Archive for category movies
Muppets Now and Forever
Everyone knows there’s a new Muppet movie in cinemas now. The tagline is “MUPPET DOMINATION”, after all. They’re obviously taking no prisoners where publicity’s concerned. It’s the plot of James Bobbin and Jason Segel’s new film The Muppets, too: how to best return these characters from pop cultural obscurity to their rightful position as entertainment icons?
The good news: the movie’s very enjoyable. The concept used to introduce brothers Gary and Walter – one human, one muppet – is a clever one; the songs are mostly great; Jason Segel’s excitement at being surrounded by these puppets is palpable. I laughed, I cried. And yet…
The bad news: the voices are wrong. For the first hour of the movie I cringed every time Fozzie or Piggy spoke. It’s like seeing your favourite band play but hearing a cover song boom out of the speakers. It made me feel a little bit like I was going mad.
This isn’t the first time. When Jim Henson died, and Kermit’s voice changed forever, I remember thinking that maybe the character should’ve been retired. But that’s a selfish thought – why shouldn’t new generations enjoy Kermit, just to spare my feelings? New voices won’t matter to the kids who see the film. That’s how it should be.
It’s harder to take in The Muppets because Frank Oz – the man who gave life to Fozzie and Piggy – is still alive. The fact that Oz was unhappy with the script and worried it didn’t “respect the characters” did affect my viewing experience. Couldn’t they find some way to allay his concerns and get him on board?
It doesn’t always serve art to give creators the final say over their creations. Everyone alive agrees the Star Wars universe would be much improved if someone had found a way to ignore George Lucas’ whims. Everyone except Lucas, anyway.
It comes down to this: what is a muppet? Is it a character that should stay an extension of its creator or creators? Or is a muppet a Robin Hood or a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, kept alive by dozens and dozens of different interpretations by artists good and bad?
(Or, as Homer Simpson once said, a muppet might be “not quite a mop and it’s not quite a puppet… but man! So to answer your question, I don’t know.”)
My favourite new Muppet story isn’t the film. It’s the muppet comic book by Roger Langridge from a few years ago. They mimic the format of the 1970s Muppet Show, keeping its anarchic humour while managing some beautiful character moments. His muppets are pencil-and-ink abstractions of already abstracted foam-and-felt, but they’re absolutely alive.
Ignore the funk revelations of the decade-old Muppets in Space movie. Langridge provides the definitive answer to Gonzo the Great’s true identity, completing an emotional journey that began in 1979’s The Muppet Movie as he sang ‘I’m Going To Go Back There Someday’.
Scooter asks Gonzo: “Tell me… please… what the heck are you??”
And Gonzo replies: “Oh, Scooter. I thought you knew. I’m an artist.”
Time Out Cinema
The Time Out juggernaut recently reached Melbourne, and I’ve been writing features, interviews and the occasional review for them. The best part? While you can still ride your dinosaur to your local newsagent and buy it in print, all its content’s online as well! You can’t search by author if you want to find my stuff, unfortunately, but here are some of my personal highlights spanning the first few issues.
I interviewed writer / director Andrew Haigh about his enormously moving drama Weekend and asked him what movie he finds genuinely romantic.
Inspired by Hugo and The Artist, I wrote about other films that wistfully look back at their own ancestors.
I talked to nomadic French filmmaker Vincent Moon about how his famous ‘Take Away Shows’ capture music in a way that regular concert documentaries can’t.
I reviewed the docos Bill Cunningham New York and Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard.
Something non-film: I profiled the inspirational Father Bob Maguire about 38 years of fighting the good fight.
And my favourite – because it did what all my favourite interviews do and exposed me to a world I’d never really considered before – I was taken on a walking tour of Melbourne’s cinema graveyards:
According to Dean Brandum, the multi-storey car park next to the Forum theatre is “hallowed ground”. It was once the enormous Majestic Theatre, retooled and refurbished as The Chelsea in 1960. By the mid-70s, however, The Chelsea had become Melbourne’s home of exploitation cinema. “Lots of pornography,” says Brandum, “and lots of European horror like Giallo films. The story goes that you could always see more rats than customers.”
Check out Time Out Melbourne here.
The Golden Age of Cinema
I swear, more and more, whenever I visit the cinema something goes wrong with the projection. Bad print, wrong ratio, whatever. I don’t know if it’s getting worse, or if it just seems that way now everyone has big TVs, 5.1 sound, and crisp digital copies waiting at home.
Even ignoring the soft focus and muddy sound of well-watched VHS, I can remember when anything seen outside of a cinema was inevitably cropped. Panned and scanned for 4:3 TVs. It meant faces of less important actors on the sides of the frame were split down the middle. Climactic Leone shootouts were butchered, turning wide shots of two men in the corners of the screen into one man, standing alone, staring at nothing while ominous music played.
I was working at a video store when the first trickle of widescreen VHS copies arrived – for ‘collectors’, of course. I was constantly explaining to customers that they weren’t missing anything under those black bars now at the top and bottom of the screen. In fact, widescreen meant they’d actually be seeing extra footage on the left and right! At least half the time they couldn’t be convinced. They didn’t want to ‘waste’ any of their TV.
