The Muppets Take Manhattan

1984 Muppet movie

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: fell asleep, but drowsily said 18/20 when asked; Dylan: 13/20; Emma: 16/20; Abbey: 18/20; Buster: 20/20)

Plot: Kermit and the gang, after the success of a musical production performed at their college, go to the titular borough to try to get the show on Broadway.

Why is more disturbing for me to imagine Kermit (a frog) engaging in coitus with a human female than with a porcine one? Or is it just disturbing that I'm thinking about that at all? Or is it just really disturbing that I have been kept awake at night thinking about it and can't stop myself? This isn't my favorite Muppet movie, but the voice work (50 Muppet characters voiced by 6 guys if my counting is correct) and puppet manipulation is always enough in any Muppet movie to make it worth the time. There's just something exhilarating about seeing these characters on the screen. Usually, it's a more-the-merrier situation, and the climactic big show/wedding scene at the end, with hundreds of Muppets including some recognizable faces from Sesame Street that got Buster excited brought out the giggles. Jen was just excited to see Muppet Babies, so excited that she fell asleep immediately after and started drooling all over the couch while sleep-singing the theme song from that cartoon. As expected, the movie's really funny although not all the gags are going to work. You get the feeling with some of the material that the writers half-expected some of the jokes to be flops though, and that adds to the fun. I also liked the songs in this one.

Here's a list of my favorite Muppets:

1) Dr. Teeth
2) Gonzo
3) Lew Zealand
4) Swedish Chef
5) Animal
6) Floyd, bass guitar
7) Waldorf
8) Statler
9) Zoot, sax player from the Electric Mayhem
10) Kermit
11) Crazy Harry
12) Beaker
13) Sam the Eagle
14) Bunsen
15) Fozzie
16) Janice, the Mayhem guitarist
17) Mahna Mahna
18) Rowlf
19) Rizzo the Rat
20) Beauregard
21) Camilla, Gonzo's chicken girlfriend
22) Scooter
23) Miss Piggy

Am I missing any notable Muppets?

Meet the Feebles

1989 puppet movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: The titular Muppet-esque creatures desperately try to get their variety show ready on schedule, but a variety of issues threaten to derail the whole thing.

This is one of those movies that I want to like more than I actually like. It starts out well enough with a bit glossy impressive theme song. The puppets look great, like creations Jim Henson's people just barely decided to discard. There's a ton of color and personality on the screen as we see the characters on stage for the first time. Then, the whole thing stumbles for about an hour and a half. There's way too many subplots, Peter Jackson (yes, this is what he did before he got Hobbititis) trying to juggle way too many ideas in a movie that is far too weak on main plot. For certain types of people, it'll be a hoot seeing these puppets, like bizarro Muppets, engaging in really bad behavior. The first clue that this thing isn't for children is the first sex scene featuring a little walrus-on-cat action. They're interrupted, and the walrus exclaims, "I was just about to pop my cookies!" It's ridiculously filthy, but it does force you to imagine interesting animal pairings. How would an elephant and a chicken do the deed, for example? For the rest of the movie, the creatures show off their waxy nips, puke, fornicate, smoke, die, shoot up, eat each other, curse, gorge themselves, drool while peeping a rabbit ménage a trois, engage in S&M acts, sniff panties, bleed, perform opera, eat fecal matter, have Vietnam flashbacks, make pornography (nasal pornography), contract sexually-transmitted diseases, projectile vomit, attempt suicide, and perform songs about sodomy. Again, I want to remind you that these are not puppets that you should watch with your children. I can't recall a Muppet ever dying. Lots of the Feebles die, and they die in grotesque meaty ways that only Peter Jackson at this stage in his career can dream up. If a director who seemed to be trying to see just what kinds of lewdness he could get away with doesn't completely scare you away, this might be worth you time. You'll probably never look at puppets the same, however.

Humanoids from the Deep

1980 horror movie

Rating: 9/20

Plot: Damn science! Once again, scientists dick around and accidentally create rampaging monsters. In this case, it's fish men who go around slicing up men with their deadly claws and violating women with their hideous reproductive organs. I guess they should have all listened to the Native American.

This is also, as you can tell from the poster called Monster. But that's not nearly clever enough for a movie made by people who can afford three monster costumes, the amount that is shown on screen at the same time. Yes, this is a cheap production as you'd expect something from Roger Corman to be. But it made up for its cheapness with the half-man/half-fish rape scenes. I mean, you never saw Jaws rape anybody unless you saw that titular beast as the phallic symbol that he was and saw the whole movie as some sort of rape allegory. I kind of liked how the monsters looked in this thing. They had these enormous heads and elongated arms, the latter which I imagine made groping teenagers a lot easier. This movie also has a fantastic ending, one that only sort of looks like it might have been stolen from another (more famous) movie that came out the previous year. And there was a random ventriloquist dummy in this thing as well as a splinters joke that I'm definitely going to be using if I ever get my hands on a ventriloquist dummy. This isn't the worst of these low-budget sci-fi horror hybrids, and the climactic scene where the monsters unleash their fury at a carnival that for whatever reason wasn't cancelled has its moments. And those monsters really do look kind of cool in a very ridiculous way. But this just feels like something we've all seen several times before.

Dummy

2002 romantic comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Steven's a 20-something still living with his parents and sister. When he loses his office job, he decides to buy a doll and fulfill his dream of becoming a gastriloquist. While he works on his craft, he befriends a woman at the unemployment office and deals with his nutty friend and his nuttier parents.

