Like
everyone else my age, the Muppets have a lot of nostalgia value for me. And although this film opened to mixed
reviews, I was just curious to see what the Muppets were up to now, for good or
bad.
Actually truth
be told, I enter into any Muppet movie with low expectations. Although I have a lot of fond childhood
memories of the Muppets, I’ve also been disappointed by them a number of
times. They’ve done some good movies
over the years, but they’ve also done a lot of bad movies.
Even back
in their golden age, their original TV show could be very hit or miss. Some of their best sketches could be wildly
imaginative, bizarre, or, delightfully subversive. But the show could just as easily suddenly
swing into saccharine sweet mode, with an over-reliance on sentimentality and clichéd
life lessons. The movies have
continued and amplified these flaws.
This film
continues the Muppet tradition. There
are moments of brilliance in this movie, but it also gets sentimental at
places, and completely ruins its own momentum.
As a result, parts of the movie can get boring, but the worst thing that
can be said about it is that it simply shares the faults of its
predecessors.
Now that
the movie is over, there were enough funny moments that I’m inclined to
remember it fondly over all, even if I did get a little bored while I was
watching it.
Things I Liked About
the Movie
* It’s not the
first Muppet movie to engage in meta-humor, but the meta-humor was cute here
nonetheless. The movie engages in
countless clichés, like the round-up montage, but at least it has the good
grace to make fun of itself while it does this.
And the clichéd plot can almost be forgiven because the characters
acknowledge it’s a cliché. (One of the
characters goes as far to point out that his whole speech must be exposition
that will later become important in the plot, because otherwise there will be
no point in including it in the movie.)
* My favorite parts of the movie were the sketches from the
Muppet variety show at the end. My only
complaint was that it was too short.
This was clearly one of the movie’s strengths, so it should have been
expanded into more sketches.
Things I Didn’t Like
* Mostly just the excessive sap and sentimentality.
* Arguably the whole concept of centering the plot on a
group of outside characters was questionable, and resulted in less time with
the usual Muppets.
The new
Muppet introduced, Walter, is completely bland and entirely forgettable.
I like Jason
Segel a lot in How I Met Your
Mother, but unfortunately he’s given very few good lines in this
movie. He mostly just plays the
thankless task of playing straight man against the Muppets. (Although since he
wrote the script himself, I suppose he has no-one to blame but
himself.)
But I really
hated was the unnecessary, predictable, and sappy sub-plot about the needy girlfriend
who gets upset because Jason Segel isn’t paying enough attention to
her. She just seemed to exist to add
some unnecessary drama to the script, and I had absolutely nothing invested in
their relationship, so I really didn’t care.
And Other Stuff:
Songs
I know that every children’s movie
must contain some musical numbers,
but sometimes I wonder whether this is supported by market research, or if this
is just flawed conventional wisdom based on what adults think children are supposed
to like.
I remember
as a child I would often get very bored or frustrated with a movie whenever
there were too many songs that stopped the action. I liked all the upbeat songs, but my children’s
attention span could get very frustrated very quickly by too many slow
songs. (Am I going out on a limb here,
or does this resonate with other people?)
Actually as
an adult, I feel much the same way. I
really liked the cheerful upbeat musical number “Life's a Happy Song.” (I even found myself
humming it for the next few days at work.)
But the
rest of the songs were just really slow and hard to sit through.
(But
perhaps I am just speaking for myself, because in spite of the fact that I
thought the song Am I a Man or a Muppet was
really boring and ruined the momentum of the movie, this song was nominated and won all sorts of awards (W)).
The New Muppet
There was some media buzz about a
new Muppet accompanying the release of this movie. Which begs the question: what has happened to
all the other new Muppets over the years?
Remember Clifford from Muppets
Tonight (W) or Bean Bunny from The Jim Henson Hour (W)?
Since this
new Muppet, Walter, doesn’t seem to have any memorable characteristics, my
prediction is he will soon be forgotten just like all the other old-new
Muppets. (His only characteristic is an intense
desire to join the Muppets, and since he accomplished this at the end of the
movie, he no longer has any identifiable characteristics at all.)
Also,
apparently The Jim Henson Hour and Muppets Tonight have also been
retroactively erased from continuity, because this movie gives the impression
that the Muppets have not been performing since their old 1970s TV show.
The Cameos
Pointless celebrity cameos have
always been a Muppet movie tradition.
And by now it’s a well established tradition, so I suppose there’s no
point in debating the merits of it.
(…Except
that it does cause the Muppet movies to age poorly. This movie in particular featured a lot of
cameos from television actors, who traditionally have even less staying power
than the silver screen stars. More
likely than not, children 20 years from now are going to have no idea who most
of these people are.)
Mickey
Rooney and Alan Arkin were fun cameos (and both men have a history of making pointless cameos in other movies, so it was fitting.)
Jack Black
was really funny in his role, and was the best casting choice.
And,
because I’ve been watching way too much TV lately, I was able to
catch actors from Community, Parks and
Recreation, and The Big Bang Theory.
But other
cameos I had no idea who they were. I
had to look it up on Wikipedia to even find out who Selena Gomez and Rico Rodriguez even are.
Was this
movie dipping the bottom of the barrel for celebrity appearances?
Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky: Smoke and Mirrors, or Civil Liberties Under President Obama
and After Bangladesh, labor unions can save lives
and After Bangladesh, labor unions can save lives
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