And in Australia, watching TV was even worse. We’d get shows months after the rest of the world. One channel stopped playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer halfway through season two, a voiceover announcing that it was the season finale. (Did I say announcing? I meant lying. Lying!) Our networks would ignore the usual TV act breaks to stuff in commercials wherever they liked. When we got shows at all, they were played completely unpredictably: I remember scrabbling for tapes to capture the last two-thirds of shows like Homicide: Life on the Street as they bounced around in ever-changing late night summer slots.
Writing in The Guardian, Peter Preston said that time-shifting has ruined the ‘water-cooler moments’ of collective TV watching. “It sounds somehow empowering as the habit grows,” he says, “but it also leaves you feeling alone…” In the UK and US? Maybe. In the rest of the world, downloading means we can finally be a part of popular culture almost as it happens, and join in the subsequent conversations online.
There are always articles pointing out cinema’s quality is rapidly declining. Mark Harris, in his celebrated GQ piece ‘The Day the Movies Died’, said: “…put simply, things have never been worse.”
Let’s say he’s right. (He’s not, I don’t think, but let’s say he is.) With correct aspect ratios, and multizone DVD players, and cheap imports of foreign films, and TV full-season box sets, and tiny, downloadable subtitles… isn’t this still the best time in history to be a movie fan?
Morgan Spurlock on The American Way
Supersize Me’s Morgan Spurlock is no stranger to brand warfare. (He and Ronald McDonald probably still aren’t speaking.) Spurlock’s new documentary, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, is both about the evils of product placement and entirely funded by product placement. The Guardian just reviewed it, saying “We onlookers seem to be expected to wallow in a kind of knee-jerk indignation that we don’t actually feel” and “For your next trick, Morgan, why not try something less tricksy but a little bit more consequential?”
I interviewed Spurlock about this little while ago for triple j magazine, and found him A) very charming and B) pretty candid about the film’s goals. Here it is.
So this interview is just part of the ‘media impressions’ required by your sponsors, right?
That’s right. You’re complicit in this whole process.
I feel like a DVD extra or something.
You are a walking, talking DVD extra! But it’s not just you. What I love about the film is that it shows you how things are marketed, how that marketing turns into awareness, how that awareness turns into attendance…
In Greatest Movie, we see you getting your Don Draper on and trying to sell the concept to brands. Is this something that comes naturally, or do you hate the business of movie-making?
What I’ve learned is that if you’re going to be in this business, you really need to understand how to manoeuvre in this business. Pitching is one of those things that they don’t teach you in school. You’re thrown into the deep end as a filmmaker when you graduate from college and you’ve got to figure it out. I made it up as I went along.
Your last film, Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden…
Question answered by the way. President Obama, you’re welcome.
…that movie was also a kind of sales pitch, just one for tolerance and understanding. Greatest Story feels different because you’re compromised from the start.
Yeah. That’s part of what makes the film work. You see the corruption take place. After making this, I told people that when you get into business with a brand it’s not a 30% or 40% chance – it’s a 100% chance they’ll somehow infect the content.
“Transparency is the new objectivity”. Do you agree?
I think we live in a time where people have been jerked around and lied to for so long that the new thing is just to not jerk people around and lie to them. To finally say: “You know what? I’m going to do something nuts and tell you the truth.” We’re at the end of that rope, and people are tired of being bullshitted.
Is that really where we’re setting the bar? “I know you’re going to screw me, but at least you’re honest about it”?
Yeah! I think it is! That’s exactly where we are!
The movie shows how everyone has their own line between ‘what’s okay’ and ‘what’s selling out’. Where’s your line?
The line I didn’t want to cross was giving up control of the film. The greatest asset they got out was the movie marketing their products, but the greatest asset I got was the film itself. The minute I gave final cut over to a brand or a company, I compromised my ability to tell the most honest and open story I could.
Did a number of sponsors want final cut?
All of them. Every single contract.
They should at least put more money on the table. “Final cut? Ten million dollars!”
I would happily have given it to them for ten million dollars.
Are you worried the film makes product placement seem sort of fun and harmless?
There was a great thing that happened after the premiere of the movie at Sundance. We got a standing ovation for the brands. It was one of the most insane things you’d ever seen. A woman came up to one of the brand representatives and said “First I want to thank you, all your companies, for supporting this movie. I’m going to buy more of your products because you did – but I’m conflicted about it.” Luckily the irony wasn’t lost on her. And I hope that when people watch the movie, just like her, the irony of the situation isn’t lost.
While a lot of the doco is funny, I found the last ten minutes strangely moving, especially with that OK Go song rising up behind it.
What I love about the film is how it comes full circle. Everything I’m critiquing at the beginning of the movie are the tools I’m using to market the film at the end. So you see the snake eating its tail. The lyrics of that OK Go song are “We solved all our problems with bigger problems”. That’s the American way.
This interview first appeared in triple j magazine #53.