192 replies to this topic

[Scholar's Parrot]

Tyler, on 11 December 2011 - 10:35 PM, said:

In case it hasn't been mentioned yet, Andrew Bird is the whistler on Walter's big number (according to the soundtrack). I thought it was when I watched the movie, but didn't think to check until now.

Yeah, I'd seen that he was on the soundtrack and while watching the movie I was wondering how he was going to show up. And right before it happened, it hit me. Great stuff.

[Christian]

Chris Orr:

I’m thinking of The Muppets, a film that has stoked political controversy from one corner of the Fox Business show Follow the Money to… the other corner of the Fox Business show Follow the Money. (As Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie, who wrote most of the songs for The Muppets, might say: It’s the most controversial film in the room — the whole, wide room.)

Bret McKenzie wrote most of the songs for The Muppets? That's probably mentioned in this thread, although Bret's name wouldn't have rung any bells apart from the Conchords mention alongside it.

Oh, and yeah, I, too, thought there was a gay subtext to the movie. Just sayin'.

[Peter T Chattaway]

FWIW, as of this past weekend, The Muppets has passed The Muppet Movie to become the top-grossing Muppet movie ever, in North America.

That's before adjusting for inflation, of course. The $65.8 million the new film has earned so far is currently good enough to make it the #44 film of the year, whereas The Muppet Movie was easily in the top eight of 1979 (the site linked there gives a slightly different cume for the film than Box Office Mojo does, and ranks The Muppet Movie way up at #4) -- and even The Great Muppet Caper was #21 in 1981.

FWIW, John Nolte @ Big Hollywood says the film's disappointing box-office performance is not due to liberal content within the movie itself, per se, but due to all the attention that the media drew to that one Fox report. Parents, Nolte opines, were not avoiding the movie so much as "avoiding the controversy". For whatever that's worth.

[Tyler]

The Muppets got shut out for Best Song on the Golden Globe nominations. They went with Gnomeo and Juliet and Machine Gun Preacher instead.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Tyler wrote:
: The Muppets got shut out for Best Song on the Golden Globe nominations. They went with Gnomeo and Juliet and Machine Gun Preacher instead.

Hmmm. I have to wonder if there has anything to do with the fact that the Globes are handed out by the Hollywood FOREIGN Press Association. Those other two films are arguably more "international" than The Muppets, and I have no idea what sort of profile the Muppets have overseas.

[Tyler]

[Overstreet]

Kermit on Tyrannosaur and Shame. And lots more from director James Bobin.

Edited by Overstreet, 16 February 2012 - 02:39 PM.

[Overstreet]

Sicinski:

Quote

The Muppets, however well conceived, was a mostly melancholy affair, and not just because Stoller and Segel foregrounded the Martin & Lewis, Mick and Keith style awkwardness of "getting back together" (Kermit finding Fozzie in a dump in Reno; the adamant unwillingness to speak Piggy's name). There were just far too many signposts that "The Muppets" as we knew it are gone, that Jim Henson is really dead and the Muppets died with him. Yes, the voices are all off, but more than that, the humor lacked an ineffable in-the-face-of-whatever optimism, a "show must go on" mentality that was not restricted to showbiz-maxim insularity but was, finally, just an ethos for life more broadly. Maybe it was the British influence, now almost totally imperceptible. Or maybe it was Henson's playful hippie socialism, a belief that things are falling apart every day and you hold them together not with grand designs but with more anarchy, with play. I'm very happy The Muppets exists, and that there is a way to share these characters with the next generation. But the film really served to clarify for me just what we lost with Henson, and what we're losing still.

[SDG]

How much of a survivalist / Bear Grylls nut is my almost 14-year-old son? After an evening of watching The Muppets, I hear him singing, "I'VE got … everything that I NEE-ed … right in front of me!" And he's holding his "bug-out bag."

[Overstreet]

Awesome. We showed this to friends last night. One of them has never seen a Muppet Show, a Muppet Movie, or Sesame Street. (Oh, the humanity!) And he loved it.

[J.A.A. Purves]

Edited by Persiflage, 01 June 2012 - 10:25 AM.

[Tyler]

Story here.

Edited by Tyler, 04 July 2012 - 10:16 AM.

[Overstreet]

Somehow I missed this Muppets-related interview. It's one of the best post-Henson Kermit performances I've seen.

Strombo: "Is there any role you turned down that you wish you hadn't?"
Kermit: "Yeah. Yoda."

Edited by Overstreet, 08 December 2012 - 03:02 PM.