Not sure why I didn't see this when it came out since I'm a fan of both ventriloquism and awkwardness. It's a comedy. Don't be thrown off by the poster which shows the titular doll like it's some kind of Chucky-esque horror movie. It's also a pretty funny comedy, one of those with characters so quirky that it would be hard for this to have anything more than a cult following. You've got a dad who builds model battleships while watching pornography, the main character's punk rocker pal played by Milla Jovovich who gives the worst advice ever, and a sister way over her head with a wedding planner business. The latter's played by Illeana Douglas who really does look like she could be Brody's sister. Brody's terrific with the ventriloquism thing, gradually getting better as the movie goes on. He does well with bringing out the puppet's personality which, in a strange way, brings out the personality of his own character. This is almost a coming-of-age movie with a guy in his late 20s. He acts like he's about 12, but he is expressive and nails awkward. Oh, and Jessica Walter is in this, playing a character not far removed from her character on Arrested Development which is fine with me. The story kind of falls apart, going a few places that are a little too unexpected, but there are plenty of low-key funny moments--Milla's punk move when listening to Klezmer music for the first time, the sister's bitchy criticism ("You look like a child molester!"), a magician's act with a rabbit, and Brody's attempt to get his gal in a romantic mood with a little Sousa. Sousa seduction! And "I always look both ways when I cross the street," a line that definitely needs context, is some pretty brilliant writing. If you like your comedy with a full serving of awkward, this one's worth checking out.

Shaye and Kiki: Fun Bubble

2004 compilation

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Shaye Saint John and her charred doll Kiki have a series of mundane and repetitive adventures.

This is a compilation of about thirty short films featuring the titular characters. Here's the character's background: Shaye was a model who was involved in a car accident that disfigured her, so she had to replace a lot of her parts with mannequin parts. Or something like that. Shaye is the creation of performance artist Eric Fournier, now sadly deceased. These shorts definitely fall in the not-for-everybody camp and are alternately hilarious and horrifying. It's a maddening hyperkinetic dada art assault on at least two of your senses. The repetition alone is enough to drive some people batty, but the cheap computer effects, daffy minutia, and often terrifying imagery are what would make things unbearable. In fact, if I ever get the opportunity to prop somebody's eyes open and forcefeed their brain things like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, this is now on the list. I'm not sure if this stuff was created to say anything about society or not. Shaye is shallow enough to match a lot of cultural phenomena in our reality-show culture though, so there might be some lunatic fringe satire going on here. I laughed and probably had a nightmare or two that I don't remember, so I'm considering this thing a success. I mean, there's a scene where Shaye is in a washroom and the creepy doll keeps banging on the window. It's the stuff of nightmares, a scene easily more horrifying than I've seen in any horror movie. And then you get a repetitive scene where Shaye is trying to get a present indoors in the hilarious "Bake, Shake, Explode" which makes me laugh just thinking about it. And Shirley Temple 2000! made me laugh out loud. If you like gams, ever wished that the movie Mannequin was created under the influence of LSD, and like to feel really really uncomfortable when watching movies, this might be for you. Hypnotizing weirdness! One gripe: Grammar problems! Missing apostrophes annoyed me.

Chicken with Plums

2011 movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Renowned violinist Nasser Ali Khan is distraught after his violin is destroyed. Since he's unable to satisfactorily replace the instrument, he decides to retire to his death bed. His wife is unhappy with the decision.

This is a beautiful story, whimsically and imaginatively told. It toys with your emotions a little bit, starting out as a fantasy of sorts before transforming through flashbacks and flash-forwards into something that is borderline devastating. The main character is imperfect, but he's imperfect like most men, especially the artistic ones, and I had no trouble at all connecting with him. Mathieu Amalric is just about perfect in the role and reminds me of a character who belongs in an Aki Kaurismaki movie. Maria de Medeiros plays his wife, juxtaposing mousey with bitchy very well. I thought the name was familiar, and it turns out she was the beauty in Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World. I also liked Golshifteh Farahani. She's got a great face and an even better name. The real star of this show, however, is its flavor. The source material is an Iranian graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, and it's directed by her and Vincent Paronnaud, the same team that put together Persepolis. Unlike that, this is mostly live action, but it's about as close to animation as live action can be. I don't know if it's the graphic novelist's visual sense or what, but there's a style to this that I just loved. An exotic and fantastical world is created from what is really a simple story. There's some magical realism with a shopkeeper's magic wand, a visit from a twenty-foot-tall Sophia Loren, and a visit from the Grim Reaper are more out-there sequences, but even everyday things like the way a bus curves through mountainous roads is displayed in a way that makes this seem like it comes from a fairy tale. There are some cartoonish special effects that don't come close to adding to any realism but still manage to fit. There's also some stylistic variety in a hilarious black and white flashback where a teacher compares the main character to his brother and encourages his classmates to boo him and a flash-forward where an animated version of the protagonist's son shoots a buffalo out of the sky before the story morphs into a sitcom that might poke fun at the United States a little bit. There's a variety with the animation styles used, too. And there are puppets, and as my regular 4 1/2 readers could tell you, I'm a sucker for puppets. Again, this isn't all whimsy and surreal vignettes. There's a heart to this movie--"The love you lost will be in each note you play."--and it hit me just right.

