A Muppet of a Movie

The Muppets

By Jonathan Fisher, January 20, 2012

The Muppets have always held a bizarre place in the public psyche. A little too twisted to be entirely for children, and a little too PG to be directly targeted at adults, the Muppets have managed to gain a faithful, loving following in both demographics. They've also been inordinately successful in attracting celebrities to their cause -- The Muppet Show was all about having a special celebrity guest each week, and their other productions often turned out some fine work from the best thespians around. A Muppet Christmas Carol is, oddly enough, one of the best adaptations of the Dickens novel yet produced, and Michael Caine is possibly the best Scrooge we've seen. So this element of celebrity collaboration and name-dropping remains in The Muppets, which features so many blink-and-you'll-miss it cameos from notable actors that it's the least the film-makers can do to insert a Rolodex joke.

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Changes a-comin'/Hugo and Sherlock 2

It's been dead quiet round these here parts for the last few weeks. There are a number of reasons for this -- the primary one is that I'm still overseas and in between boosting my Heathrow injection with Christmas and New Year food and drink, I've also been travelling around the lovely UK country side. I'm planning to get back into reviewing and podcasting from January 13, and hopefully by the end of the month there will be some quite big news about the site. I may as well provide SOME kind of movie criticism while I'm here. In the last few weeks I've seen Hugo and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. In short, loved the former, a bit indifferent about the latter. Hugo is a wonderful heart-warmer, with Dickensian flourishes and a massive appreciation for the beauty and power of the history and medium of cinema. As for Sherlock -- it was a bit of a much of a muchness for me. I was a marginal fan of the first one, thinking that Robert Downey's performance was just about worth the price of admission. This new instalment is just an extension foe the first film, and as such many of the same observations can be made about it -- hip, whimsical execution, a fun soundtrack, and a nicely recreated London of old. Moriarty, Sherlock's arch-nemesis, is the primary villain here. I didn't find him that menacing. As for the rest of the story, it's a bit convoluted. I didn't think it was really worth caring all that much about. Alright, this is the best I can do sitting on a couch in the Cotswolds, typing on an awkward iPad keyboard. I'll go into more depth in the next few weeks.

RIP Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

"I know what's coming, I know no one beats these odds. It's a matter of getting used to that, growing up and realising that you're expelled from your mother's uterus as if shot from a cannon, towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks. It's a matter of how you use up the intervening time in an intelligent and ironic way. And try not to do anything dastardly to your fellow creatures."

Christopher Hitchens said that absolutely plastered, on the side of a road, recorded by a fan of his on a camera phone. It takes a very special intellect to come up with quite a worthy life's mantra in such a state. Hitch was/is a great influence on my writing, my thinking, and my perspective on the Universe. I'll miss him greatly.

Five Innovative Features

This is an article by guest-writer Leanne Miller on five of the most innovative films of modern times. If you'd like to get in touch with Leanne about her writing, reach her at leanne.miller82@gmail.com.

The world of cinema is continuously growing and fans are constantly dazzled by the lengths producers will go to create a truly impressive movie.

Special effects, computer animation and clever cinematographic techniques are all the rage these days, so to celebrate this timeless art form, let’s take a look at 5 of the most innovative movies of modern times.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

The brain child of Nick Park, Wallace & Gromit are a loveable duo created using clever stop-motion animation. The first feature-length movie,Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit [2005] brought the duo to the big screen for the first time, and quickly became one of the most popular “clay-mation” movies of all time.

Using a laborious but rewarding procedure, the film was created by moving each plasticine character a bit at a time and filming each frame. Every frame was then played back in quick succession to create the illusion of movement. Each character also had to be duplicated in different poses and in a multitude of costumes depending on each scene. The final product beams with the ingenuity of its creators.

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25th Hour

This is the first in a new breed of post that will come up on the site from time to time. I feel compelled to share my favourite shots from my favourite movies, with my favourite quotes from that movie. Here is the first.

‎"You have a son, maybe you name him James. It's a good strong name. And maybe, one day, years from now, long after I'm dead and gone, reunited with your dear mother, you gather your whole family together, and tell them the truth. Who you are. Where you come from. You tell them the whole story. Then you ask them if they know how lucky they are to be there.

It all came so close to never happening. This life came so close to never happening."

-- 25th Hour [2002]

Podcast: Arbie/The Film Brief on iTunes!

This week's podcast, in which Jonathan and Tim discuss "Matilda: The Musical" (words and music by Aussie Tim Minchin), "Contagion", "Melancholia", "Cars 2", Julie Taymor's "The Tempest", and we meet Tim's pet rabbit Arbie.

Subscribe to The Film Brief on iTunes here, and you'll get the next episode delivered to your PC in your sleep. 

(or if, for some reason, you still want to download the podcast via the old website, you can do so here)

Email us at thefilmbrief@live.com and follow us on Twitter @thefilmbrief.

It's not the cough that carries you off...

Contagion
By Jonathan Fisher, November 9th, 2011

Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is a brilliant film that appeals to our deepest, darkest fears, imprinted into each of us by evolution. It envisages the worst-case scenario of a viral epidemic, on roughly the scale of the Spanish influenza of 1918 that killed 3% of the world's population, and infected 27%. 'Realism' is an adjective that has been bandied about in just about every review of Contagion. Realism is right. This is not a sensationalist fiction, like Outbreak, a fine and entertaining movie in its own right that played the scenario as a thriller. Instead of aiming to excite the viewer, Contagion wants us to merely consider. Consider, what would happen if every citizen in our overpopulated world saw every other citizen as a threat to their health? How would our technologically advanced society deal with nature at its most threatening? How would the psychological stress of a widespread outbreak take its toll on those we charge with protecting us in such instances? Contagion isn't a thriller. It's a Medical Scenario Presentation (a new genre?).

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