In Which I Complain About The Muppets, And Kill All Joy

So this afternoon, I went to see The Muppets, because the Muppets are awesome. I was watching Sesame Street extremely early in life: the first word I ever spoke was "cookie" because I saw Cookie Monster on the back of the newspaper my dad was reading. I even used to refer to time increments in terms of Sesame Street whenever we drove to my grandparents' house, i.e., "How many Sesame Streets until we get there?" And I remember very clearly gathering around the console TV with the family to watch The Muppet Show every week. The soundtrack to The Muppet Movie was one of the first albums I ever owned, and I used to listen to it ad infinitum. The older I get, the more I realize how much the Muppets aesthetic influenced my taste: my affection for old Hollywood spectacle and artifice, for musicals and surreal humor, all seem tied to my affection for those two television shows. In other words, I am the target audience of The Muppets.

And that's a problem. This should be a movie directed towards children, with stuff to appeal to adults. That was certainly the case with the original Muppet movie. But this seemed almost exclusively to be an exercise in nostalgia, with frequent references to that first movie. I don't have a problem with them breaking the fourth wall -- they ALWAYS did that, and I love that about them -- but jokes would rely on a recent re-watching of The Muppet Movie, and that shouldn't be the case. The whole movie seemed to almost evangelize on the Muppets' behalf, trying to convince the audience that there were culturally relevant once again. Except, and here's a problem: WE'RE ALREADY IN THE AUDIENCE. We're the people who think that they can be relevant, we're the ones willing to overlook that the Muppets don't sound quite right, we're in the theater. Now give us an exciting, amusing story about the Muppets to justify that faith!

The music for the film was problematic, as well. There were four new songs by Bret McKenzie, of Flight of the Conchords, and these were pleasant enough. But they lacked that spark that you had from The Muppet Movie soundtrack. Then they used "Rainbow Connection" (twice), as well as the original version of "Mahna Mahna" at the conclusion. Which, is fine: I find myself wondering why they couldn't just write new songs, but at the same time, "Rainbow Connection" has proven remarkably durable over the years. But then, several times in the movie, they just used pop songs -- "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard," "We Built This City," "Bad to the Bone." And that just struck me as wrong: the Muppet movies (or at least the core three) always seemed to be in a somewhat timeless place, a world of its own. Couldn't songs have been written to accomplish what these songs did in the movie? The "Bad to the Bone" cue in particular seemed profoundly hacky, like something you would expect to see in a Chipmunks movie. (I actually had less problem with the Muppet-izing of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Fuck You," because at least those were integrated into the action, and besides, The Muppet Show used to do that sort of pop music re-purposing pretty regularly. The first time I ever heard "Copa Cabana" was when Liza Minnelli performed it on that show.)

Don't even get me started about the cameos. The best thing about the cameos is when they're able to integrate it into action without making a big deal out of it. Sarah Silverman as a waitress works, for instance. Zach Galifianakis as a hobo? It was the role he was born to play! But trotting out Whoopi Goldberg, Selena Gomez, and the kid from Modern Family as themselves to answer phones in a donation drive? Two of these individuals currently work on shows on ABC (a Disney company), the other is a hideous monster straight out of the Walt Disney clone farm. This is incredibly lazy, and it is not going to help the movie age well.

Did I laugh at this movie? Heck yeah, although sometimes the laughter was a bit more strained than I would have liked. Did I cry at this movie? Yes I did, although it seemed to spring less from the story than it did the accretion of nostalgia that has built up on the property for me. The re-enactment of the opening of The Muppet Show literally had tears streaming down my face, which, I admit, didn't make a whole lot of sense. But I was mourning lost youth, and the loss of Jim Henson. This movie provoked an emotional reaction, but only because the emotions were already inside me when I entered the theater. It made me nostalgic for how ambitious the Muppets used to be.