I think fans of Amelie might like this.

Is There Sex After Death?

1971 sex comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Dr. Rogers from the Bureau of Sexological Investigation roams about in the Sexmobile and interviews experts in sexual matters, talks to everyday people on the streets, and visits key sites to answer the titular question and others.

Prankster Alan Abel and his wife created this now-dated look at sexuality. It's funny forty-some years later, but after a while, it gets a little tedious. There are plenty of naked people, but if this makes any points at all, it makes them early. The wad is shot, so to speak, and then it keeps going. Abel himself plays the roving reporter and does it as a sort-of straight man. It's amazing that he keeps his composure while sitting so close to so many naked people or hearing an actor say, "For the vegetable, it was exquisite," or a "Professor of Dildography" talk about "millions of miles of unused orifice," or an x-rated magician ask, "Is that not your urine sample?" or an expert claiming that "you'd be up to your ass in dwarfs" if one of eight didn't die during sexual intercourse. In between all that, Abel takes us to a sex Olympics, a nudist colony where they sing "Dinah Won't You Blow Your Horn" and later dance in a way that makes nudity seem like a pretty terrible invention, a perverse art gallery, and a pornographic opera. Oh, and there's a brief penis puppet show. Robert Downey Sr. makes a pair of appearances, but he's nowhere as entertaining as Earle Doud who plays the x-rated magician or Marshall Efron who plays Vince Domino, the "master of filth and excretion" who talks about making a pornographic film with a goose and a donkey. This is nothing revolutionary, some bits fall completely flat, and it's not always even all that much fun, but it's an interesting enough little time capsule item nevertheless.

What Is It?

2005 movie

Rating: n/r (Mark: n/r)

Plot: A snail murderer wrestles with himself.

According to the credits, "This film has not advocated the assassination of Steven Spielberg in any way."

My brother and I made the trip to Bloomington to see Crispin Glover again. He showed us slideshow versions of eight of his novels, showed this first movie of the "It" trilogy, and then verbosely sort-of answered some questions. He had a beard this time.

I love this man. I really do. I have a feeling that people think I'm just joking around when I go on and on about him, but I think he's a borderline genius and one of the most interesting of Hollywood people. Having said that, his performance in this is about the worst part of the movie. He and his hair (or possibly wig) are distracting, and being distracting in a movie like this is an impressive feat. So what kind of movie is this? It's oddball avant-garde, cheap but fanciful and full of ideas, and a lot of people are going to find it downright offensive. It takes place, from what I can tell, on at least three levels of consciousness, years before Leo and his special effects team did it in Inception. The cast is made up mostly of unintelligible actors who have Down's Syndrome. There are references to Shirley Temple and Nazis, sometimes at the same time. There are cheap puppet shows. One character, the one who tells us that he's Michael Jackson, is in blackface. One scene right after Crispin Glover's character--either Dueling Demi-God Auteur or The Young Inner Psyche and Id since he plays both--floats in with what has to be one of the best special effects I've ever seen features a Cabbage Patch Kid, the playing of a song that uses the no-no n-word and is mostly about how black people smell, and a naked black woman in a monkey mask manually pleasuring Steven C. Stewart, the guy with severe Cerebral Palsy who wrote and starred in the second film of the "It" trilogy. Yep, that's the kind of movie this is, and if you're not in the right place mentally to see any of that, you should stay away. As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I like my avant-garde or experimental films best when they're a little goofy or at least humorous, and I did find parts of this really funny although I stifled laughter because I didn't know how the woman sitting next to me felt about the whole thing. I mean, I already came in with the guy who had smelly hair, so I already had one strike against me.

I can't pretend to know exactly what this is (pun, I guess, intended) or what Glover is wanting to say, but it's a movie that sticks with you and makes you think which is one of the director's intended goals. It's far from a perfect movie and, in fact, appears to have been filmed in Crispin Glover's backyard or basement, but at the same time, it is unique and almost pretty special. My brother and I are refusing to rate the thing because we're a couple sissies. I neglected to ask everybody else in the theater.

By the way, this is now easily at the top of my list of "Best Shirley Temple Movies" right ahead of The Littlest Rebel.

Beauty Is Embarrassing

2012 documentary

Rating: 16/20

Plot: The life and work of a unique artist, Wayne White, a guy who writes dirty words on landscape paintings and made puppets with Pee Wee Herman.

Add this to the pile of documentaries about weird artists or otherwise-abnormal individuals that I like. White's an interesting guy because of his background in the hills of West Virginia or someplace like the hills of West Virginia and his emergence as this creative force in what I'd imagine is an area not known for treatin' people who make art kindly. I like art that seems to have been made by an artist who only wants to please himself. I also like my art with a dose of irreverence; the less serious the art, the more likely that I'll appreciate it, and White's funny word paintings don't really say much of anything but made the teenager inside me (poor choice of words?) giggle (that makes it worse, right?). That's the part of me that appreciates art, by the way--the immature side of me. It's the same reason I'd still watch Pee Wee's Playhouse, and White was a puppet-creating machine and puppeteer on that show. Seeing a bit of the behind-the-scenes stuff with that show was really great for this fan, of course. I also liked watching him make and then wear a giant LBJ head, and a gigantic and gigantically goofy museum piece was about the most whimsical piece of art that I've ever seen. This is a funny and inspiring documentary that almost approaches touching at one point, and I really enjoyed it. I just love creative people, and the world would be better off--at least way more interesting--if it was inhabited by more Wayne Whites.

