Joy to the world from The Muppet Christmas Carol with songs written by Paul Williams. Sleep tight.
Category Archives: Puppets
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (2019)
I hope you know that you made today a very special day by just your being you. There’s no one in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are. 1990s New York. Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) is an investigative journalist for Esquire magazine who receives an assignment to profile beloved children’s educational TV host Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood . He approaches the interview with typical hard-nosed scepticism, as he finds it hard to believe that anyone can have such a good nature. But Roger’s empathy, kindness and decency chips away at Vogel’s jaded outlook on life. He’s happily married to Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson) with a young baby but the encounter with this unique celebrity forces the reporter to reconcile with his painful past, starting with his sister’s wedding which is attended by the father Jerry (Chris Cooper) he utterly loathes and they have a violent fight ... I don’t eat anything that had a mother. The general truth about Tom Hanks is, he’s a saint (even with that early, uh, brush with a cocaine habit). And Rogers’ saintliness is put to the test in this construction. The overall effect is to render Hanks’ patented sincerity inauthentic. The melding of the real with toytown is creepy as … whatever you’re having yourself. Much of this rings false and frankly sinister. The point where Lloyd is miniaturised to enter the TV world is like a bad trip and cheap psychology as if Screenwriting 101 and Self-Help got scrambled in the manipulation blender. You have to care about Lloyd’s problem to empathise with this concept. I didn’t. Adapted from Tom Junod’s article Can You Say … Hero? by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harper. Directed by Marielle Heller. Anything mentionable is manageable
The Witches (1990)
You can never be sure if it’s a witch you’re looking at or a kind lady. Little American boy Luke Eveshim (Jasen Fisher) is holidaying with his Norwegian grandmother Helga (Mai Zetterling) who regales him with stories of witches, female demons masquerading as normal women but possessing undending hatred of children. Helga’s best friend in childhood was entrapped by one of them in a painting and eventually faded from view. When Luke’s parents die his grandmother becomes his guardian and sends him to boarding school where he evades the attention of one such witch (Anne Lambton) and during the holidays at a seaside resort Luke become aware that witches are holding their annual British convention as The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children led by the Grand High Witch (Anjelica Huston). When he and another boy Bruno (Charlie Potter) are in their midst they encounter a life-changing transformation into mice and have to avoid all sorts of predators as they try to escape to safety experiencing an actual cat and mouse chase … Real witches hate children! Adapted by Allan Scott from Roald Dahl’s darkly comic book, the biggest surprise to fans of Nicolas Roeg is that he directed it (perhaps not when you consider he had young sons at the time) but it has some of his recognisable tropes as well as a crew of his regular collaborators, including Scott, costumier Marit Allen and editor Tony Lawson in a production from Henson Studios with all that firm’s puppeteering and effects skills to the fore. The trick of balancing realism with fantasy, humour with horror, and scares for children (Roeg edited out more morbid material after seeing one of his children’s reactions) with jokes for adults, is perfectly achieved in this ambitious comic drama with Huston camping it up appositely to Zetterling’s caring grandmother. How is the room service here?/Diabolical./ Good! A third of the film is the adventure the boys have as mice, attempting to avoid becoming part of the hotel’s dinner menu, and there’s a marvellous payoff with formerly fat Bruno achieving his mother’s (Brenda Blethyn) ambition that he lose weight. The (happy) ending is different from that in the book and Dahl hated it and threatened to publicly campaign against it (Jim Henson dissuaded him) but overall it retains his casual cruelty and wit. Stanley Myers’ score is amped up with excerpts from Dies irae here and there to sound like Berlioz’ The Witches’ Sabbath. Shot in Bergen, Newquay and at Bray Studios, this was the last feature to involve the great Henson and the final one of Dahl’s books to be adapted prior to his own demise. A foolish witch without a brain, must sizzle into fire and flame! A witch who dares to say I’m wrong, will not be with us… VERY LONG!
