Partner and I saw the new Muppet movie on Cape Cod at Thanksgiving. I laughed myself sick several times, and teared up a couple of times.
I know, I am a doddery old coot. But listen:
This is an excellently well-made movie. The doubters said that modern kids would not like this movie, since they are not familiar with the Muppets. These doubts were completely put to rest when I heard the children in the theater audience laughing themselves into delirium. Chris Cooper rolls out a contract on a scroll, and it’s five feet long, and I heard a little boy in the back shriek: “It’s so long!” Best of all, there’s a musical number performed completely wordlessly by clucking chickens, and Partner and I were laughing, but the little girls behind us were laughing so hard they were in tears.
There are lots of references that five-year-olds will not get. The sequence beginning with Kermit’s robot butler serving Tab and New Coke, and ending with Gary Numan’s song “Cars,” is wonderful, and I was bellylaughing through the whole thing. I got it: the Muppets were very early-1980s.
But then there's the new material.
I credit Jason Segel with this wonderful mash-up of nostalgia and cleverness. He looks like a big human Muppet (as one of the songs in the movie affirms), and – according to sources, including Amy Adams (who plays his girlfriend) in New York Magazine – he is the biggest Muppet fan in existence, and is both the co-executive producer of this masterpiece, and its co-writer.
I don’t know if he wrote the songs, or collaborated on them, but they too are wonderful. Kermit sings a sad little song early on in which he invokes the memory of his old Muppet comrades, and it’s lovely. Jason and his Muppet brother Walter sing a wonderful duet early in the movie that’s reprised later, and it is also wonderful. The big number - “Am I A Man Or Am I A Muppet?” – is (impossibly) both moving and hysterically funny.
And when, late in the movie, Kermit sings “Rainbow Connection” from the first movie back in 1979, I dare you not to get a lump in your throat.
It is a sweet movie. I can’t tell you more than that. Both Partner and I left the theater giggling, and nostalgic, and having had a wonderful time.
I don’t know much about viral advertising, or about social media, but I see a lot of my Internet friends and acquaintances getting excited about this movie.
See this movie, kids. It is absolutely worth your time. It will make you laugh, and make you sentimental, and hopefully you will hear (as we did) some kids shrieking with laughter.
It will give you hope for the future.
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