My favorite part: White says, "You're only going to be on this earth for 80 years, so you better get on it. Time's running out." And then the next shot is him dancing in a giant LBJ mask. Beautiful editing there. 

My brother recommended this to me because he had noticed that I hadn't used the word "whimsical" on the blog for a while.

Here's a word painting that I stole from somebody on the Internet:

Team America: World Police

2004 marionette action movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A stage actor joins the titular terrorist busters, stops a group of terrorists in Egypt with the help of his acting abilities, and then must face Kim Jong Il who is planning to use his weapons of mass destruction to take over the world.

There are a lot of movies that I like that nobody else seems to like very much. I get it most of the time. I don't blame or criticize anybody for not liking Eraserhead. But this one I have trouble understanding. Not even South Park fans seem to like this much at all, and I don't understand why. For me, this is easily the most brilliant and brilliantly executed and consistently humorous thing that Parker and Stone have ever done. They nail big dumb Michael Bay-esque action movies, and the satire is just perfect. Of course, I was sold within the first few moments of the movie when there's a marionette who has his own marionette and a mime. All within seconds! And you get to see puppets engaging in fisticuffs including a guy vs. terrorist fight sequence near the beginning that includes the Crane Technique. And yes, there's the infamous marionette sex scene which is not only one of my favorite sex scenes ever but one that should be required viewing for all newlyweds. These puppets are awesome. I'm easily entertained anyway, so something as simple as getting to see marionettes "walk" around is enough to please me. Still, the way they give these little figures facial expressions and all gives them this realism and makes them seem like better actors than the people who are usually in movies like this. The sets are absolutely amazing with this surprising amount of details. I always imagine Parker and Stone catching part of this on television (because in my mind, they're always in the same room as each other) and saying, "I can't believe we made this thing!" Like most of their stuff, this is also a musical, and the songs are also pretty great. There's a wonderfully catchy song about AIDS, a dumber-than-dumb "Freedom Isn't Free" song which is stupid enough to seem real until a line about how "Freedom costs a dollar fifty" line, fist-pump-inducing "America, Fuck Yeah!" that should probably replace our current national anthem, Jong Il's number about how rone-ry he is, and the brilliant "We're Gonna Need a Montage." The big swing and miss is a song devoted to making fun of the Pearl Harbor movie. Aside from a bit of political jabbing that is pretty harsh on both liberal and conservative ideals, there are plenty of goofy moments that just make me laugh. I don't like all the meta-jokes that draw attention to the fact that the characters are marionettes. Those didn't need to be there. But I laugh every single time I even think about that Matt Damon puppet and his repeated single line. And "No me gusta!" makes me smile. And the line "When you see Alec Baldwin, you see the true ugliness of human nature." Oh, and the line "I was raped by Mr. Mistoffelees." A hammer slid across a table, Kim Jong Il's panthers, the gruesome deaths of many Hollywood stars. Seriously, somebody tell me what's not to like here! That's a rhetorical exclamation, by the way, so you don't really have to answer. Bonus nods for a strong use of the Wilhelm Scream and an allusion to the cantina scene in A New Hope. This might not be a perfect movie, but I challenge you to find a movie this freakin' funny that also contains an extended scene of marionettes having sex.

Her Master's Voice

2012 ventriloquist bereavement documentary

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Nina Conti and her little monkey travel to a a place called Venthaven which is like a cemetery for ventriloquist dummies whose owners have died. She takes along a few of her mentor's puppet's, first spending some time at a ventriloquist convention. And I believe she and one of the puppets (the one sporting wood throughout the trip) actually "do it."

There's a "Distant Voice Expert" in this named Nacho Estrada. Seriously, how badass a name is that? If my name was Nacho Estrada, I wouldn't spend any time at all with puppets. I'd just walk around referring to myself in the third person, often in a menacing way.

As tempted as you might be to see this movie based on the poster, believing that there really might be some girl-on-puppet action, I don't recall anything like that happening. But there is a very strange scene where she disrobes the old lady puppet and takes it with her into the hotel pool. That's the kind of people you're dealing with here--these ventriloquists. I enjoy puppets more than most adult, but I'm pretty sure I'd be uncomfortable hanging around with a ventriloquist. Can they be trusted? Do I dare look at the human mouth while the puppet is talking? If insulted, do I take a swing at the puppet or the ventriloquist? It's just too much to think about.

I liked Conti fine. She's maybe one of the cutest female ventriloquists out there, and she's really good at her craft. Her main puppet--a monkey--is about the most boring ventriloquist dummies that I've ever seen. It looks like something you could buy at a dollar store or something. Conti's funny enough with her monkey, but I liked her versatility with the other puppets more, a kind of exploration as she tried to find their individual voices and personalities. And there was this idea running throughout the movie, from the work of Conti's mentor to all the other ventriloquists, that these dummies are really a device to make the complete insanity of the artist acceptable. I liked that. There was even a quote--"Creation and insanity are almost the same thing." Of course, the stuff at the ventriloquist convention was fun for me. Like most Americans, I'm easily amused, and watching the creativity and trickery of a lot of those artists was great. And you just know they're all checking out each other's mouths. The whole thing builds to the trip to puppet heaven with all those sad-looking dummies without voices. There was something touching about the whole thing.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

1996 cartoon

Rating: 14/20 (Jen: 17/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: When I was in fourth grade, I was in desperate need of an identity. So I started wearing leather pants and gave myself a nickname--Quasimodo. Only I didn't know how to spell it. I insisted that all my friends call me Quasimodo--it was Quasi for short--and even my teachers in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade called me that. Imagine how embarrassed I became when I found out that Quasimodo was a lonely ugly hunchbacked character who spent all his time in a belfry masturbating to figurines he's made in the likeness of the townspeople!

