Anna Kendrick made her first foray into features with a musical (Camp) and lately it seems like the girl is ready and willing to remind us of just why that was. In the next few weeks she’ll get her Sondheim on as Cinderella in Into the Woods and…
Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch decided that for his directorial debut he’d keep things a bit musical. God Help the Girl, written and directed…
Pina Bausch was a choreography innovator and a moving force to the dance theatre establishment. Her work stirred audiences in emotional, psychological, and artistic ways. She became a catalyst for an aesthetic revolution and a redefinition of dance that provokes choreographers around the world to this day…
There are few comforts to take from Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return. One of them is that this film will be forgotten in a few weeks, another is that it raises the esteem of the oft-maligned but still pretty good Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) and still another is that Patrick Stewart likely got well paid for the 30…
I am not a big fan of musicals. The label is enough to make me wary of watching a movie. I usually find their enthusiasm irritating and their artificiality distracting. But I’m probably being a little genreist, here. It’s not fair to dismiss the entire genre. It’s prejudicial and…
There must have been enormous pressure on James Bobin after the success of The Muppets (2011). After all, he made the best Muppet movie since The Muppet Movie (1978) and trying to come up with a follow-up would be as difficult as it must have been for Jim Henson. What Henson came up with was The Great Muppet Caper (1981), which placed the Muppets in England attempting to stop the theft of the baseball diamond from a gallery. Bobin and co-writer Nicholas Stoller (who also co-wrote the 2011 feature with Jason Segal) came up with Muppets Most Wanted, in which the Muppets wind up in England and end up involved in a heist of the crown jewels. Both films even start with self-referential songs, Caper opens with ‘Hey, It’s a Movie’ while Most Wanted opens with ‘It’s a Sequel’.
Muppet movies have always been problematic. While many moments are good, the films struggle to maintain the zany attitude that the television show established. Somehow the translation to a long-form format always missed, sometimes just slightly and other times widely, off the mark. That changed with The Muppets (2011), possibly because co-writers Jason Segal and Nicholas Stoller approached the screenplay with the irreverence that permeated the series and utilized the trademark Muppet self-reference and breaking of “the fourth wall” to draw people in and keep the plot afloat.
It’s a road movie. It’s a crime-caper. It’s a musical comedy. It’s a prison break comedy (no drama allowed). It’s Muppets Most Wanted, the second entry in the newly rebooted, Jim Henson-created, Disney-owned Muppets franchise that once, not that long ago (as in 2010), seemed like its days of drawing family-friendly moviegoers to multiplexes were well behind it. But 2011 changed everything – well, at least for the time being. With multi-hyphenate Jason Segal co-starring and co-writing (with Nicholas Stoller), Amy Adams as his love interest, and an irresistibly catchy Oscar-winning song written by Bret “Flight of the Conchords” McKenzie, the return of the Muppets to the big screen wasn’t just for nostalgia buffs. It was a fresh, invigorating – not to mention reinvigorating – return to what the Muppets do best: Entertain audiences with a clever mix of pun-filled skits, self-aware songs, and classic comedy shtick. What wasn’t there to love about The Muppets? Short answer: Not much.
Whether it means to or not, Patch Town does well to invoke the history of cinema in an opening credits cut from old-style newsreel to lacking new-age digital effects. Here is a film that doesn’t want for forebears yet feels quite unlike anything else, a movie that’s made with feet in the past and eyes on the future, its arms wrapped round the present like it wants it all to itself. If ever Craig Goodwill’s comic fantasy were to have a moment, it would be now, if only because it’s a production of audacious immediacy, an energy and enthusiasm that can’t but attract attention. It is loud, it is proud, and it’s as much a daft delight for that as a wearying waste.
As part of the Generation 14+ section, the Scottish musical drama God Help the Girl is a young, fresh film for a mainly young, teenage audience. Created by first time writer and director Stuart Murdoch, the film focuses on a broken artist who is trying to find and define herself through the art of music.