The Muppets-2 – Press Play Video Blog

OSCARS DEATH RACE: THE MUPPETS

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Fearless Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is making it her mission to watch every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey her Oscars Death Race. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]

I loved the Muppets as a kid — The Muppet Show is one of the few programs my parents' ambitious first-child rules about TV would allow — and I remember them fondly. But I had misgivings about The Muppets going in, for two reasons. The first is that, while I like Jason Segel, he works better for me as a seasoning and not the main course.

The second reason, which I admit knowing full well that this is the internet equivalent of climbing Wolf Mountain wearing a steak suit, is that I don't like Miss Piggy, at all. I never did. The "hiiiii-YA!", the "moi," the Scarlett-O'Hara-class come-here-go-away nonsense with Kermit: no thanks. If it was always intended as a meta commentary on high-strung actresses or something, well, my bad, but I don't care for it.

I didn't care for The Muppets either, and Miss Piggy is kind of a bitch in it but it isn't her fault (or Segel's; he fully commits to Gary and his various soppy subplots). It's the storyline about Walter, Gary's Muppet brother and world's biggest Muppets fan, finding his place in the world and believing in himself and whatnot — a perfectly functional concept whose execution here is problematic. Again, Gary (a human) and Walter (a Muppet) grew up together. Gary is apparently around 30, which would put Walter in his late 20s, probably, and yes, it's a kids' movie, but what's up with their still sharing a twin-beds Bert-and-Ernie domicile? If that's the house they grew up in, what became of their parents? This isn't even getting into the arrested-development issues Gary's having: son, you don't keep a girlfriend played by Amy Adams waiting ten years for a ring. She teaches a car-repair class, in a circle skirt and pumps! Also, she's Amy Adams. I know that's the point, but the problem here…is that it's Amy Adams. (She's charming in the film, in spite of the "it's me or the dog" bit she has to play.)

And then you find yourself troubled with all these larger existential questions about Muppet aging — they split up how long ago? Which makes them how old now? Are they…old old? The Eighties-Robot gag is okay (I enjoyed visiting with vintage soda-can fonts), but then you can't stop wondering how we're meant to understand "Muppet years" and whether they can die or they just get unstuffed or what.

And then you down a half-inch of bourbon and wander back to your point, and here it is: the movie treats Walter like he's still a child. That doesn't really line up timing-wise, and Walter is just kind of a wet end in the second place. It's great that he finds his people (well, "people"), and he's a hell of a whistler, but that subplot draaaaags. The main plot, in which the Muppets must reunite to save their theater from an evil land developer (Chris Cooper, who tries heroically, but I hope he fired his agent after he had to rap), is also a foregone conclusion, but between the meta jokes from Waldorf and Statler about how they're announcing plot points; the Scandinavian diacritical marks on the Chef's subtitles; the Chiba-esque credits sequence for kidnapping Jack Black; and sundry cameos, that story is more spritely. The Walter stuff that felt shoehorned in for children/people unfamiliar with the franchise felt damp and simplistic.

The nominated song, "Man or Muppet," is why we're all here. It's not good, and not just because forces Walter to sing that he's "a very manly Muppet." Blech. Still, expect to see Mr. The Frog up at the podium on Oscar night.

Sarah D. Bunting co-founded Television Without Pity.com, and has written for Seventeen, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon, Yahoo!, and others. She's the chief cook and bottle-washer at TomatoNation.com. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here.

VIDEO SLIDE SHOW: The Muppets’ greatest hits

After Jim Henson’s death, the Muppet troupe spent a couple of decades wandering the pop culture wilderness, trying but mostly failing to get in touch with the magic that once fueled their popularity. They got a big step closer two winters ago, when “Muppet Bohemian Rhapsody,” their first hit viral video, debuted on YouTube. This week they’ve got their first big-screen hit in almost three decades, The Muppets, written by and co-starring comic actor and Henson obsessive Jason Segel. “It bumbles along episodically from one thing to the next — hey-ho! — and captures the spirit of Henson’s Muppet Show admirably,” writes my colleague Andrew O’Hehir.

The key to their success is the same one that fueled the success of the classic Warner Bros. characters and Matt Groening’s The Simpsons: the ability to appeal to several age groups at once. Kids laugh at the pratfalls and silly voices. Adults chuckle at the literary references, pop culture in-jokes, puns and innuendo coded just cleverly enough to go over children’s heads.

You can read the rest of Matt's piece here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is TV critic for Salon and publisher of Press Play.

Jason Segel’s THE MUPPETS proves it’s time for Kermit & Co. to pack it in

In his effort to revitalize the brand, Jason Segel exposes his fondness for the Muppets as boldly as he exposed his naked body in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. No hidden agendas here, The Muppets is packed with full-frontal nostalgia that suggests not just Segel’s desire to relive the magic of yesteryear but also his fervent belief that the Muppets’ charms can cast an equally powerful spell today. The Muppets, which Segel co-wrote with Nicholas Stoller, opens with an outright appreciation of The Muppet Show and the not so subtle implication that Segel spent his childhood feeling as if the Muppets were part of his family. If you’re a hardcore fan and realize how much the brand’s spirit has strayed from its roots since Jim Henson’s death in 1990, this is exactly the kind of opening you want to see, and it’s equally encouraging when, not much later, Segel’s Gary and his brother Walter (a Muppet performed by Peter Linz) break into song. The film’s rousing opening number, “Life’s a Happy Song,” captures some of the cherished Henson-era optimism and sweetness in its title alone, and the lyrics have a casually playful absurdity to them that feels just right. But the capper is a massive dance routine at the end of the song, when the citizens of Smalltown, USA, come flooding into the frame to form a leg-kicking, jazz-handsing chorus, creating a spectacle that would rank among the all-time greatest Muppet moments if not for one small problem. None of them are Muppets.