This is a very hit 'n' miss affair from the Disney folk. They handle dark and mature very well here, but that butts heads with the comic relief, almost all of it provided by a triad of gargoyles and almost all of it falling completely flat. Timon and Pumbaa have become gargoyles, make a bunch of fart jokes, threaten to spit on mimes, and are--to me, a non-child--extraneous. And contrast those gargoyle gags with scenes where babies are being thrown into wells because they're demons who need to return to hell where they belong, and it just seems to silly. That's pretty freakin' dark for a child though, right? Add Esmeralda's pole dancing, a scene which seemed racy and inappropriate for young viewers but succeeded in making me really horny and a villain who's just a little too complex to be understood by most children and just as horny as I am and you've got a movie that doesn't seem kid-friendly. But then you've got the gargoyles who seem like they're thrown in to say, "Hey! Don't worry because this is a children's movie after all!" This leans more toward opera than it does musical at times, and it takes a while to get used to the style of song. A lot of them are depressingly boring songs, including a big number at the beginning that is probably called The Bells of Notre Dame," a song in which they embarrassingly mispronounce Notre. Notra? Tell that to South Bend, Goofy! The "You're So Ugly So You Have to Stay in the Belfry, Ugly Guy" song is another stinker, but "Out There" is good enough to be considered as a minor Disney classic and the song the villain sings about Hellfire and the number in the Court of Miracles are pretty great. The animation is so-so. The scenery, the streets of Paris and the innards of the church are really well done except they goofed and forgot to put an Eiffel Tower in there. Esmeralda's animated well enough to give a dead gypsy wood, but Quasimodo is kind of ugly. A Disney hero should be better looking than that. What kind of kid is going to want to play with a Quasimodo action figure? Chester McBlondy (I don't remember the name of the other tip of the love triangle) has a bad haircut, so nobody's going to want that action figure either. Add him to the pile of uninteresting, wooden Disney hero guys. I don't really like how the characters move in this either. There's an unnatural glitchiness that shouldn't have been there. This isn't an upper-echelon Disney feature, but it's not bad. Reboot sans gargoyles and they might have something.

The Great Muppet Caper

1981 shenanigans

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: fell asleep; Dylan: 13/20 ; Emma: 18/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: Kermit and his twin brother Fozzie are newspaper men who, along with their photographer Gonzo, aren't doing a very good job. They get one last shot to report a big story and travel to London to get a scoop on a jewel heist.

For my money, this is the funniest of the Muppet movies. And Jim Henson's just showing off here in this more freewheeling and irreverent follow-up to The Muppet Movie. He's got Muppets swimming, a Muppet multitude riding bicycles, Muppets flying through the air, Muppets climbing up the sides of buildings. There are so many moments where you just scratch your head and wonder, "How the hell are these puppets doing that?" Yes, the story is more than a little goofy, and a lot of the puns are very nearly painful. But the cameos aren't as obtrusive as in the predecessor (Peter Falk is particularly funny), and, if I'm remembering clearly enough, there are more Muppets involved in this one. The Swedish Chef, that eagle guy, Stafford and Waldorf, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, Bunson and Beaker, and a bunch of others not even I can name all have their chance to be funny. A lot of this takes place in a dilapidated hotel called The Happiness Hotel, the only free place Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo can find in London. It's a place slightly better--maybe a fourth of a star better--than the motel I worked at. Only it's got a bitchin' bus. And when I imagine that bus without all those Muppets hanging out the window, it makes me want to tell a stranger about it while grabbing him by the shoulders and vigorously shaking them. Charles "Freakin'" Grodin hams it up--in a good way--as the villain while John Cleese and Peter Ustinov are also funny in small roles. Oscar the Grouch also has a brief cameo appearance. But it's really the five guys who do the voice work for thirty-three (if I counted correctly) Muppets that are the stars here. The Muppet movements and, as weird as it feels to say this, facial expressions helps them blend into the settings and make them feel like living things, but it's the voice work that gives them their personalities. Lots of laughs during this family movie night, so much that I'm surprised Jen didn't wake up. Oh, and this makes yet another musical for family movie night. The songs in this are fine if not especially memorable. The Electric Mayhem get to throw down on the bus. I wonder if that bus would have been allowed at the airport. My boss at my motel told me that I had to take the magnet with our name off the door when I picked up customers at the airport because "we are not allowed there." I never asked what the hell he meant by that.

I'm going to have to re-evaluate my ratings for all these Muppet movies. The Muppet Movie and the new one were both 15/20 according to the blog. Treasure Island was only a 12/20, but it's not very good. I guess Manhattan isn't on the blog, so that might be an upcoming family movie night pick. But that rating for The Muppet Movie seems awfully low, especially since it does have memorable songs and, if I'm remembering correctly, a wild Muppet sex scene.

Trivia time: Charles "Freakin'" Grodin was in one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Want to guess what that was?

