A few years ago, I informed my children that I no longer
wished to receive birthday presents, but instead, in lieu of a gift, I wanted a
selected “Birthday Treat”, wherein each of them would do something with me, just me and them, either the two of them together
or individually. Last year, the three of
us attended a ten A.M. screening of Les
Miserables, where we hummed along and cried in a near-empty theater. It was one of my greatest birthday presents
ever.
Before she became a Mom, Rachel and I would go for delightful
Santa Monica “Birthday Hikes” after which Rachel would take me to breakfast at Patrick’s Roadhouse, an oceanside diner,
frequented by our former Calleefonya governor
and bodybuilder. This year, working
around the impending arrival of “Baby Brother”, at my request, Rachel will honor
my birthday by providing me with an extensive and much needed Kindle tutorial.
Two months after my actual birthday, it hit me what I wanted
Anna to do with me. I wanted her to take me to see the latest
Muppets movie, The Muppets Most Wanted. I like Muppets movies. Plus, I strategized, if I joined Anna at a
movie she’d have liked when she was twenty years younger, it might make me twenty years younger by contact. At my age, you try anything.
The “Birthday Treat” itinerary had us seeing the movie
(Anna’s treat), having lunch, and then hanging together out at her new
house. Better than a new pair of socks? Are you kidding me?
I have a peripheral “non-connection” with the Muppets. In the late seventies, I was asked if I
wanted to spend six months in London (where it was produced), writing The Muppets Show. I said no, partly because at the time I had a
job I enjoyed at the Mary Tyler Moore Company, partly because I did not want to
trade employment certainty for “What if I couldn’t do it and they fired me?”, and
partly because I was at the beginning of a situation that would ultimately
become a marriage, and I did not think that a six-month separation would be
beneficial to the relationship. Who
knows what would have happened if hadn’t stuck around to remind her what I
catch I was!
Besides, I had some hard feelings against the Muppets. In the mid-seventies, they beat me out for an
Emmy for writing a Lily Tomlin
Special. I mean, I had rented a tuxedo
and everything! And I got aced out by some colorful pieces of
felt!
I always appreciated the Muppets, all the way back to
“M’nah-m’nah” and “You Gotta Put Down The Ducky (If You Want To Play The Saxophone.)” Their unique recipe of savvy, silly and
anarchy resonated with my personal tastes in entertainment. (And life.)
And so, I selected seeing The Muppets Most Wanted as my “Birthday Treat.” Anna was free that Sunday morning, her husband
Colby was away on a business trip in Korea (he’s a products engineer for Samsung) so I was not taking her away
from anybody, Anna said okay, so off we went!
The following critique takes nothing away from that
experience, which was sublime. Every Poppa-pampering second of it.
Three of four paragraphs ago, I mentioned “The Recipe”,
although not in capital letters. To me,
“The Recipe” is everything. (And thus deserving of capital letters. And quotation marks.)
“The Recipe” involves the careful blending of specific
ingredients in specific proportions. The
closeness to Perfection is the ultimate consequence of that recipe.
The 2011 Jason Segal The
Muppets got really close. (Of course, Segal had practice, staging the
puppet opera in Forgetting Sarah Marshall
{2008}). The Muppets offered a winning combination of exquisitely blended
ingredients, delivering a Hensonian- worthy recreation of goofiness and
heart.
The Muppets
writer-director team “got it” – meaning they successfully channeled “The Muppet
Way” of doing things, and it worked magnificently. (Also memorable in the Muppets ouevre is The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984), if
only for its universal observation that “Pipples is pipples.” But, of course, Henson was still available for that one.)
The current The
Muppets Most Wanted includes all the ingredients, and is unquestionably
entertaining. But the people who put it
together do not quite, in my view, have the “touch.” (Which, it now occurs to me, is interesting,
because the film’s plot is about a “counterfeit.”)
An insufficiency of blending can unsettle “The Recipe.” Though the requisite elements may all be present
and accounted for, in The Muppets Most
Wanted you can almost taste each ingredient individually. It’s like a Shepherd’s Pie where the peas are
separate from the carrots are separate from the beef are separate from the
potatoes.
“Okay, we have action.
Now let’s put in some comedy. Now
a “pinch” of anarchy. Oh yeah, and some
‘heart.’”
The result is a confection that is – although not deal-breakingly
so – less than the sum of its previously successful parts.
One of my favorite kinds of jokes is a clever observation
that you didn’t see coming. I recall
only one of those in The Muppets Most
Wanted. During a fight scene in a
British cathedral, something gets tossed through an overhead stained-glass window,
following which, the minister (played by Frank Langella), in regards to the shattered
cathedral window, unhappily observes,
“That’s only eight
hundred years old.”
There needed to be more of that, and there wasn’t.
It also appeared to me that some of the performers in the
movie “got it” and some of them didn’t. Tiny
Fey got it. Ty Burrell (who I usually
don’t care for in Modern Family) got
it as well.
Surprisingly, however, Ricky Gervais did not. Gervais appears “inconvenienced” by having to
participate in the movie, and even more annoyed by being required to play “Second
Fiddle” to a notorious “Kermit” look-alike.
(Apparently he didn’t enjoy
being upstaged by a piece of felt either.)
Overall…you know how you go to a concert of The Platters but it’s not the real Platters anymore?
That’s what this
felt like. The gold-lame jumpsuits are the
same. But nothing authentic inside them.
Fortunately, my companion sparklingly injected what The Muppets Most Wanted was missing.
And I departed my “Birthday Treat” beaming.
As I am at this very moment, recalling the experience.
2 comments:
Sounds like a great way to spend your b-day, regardless of the movie. Wish my daughter lived close enough to go out w/me once a year.
Just saw The Book Thief - superb movie. The 13 yr old lead actress - the 'thief' - Sophie Nelisse, was excellent. She is a French-Canadian actress who won a Genie and Jutra awards as best supporting actress in the movie, "Monsieur Lazhar" - at the age of 10. Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson also star. Both are also excellent. Interestingly, the film is narrated by Death.
The film is based on a novel and is not based on a true story.
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