For a guy who so clearly gets the Muppets, Segel should be the first person to realize how utterly un-Hensonian this is. Henson’s Muppet movies are full of big musical performances, but always with the Muppets at the center of the action. In The Great Muppet Caper alone, there’s the black-tie dance sequence that includes Miss Piggy tap-dancing, the synchronized swimming number, also starring Piggy, and “Couldn’t We Ride,” with the whole crew on bicycles. The thrill of these Henson numbers is their audaciousness, the way Henson dared to make the Muppets part of the action in scenarios in which it seemed logistically impossible. Segel’s opening dance number takes the opposite approach. One moment Walter and Gary are singing their way through the streets, and the next moment Walter is gone, literally kicked from the frame, never to return until he’s wheeled in on luggage at the very end of the sequence as dozens of humans dance behind him. Audacious? Hardly. And it’s a sign of what’s to come. Segel’s core mistake is to repeatedly push the Muppets to the margins in a movie designed to give them the spotlight. Case in point: Of the more than 20 songs in Henson’s three Muppet movies, only one of them has a non-Muppet performer (“Piggy’s Fantasy” in Caper, in which Kermit vies with a voice-dubbed Charles Grodin, which is part of the joke). Yet of the six original songs in Segel’s film, only one of them is Muppets-only. One.

None of this is to suggest that Segel’s approach to the Muppets isn’t endearing in its own way. But The Muppets speaks to the ability of Segel and Amy Adams (as Gary’s girlfriend Mary) to be Muppet-like as often as it speaks to the appeal of the Muppets themselves. What’s particularly odd about Segel’s reboot, directed by James Bobin, is that it tends to miss most glaringly when trying hardest for the bull’s eye. Midway through the film, for example, the Muppets, who have been gathered together from far and wide to put on the traditional one-last-show, are faced with
cleaning and repairing their decrepit studio. After watching Scooter quietly push a broom for a few unproductive seconds it’s Walter who reminds the Muppets that this is the kind of stuff that they’re supposed to do to music, and he’s right. But Starship’s “We Built This City”? Uh, no. That scene might be intended as Segel’s nod to the Muppets’ recent successes on YouTube, where they covered Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” to hilarious results, but it lacks the Muppets’ own signature. It’s more like an Alvin & The Chipmunks cover: same song, different performers, no reinvention. Thus it smells like surrender, an odor that returns late in the film when the Muppets sing “Rainbow Connection” as the main act of their studio-saving telethon. Make no mistake, watching the gang
perform “Rainbow Connection” is lump-in-the-throat touching and realistic, too (not that the Muppets have ever been about realism), but it comes off like a concession – that the Muppets’ best days are behind them and the most magic we can hope for is an occasional performance of their greatest hits.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe what Segel’s film shows us is that Henson and Frank Oz, the puppeteers extraordinaire who through their voices and hands gave so many of these characters their spirit, are irreplaceable. As disappointing as it can be to watch the Muppets lose their identities in adaptations like The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island, the catch-22 of letting the Muppets be themselves is to be made increasingly aware that, with Henson and Oz gone, most of the performances can be nothing more than imitative. Credit where it’s due, Steve Whitmire’s Kermit is as strong as it's ever been – he’s mastered the subtle finger movements that make Kermit so thoughtful – but Fozzie and Piggy, to name two, are frequently off key, and Rowlf seems to have lost his personality entirely. When the new troupe nails it, as Whitmire and Eric Jacobson do when Kermit and Fozzie have a quiet conversation in hammocks underneath the stars, it warms the soul. But so much of what works in this picture is an allusion to the Henson era (the lens flares that recall The Muppet Movie) or a direct quotation of it (the cover of the “Rainbow Connection”), and as welcome as it is to see banjos hanging on the wall of Kermit’s office or to spot a photograph of the African-mask puppets from Harry Belafonte’s famous performance on The Muppet Show, these little details can make the film feel less like a reinvention for a new generation than like a fantasy camp for the old one.

Segel’s stroke of brilliance with The Muppets, beyond reviving the running gags and meta references that are key to the brand, is to backload the picture with the sort of colorful, chaotic and heartfelt performances that typified The Muppet Show, ensuring that the movie ends on a high note. I’m not sure what the shelf life is for the cover of Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” by about a dozen chickens, but I do know it’s precisely the kind of mischief Henson would be up to if helming The Muppet Show today and that it inspired much of the packed crowd at my screening to break into gleeful rhythmic clapping. Trouble is, so many of these thrills send us backward, not forward, like the goose bump-inducing recreation of The Muppet Show’s opening number, confining the Muppets to retro appeal. In the movie’s greatest shot, one that perfectly blends the familiar and the new, Kermit sits alone backstage, his hand on a small handle that he’ll use to throw open the oval hatch through which he’ll announce the start of the show, looking angst-ridden and full of questions. Will their material hold up? Will anyone come to watch? Will the crowd still love them? Segel’s film makes it clear that the answer to those questions is yes, but we’ve yet to see if someone can return the Muppets to their roots while moving beyond nostalgia. Segel’s film offers hope and also confirms fears.

Maybe the time has come for Kermit and the gang to cede the spotlight, not to eliminate the brand but to preserve it. Maybe the Henson-era characters need to be retired, replaced by Walters, Bobos and Pepes. It’s a tough task, immortality. Then again, part of loving the Muppets is believing in the dream.

Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler and is a regular contributor to Slant Magazine's The House Next Door, coauthoring The Conversations series with Ed Howard. Follow him on Twitter.