Period Piece

2006 thing

Rating: 4/20

Plot: None.

I guess we'll put this in the mondo film or shockumentary genre although it's not a documentary. It's not exactly scripted either though, and it doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm not sure who I should blame for this--Johnny Knoxville, Pink Flamingos, Tom Green, Harmony Korine? All of them. Maybe I should just blame Giuseppe Andrews, the "film's" "director" who, in a brief introduction to this, said, "Well, it's a hard film to synopsis." He also referred to it as a "grenade of wild images, dialogue, and sound" when he could have saved a lot of words and just said described it as "inane garbage." I probably should have heeded the warning at the beginning of the film--"Warning: This film contains senior citizen nudity and dead pigs." Or maybe the appearance of the guy on the cover four-and-a-half minutes into the movie, completely naked and simulating a sex act with an invisible woman should have had me reaching for my remote. This movie feels like somebody flinging feces at you, just shocking scene after shocking scene. It's got a very middle-schoolish "look at what I can say on your television" kind of humor. Or, more accurately, "Look at what I can get old people to say." You get people shooting up in a car wash; all kinds of scenes with people, including a guy in a coon skin cap, having sex with a teddy bear; clowns on stick horses; plays with stop-motion animated tater tots which, of course, evolve into tater tot pornography; smoking pigs; a puppet; a guy eating his own armpit hair; characters pantomiming the cutting and eating of flatulence with a plastic knife and fork. I don't mind experimental movies, and shocking things don't bother me. This is just 80 minutes of pointless nonsense, and 80 minutes which, by the way, seems a little longer than Gone with the Wind. I can't think of any reason why anybody reading this should see this movie. Well, unless you're into tater tots or naked old people. Or stuffed animal snuff films.

I do wonder if Campbells appreciated the (I assume) free product placement in a scene where a can of clam chowder was used to sodomize a teddy bear.

Little Shop of Horrors

1996 musical black comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: For the most part, it's the same as this one. Only this version has songs and probably took longer than two days to film. There's also more cleavage, less Jack Nicholson, more black people, and more color.

I had a "Guess This Movie" contest with the winner getting pick the next movie that I watched, and this is the movie that was sort of chosen for that. It was on the queue anyway, so this guy really didn't win anything. Sucker!

The only other time I saw this was in the theater. I was a big Rick Moranis fan, and since this was PG-13, I thought there might be a little partial nudity. I already liked puppets, but I wonder if this sparked an interest in cult black comedies. I can't think of any that I would have seen before seeing this. It was an interesting theater experience for me. I remember during "Suddenly Seymour" not being able to peel my eyes from Ellen Greene's cleavage, and I was perplexed and strangely aroused by the hermaphroditic Audrey II. When Audrey II assaults Audrey I (a scene that completes a 2012 "tentacle rape" trifecta for me, by the way), I got stiff and hoped my date--the pudgy and red-haired Cassandra, a girl who may or may not actually exist--didn't notice. When Audrey II depantsed Rick Moranis, I climaxed, and I wasn't ashamed of it then and am not ashamed to admit it now. Also--and this made the Brazil Times so you can verify it--during the scene where Audrey is crying because her boyfriend was just smashed by the demolished building and the music rumbled to life and played "Suddenly Seymour" and then Seymour emerges from all the smoke, the theater crowd erupted with cheers. People started disrobing and having sexual intercourse right in the theater aisles, somebody started a small fire and started throwing trash into it, a person a few seats next to me fell to his knees and started eating through the cushion of the chair he had been sitting on, somebody stood a few inches from the screen and screamed The Kaddish. Sure, the songs in this are memorable enough, but all the extracurriculars made this a movie experience I will never forget. The songs in this, all intentionally corny, aren't bad, but they're dated more from the bass lines than they are the doo-wop doo-wops provided by the trio of background singers. I like them, by the way, like a dramatic chorus. Not sure why they were murmuring "summertime" during the scene when Seymour's boss gets eaten. [Edit: Ah, it was "suppertime," not "summertime." That makes more sense.] Rick Moranis, a guy who ruined what could have been one of the greatest careers in movie history by deciding to focus on his family, isn't a bad singer, but he's out-performed by Ellen Greene, sometimes comically. Either she's overdoing things or he's underdoing them. And then there's Levi Stubbs of The Four Tops whose performance would have been better if he didn't have such stupid things to sing. "I'm just a mean green mother from outer space, and I'm bad." "Would you like a Cadillac car? Or a guest shot on Jack Paar? How about a date with Hedy Lamarr?" Ick. He does get to use one of my all-time favorite phrases--"No shit, Sherlock"--so it's not a total loss. Back to Ellen Greene and her cleavage. She's got an impressive singing voice, but the Olive Oyl screeching voice thing drove me nuts. She made up for it by riding side-straddle on the back of Steve Martin's motorbike though. Hot! Steve Martin is delightfully over the top, part-Elvis and part-Marquis de Sade, and I especially enjoyed seeing him from the perspective of a uvula. And I had completely forgotten that Bill Murray was in this in Jack Nicholson's role. That's still a completely pointless scene. The stylized setting looks great, and the puppet work is amazing. No, I never believed there was really a man-eating plant in the room, but I also couldn't figure out how exactly that many parts of Audrey II moved around like that. As my five and a half regular blog readers know, I'm easily impressed by puppets though. A couple gags that I really liked: John Candy's radio show that apparently shows his listeners weird things. How would that work on the radio? And waiting to be interviewed after Rick Moranis was a little person with a saxophone-playing nun ventriloquist dummy. I tried to find the little person's name, but I can't even find evidence on the Internet that that scene exists. It's possible that I hallucinated again.

