. The voice-actors are spot-on by being nearly impenetrably unidentifiable...you won't recognize Will Arnett, or Kristen Wiig (two of my favorite comic actors of the moment) or Russell Brand, and Steve Carell's Gru is an amazing comic performance featuring crack timing, muttered asides and a nicely Slavic accent that tortures its way through idioms. 

And I love the buried movie references, little echoes of the past that tweak the unconscious, be they from It's a Wonderful Life, The Wrath of Khan, The Empire Strikes Back, or The Godfather (the last is so wickedly placed, I couldn't believe the writers were so sick to think of it). But, it's all done with its heart in the right place and a warmth of spirit tough to find in movies these days. It'll yank your heart strings to a ridiculously cartoonish length and never let them go. This is one for the whole family, even though the parents will need to do a bit of explaining along the way (some of the jokes will just sail past the heads of kids, which is always a sign of a good cartoon).

I saw Despicable Me in 2-D, but it might actually benefit a 3-D screening, especially for the end-title sequence where the Minions attempt to bridge the gap between the screen and the audience—a hilarious concept that's a bit mind-blowing when you think of it (and evidently there's a phone app that allows you to translate what they're saying during it—will wonders never cease?).

* Called "Minions," they have all sorts of uses and are voiced by the co-directors and "Flight of the Conchords" Jemaine Clement.  Yee-es.