Attack of the Puppet People (1958)
Aka The Fantastic Puppet People/War of the Puppet People/Six Inches Tall/ I Was a Teenage Doll. Living in the moment is the most important thing. Inexperienced secretary Sally Reynolds (June Kenney) is grateful to her seemingly kind new boss, eccentric expert doll maker, Mr. Franz (John Hoyt), when he introduces her to a dapper young St Louis salesman Bob (John Agar). Little does she know that Franz is really a mad scientist who fights off loneliness with a machine that shrinks people to one sixth of their size forcing them to serve as his living dolls. But when he shrinks Bob after her predecessor Janet (Jean Moorehead) has disappeared, Sally then becomes his victim and she and Bob refuse to be his playthings, eventually escaping into a dangerous world that towers over them... Nobody can hear little people like us! The Amazing Colossal Man is playing at the drive-in and there’s something so eerie about Mr Franz’s amazing lifelike dolls it would drive a girl crazy with suspicion. George Worthing Yates developed producer/director Bert I. Gordon’s story into a fully fleshed screenplay, inspired by The Incredible Shrinking Man, no concept being beyond the ken of AIP in those exploitation-hungry days. The aforementioned Colossal was Gordon’s own work, hence the generous clip. Kenney (Teen-Age Doll) is terrific as ever as the innocent but the film is best when Hoyt rationally explains his daft plans; and when Sally and Ben are introduced to their fellow captives – US marine Mac (Scott Peters), teenager Stan (Scott Miller), aspiring pop singer Laurie (Marlene Willis) and a broad called Georgia Lane (Laurie Queen of Outer Space Mitchell), who bathes in a pot of instant coffee granules. From the misleading title to the paucity of effects, this is cheap as chips but deadly serious. This guy takes friendship seriously so he does old puppetmaster (Michael Mack) from the old country a favour that leads to the gang’s escape attempt during a very unnerving theatrical debut. That’s the director’s daughter Susan as the irritating little girl who gives the game away to LAPD Sergeant Patterson (Jack Kosslyn). Don’t leave me! I’ll be alone
Labyrinth (1986)
You remind me of the babe. Bratty 16-year old Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) must find her young brother Toby (Toby Froud) whose crying is driving her crazy and whom she has wished away to the Jareth the Goblin King (David Bowie), a character in the play she’s rehearsing. To find him she has to enter a maze and has just 13 hours to do so or have her baby brother transformed into a goblin at midnight. With the help of a two-faced dwarf called Hoggle she negotiates all the tests and obstacles including a talking worm, creatures called Fireys who try to remove her head, and a goblin army on the march… I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave. Nutty enchantment in a musical fantasy collaboration between puppetmaster Jim Henson and illustrator Brian Froud with Monty Python’s Terry Jones providing the screenplay (although other writers were involved: George Lucas, Laura Phillips, Dennis Lee, Elaine May… and it owes a deal to both Lewis Carroll and Maurice Sendak) which got a roasting upon release but has proven its credentials with the passing of time and is now a determined cult and kids’ classic. Beautifully imagined and executed with a wicked stepmother, a baby in peril and toys that come to magical life in an ancient labyrinth and wicked creatures in the woods, this is just a perfect film fairytale, a story enabling a child to do battle with the grown ups in her life, a darkly romantic and dangerous outside world never far from her door. Bowie’s performance is of course something of legend, while Connelly and the puppets are the mainstay of the ensemble. Do you dare to eat the peach in this phallic kingdom of the subconscious?! Puppetry: puberty. Discuss. Quite wonderful. You have no power over me!