The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland

1999 movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: One day, the folks on Sesame Street decided that they needed more cash, probably to support the drug habits of half of the population and to continue to pay off folks to keep the secret about Bert and Ernie's relationship a secret. One of them said, "You know what? Elmo's enormously popular even though he's about the most boring character we have. Let's do a movie about him!" Somebody else asked, "What the hell are we going to have Elmo do? He just sits in his room talking to himself and acting like he's mentally challenged!" The first somebody answered, "It doesn't matter. We can just have him walking around for eighty minutes." Somebody else said, "No, we have to have him do something!" Then, somebody else said, "I got it! Why don't we just use the same basic plot of Pee Wee's Big Adventure. Kids can't watch that anymore anyway since Pee Wee jerked off in that theater." Somebody argued, "But Elmo doesn't even have a bike. Plus, people laugh when we have these Muppets walk around. Elmo on a bike would look really ridiculous." Somebody else said, "We can have him looking for his blanket then." Then somebody suggested that that they pad the length by making it a musical but was reminded that the only guy on Sesame Street, the genius who penned "Rubber Ducky" and "People in My Neighborhood" and all of the Roosevelt Franklin songs in a single opium-inspired thirty-five minutes, who knew how to write songs was in rehab. They decided to just write a few songs themselves, and though uninspiring and not memorable at all, they decided that Mandy Patinkin, who owed them a favor for helping him cover up a scandal that also involved Bert and Ernie, could give them a little life. They wrote and revised everything in a fortnight, tried to find the Roosevelt Franklin puppet but couldn't, wrote Roosevelt Franklin out of the script, shot it in a few weeks, and released it. It inspired an alarming number of blanket thefts and was banned in a few Eastern European countries. The end.

Masturbating to this turned out to be nearly pointless.

Get your motherfucking hand out of my motherfucking ass!

Oprah Movie Club Pick for April: The Muppets

2011 Muppet movie that can't be called The Muppet Movie because there already is a movie called that

Rating: 15/20 (Emma: 18/20; Abbey: 19/20)

Plot: The aptly-named Tex Richman is about to buy the land upon which sits the former Muppet studios because he wants to drill for oil there. When Gary, his girlfriend Mary, and his little felt brother Walter find out while vacationing in Hollywood, they find Kermit to let him know and help him reunite the Muppets for a telethon to raise money to save the studio. Those curmudgeons who always sat in the balcony crack wise.

I have to get this out of the way before I type anything else--I've always loved the Muppets and probably always will. I love them unapologetically and unconditionally. If Scooter bounced over to me and hit me squarely in the groin with a baseball bat, I would grimace and fall down writhing in pain and ask, "Scooter, what was that for?" but it wouldn't keep me from loving the Muppets. I think it's the texture of their "skin" that I like so much. And it looked great in this movie--you could see the felt, and all the colors of these colorful characters, especially when they filled the screen with their movements all at once, just hit my nostalgic sweet spot and made the child within me giggle. I don't want to go on and on about the material Muppets are made of; I'm not a pervert or anything.

This really is a movie that's all about nostalgia. I can't imagine a fan of the brilliant television show or the other movies hating this despite some flaws. It's true to the original stuff and, at least I think, the overall vision of Jim Henson. There's some self-referential stuff peppered in the script and a fan favorite song playing over the closing credits. All of the characters show up except for that John Denver Muppet, and the new character, though possibly guilty of being a little on the bland side, is just too likable not to like a little bit. Really, I wanted to give Walter a noogie. Not that I'm a pervert or anything. It was great seeing all the characters in something a little more traditionally Muppety than the parodies they've appeared in more recently. The start of their big show with their theme song nearly jerked tears from me!

The humor's also slap-happy meta-, and Muppet-esque, and although Muppet-esque humor probably isn't for everybody, I laughed more during this than I've laughed at anything for a long time. I laughed like a little boy, too. I laughed at Muppet teeth, a robot offering Tab and New Coke, Swedish Chef subtitles (and that "Say hello to my little friend" reference was so funny), a human replacement for Animal in Fozzie's Moopet band (Dave Grohl, the first of two Nirvana references), Punch Teacher, Tex's unlikely and surprising burst into a rap song, hip-hop Fozzie's "Wakka Wakka," and the barbershop quartet version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" which was about the best thing I've ever heard in a movie and my new second movie scene that takes place in a barbershop. That's right, Chaplin still has the top spot.

This is a Muppet musical, and I actually enjoyed the songs. There was one nice nod to a song from an earlier movie (I won't give it away, but it has to do with rainbows and connecting) that was beautifully done, sonically and visually. The duet about being a "Muppet Man" or a "Manly Muppet" managed to be both touching and hilarious.

Jason Segal and Amy Adams were both potentially bothersome, but they were fine here. I enjoyed Segal especially with this wide-eyed "Holy cow! I'm in a freakin' Muppet movie!" look that he had throughout this thing. You expect and at times put up with all the cameos, just like you kind of have to wade through a few terrible jokes to get to the really funny parts. The story was ok but predictable, but there were an awful lot of side plots. So many stories! This also almost overflows with themes, and although a lot of those themes really connect, it almost seems too ambitious at times.

Still, I'm not complaining about anything I saw here, and I was enormously entertained by this. And I am thrilled that this Muppet comeback wasn't completely screwed up.

Oprah Movie Club: Joe vs. the Volcano

1990 romantic comedy

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 13/20)

Plot: The titular loser's stuck in a dead-end and depressing job in the depths of a gray building where artificial testicles, amongst other things, are made. As a hypochondriac, he makes frequent trips to the doctor. He complains that he doesn't feel right, and a doctor informs him that he has brain cloud and only five to six months to live. Joe quits his job with style and takes a secretary out. The next day, an eccentric gazillionaire shows up and makes Joe a proposition. He wants to pay for Joe to travel to a Pacific Island and throw himself in a volcano so that he can get his hands on a mineral needed to make superconductors. Yeah, I'm not sure that made much sense either. Joe agrees, buys a lot of stuff with Ossie Davis, and then begins his journey.

So how cute is that Meg Ryan? I've always been apathetic when it comes to Meg Ryan, but I was really impressed with the trio of characters she played here--the secretary, the flibbertigibbet (Full disclosure: I had to give this movie a bonus point for using flibbertigibbet.), and the yacht lady. Cute as a freakin' button, no? Tom Hanks? Well, I was distracted by his hair in this one, maybe even more than I was when I watched The Da Vinci Code. He's kind of like the straight man in this giant cosmic joke played on his character, and the performers around him, even though they're barely more than cameos, are memorable and a lot of fun. I always enjoy Dan Hedaya, and he's funny as Joe's boss with all those repeated lines about how so-and-so can get the job but can he do the job. Robert Stack plays the coolest-sounding doctor ever, Lloyd Bridges is hilarious as Graynamore, and it's always good to see Ossie Davis. The luggage salesman (Barry McGovern), Abe Vigoda, Nathan Lane. They're all great periphery characters. You really have to be willing to let go of the real world and just accept the way things happen in this movie, but if you do, I think this one's a rewarding experience. It's like a fairy tale with a little more depth, a story about letting go, taking chances, and living the big life that you've been given. It's probably too surreal and free-floating for the rom-com crowd and too goofy and Meg Ryan-y for a lot of people, but I thought it had enough giant dogs to make it worth anybody's time. And hammerhead shark puppets! That made me laugh. This one's worth watching multiple times, by the way, to catch some recurring imagery (check out that lampshade) and repeated lines (lots of "soul" stuff here).

Joe vs. the Volcano was Barry's pick for the Oprah Movie Club.

The Beaver

2011 Muppet prequel

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Some antisemitic guy gets depressed and starts talking to and through a the titular puppet that he found in a dumpster. His family has a problem with it.

If Hesher is an after-school special with a bad-boy edge and a ton of curse words, The Beaver could be described as an after-school special with a puppet. There was a lot of potential here actually with a story that could have had some real depth and could have packed a real emotional punch. Unfortunately, it's very poorly written and doesn't feel fully realized. And I'll have to admit that I feel a little cheated since I went into this thing thinking we'd have scene after scene of Mel Gibson making love to his own hand. But that's likely my fault. Mel Gibson is dynamic in this, a chance to show some versatility. His character's got all sorts of angles, and good old Mel handles them all in a way that doesn't make the character as dopey as a character with a beaver puppet should be. And that's important. When the story focuses on his character and his family, this is actuallypretty good. But there are tangents, and when we move to the subplots involving his oldest son's love interest etcetera, this fumbles.

It's a shame this wasn't a box office smash because I could spend hours playing with them. Probably inappropriately.

The Garbage Pail Kids

1987 garbage pail movie

Rating: 3/20

Plot: A frequently-bullied, delusional kid accidentally frees the seven disgusting titular puppets from their garbage pail prison in a magician's antique store. They wreak havoc in disgusting and unfunny ways.

This came very close to being the first movie in the nearly four year history of this blog to be too embarrassing for me to admit that I watched. I could attempt to justify spending an hour and a half with this movie, one without a single redeeming value, by saying, "Well, I've seen it on some 'Worst Movie of All Time' lists, and I'm on a quest to find the worst movie of all time," but that wouldn't make it any less embarrassing. I could say, "Well, you know. It had puppets in it" or "Hey, I was watching it ironically!" or a variety of other things that would make it a little closer to OK that I watched this, but I don't think anything could make it OK that I watched this. Don't get me wrong! I did learn a couple valuable lessons from this thing: 1) Don't shake hands with Messy Tessy. 2) Don't watch anymore movies produced by the Topps baseball card company. Apparently, there is something more difficult to digest than that nasty gum they included in those card packs. Farts, projectile vomit, puppet rapping. If somebody shoved a copy of this into an 80's time capsule, likely to get rid of it so that none of their friends would catch them with it, then whoever digs that up is going to likely want to invent a time machine just to go back to the mid-80s and eliminate the race of man before this movie or any movie like it could be made. Here, I'll tell you a story to illustrate just how painful and embarrassing the experience of watching this movie is: I saw a can of Pepsi yesterday, remembered that the Pepsi company had for whatever reason decided to include a little product placement in this movie, remembered that I had watched this movie a few days ago, and attempted suicide by running head first into a cement wall. So this movie, out of the hundreds that I've seen and written about on this blog, came the closest to ending my life. True story.