The Happytime Murders (2018)
I unsewed your mother and made a jacket out of her! Private detective Phil Philips (Bill Barretta) is a down-on-his-luck puppet who used to work for the Los Angeles Police Department. When two puppets from an old kids’ TV show starring his brother wind up dead, Phil suspects something is afoot and rejoins the LAPD as a consultant. Reunited with Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy) his former human partner, the bickering duo soon find themselves in a race against time to protect other former cast members before the killer strikes again and Phil starts hanging out with his ex-girlfriend Jenny (Elizabeth Banks) who used to act in the show, now living it up as a stripper in a sleazy club … A mixed-media event that is vulgar, crass, crude, unbelievably explicit (there’s a beaver shot homage to Basic Instinct) and literally so crazy out there it’s in another dimension. However I did enjoy it, mainly because I relished the extremes to which director Brian Henson and his crew have gone to bust taboos. And it’s hilarious! An homage to all those Forties private eye flicks with Maya Rudolph as brave and loyal secretary Bubbles (who’s unafraid to clean up after an outrageous puppet sexcapade), McCarthy doing her shtick as well as you would wish, hoovering sugar up her nose like the worst kind of puppet junkie and making an idiot of herself in front of her boss, Banks a particularly unreliable stripper ex of Phil’s in this tale of inter-species relations, this is LA as Philip Marlowe would never have conceived it. You might be tempted to say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Except here fuzzy bunnies are sexual deviants. Otherwise the noir tropes are all there. As well as a whole new meaning for the term fluffing and an awesome exploration of silly string. This is gleeful, jawdropping outrage. I have now lived long enough to state, I have seen a puppet porno. What more is there to be said? I laughed. I gasped. I hurled. Written by Todd Berger. Should have kept my fuzzy balloon in my pants
G.I. Blues (1960)
There is no need to borrow a baby to get into my apartment. You underestimate your attraction. Stationed in West Germany with the American military, soldier Tulsa McLean (Elvis Presley) hopes to open up a nightclub when he gets out of the army. He lacks the capital for such a venture, but a chance to raise the cash comes his way through a friendly wager with his colleagues. Local dancer Lili (Juliet Prowse) is a notorious ice queen, and Tulsa bets everything he has that a friend of his, Dynamite (Edson Stroll) can earn her affections. But, when Dynamite is dispatched to Alaska, it’s up to Tulsa to melt Lili’s heart and as his friends Cookie (Robert Ivers) and Turk follow the couple and watch Tulsa negotiate his way into Lili’s affections from nearby, a baby enters the picture when Cookie falls for Lili’s Italian roommate Tina (Leticia Roman) … An unremarkable service comedy by screenwriters Edmund Beloin and Henry Garson gets the musical romcom makeover starring the King. This gained traction because of course Elvis Presley was himself stationed in Germany, as part of the post-war occupation, curtailing his musical career. This was the first of nine films in partnership with Norman Taurog and it curdled his screen persona and his film performances thereafter. However it is beloved of many fans precisely because of the echoes in his own life – he finds Blue Suede Shoes by Elvis Presley in a jukebox! – and the songs are outstanding. There’s some excellent location photography, including on a cable car ride. Juliet Prowse is remarkably charming and her presence alone elevates this in the canon. The King died on this day in 1977. Long live the King!
Christine (2016)
So, now, in keeping with WZRB policy, presenting the most immediate and complete reports of local “blood and guts”, TV 30 presents what is believed to be a television first. In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide. In Sarasota, Florida, circa 1974, an ambitious, 29-year-old reporter Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall) is relentlessly motivated to succeed. She earwigs on a radio scanner in her teenage bedroom to get ahead on stories. She knows she has talent, but being a driven career woman comes with its own challenges, especially when competition for a promotion, a floor manager Jean (Maria Dizzia) scoops a story on a serial killer in Gainesville (“but that’s not local! I don’t know the rules!”) and a tumultuous home life lead her to succumb to a state of depression which we learn from her mother Peg (J. Smith Cameron) is a regular occurrence. She is also dealing with horrific abdominal pains which are the result of a dodgy ovary and surgery could leave her infertile depriving her of her dream to have a child. She’s an unmarried virgin with no man in the wings. With ratings on the floor, the station manager Michael (Tracy Letts) issues a mandate to deliver juicier and more exploitative stories at odds with her serious brand of issue-based journalism and she wants to get away from fender benders and strawberry festivals contrary to his urging her to make news sensational. When the show’s host George (Michael C. Hall) takes her on a date as a ruse to introduce her to group therapy before breaking the shocker that he’s going to the new outlet in Baltimore with the station owner (John Cullum) and she then discovers that he’s taking the blonde sports moppet with him because they’ve got presenting chemistry, she decides on a truly sensational course … The true-life story of a woman journalist struggling with mental illness and the pressures of local TV ratings is a sad portrait played with devastating accuracy by Hall. Her nasal harshness as a charisma-free broadcaster is coupled with her utterly infantile home life which she shares with an equally immature mother who has decided to shack up with a younger, unsympathetic man. Bad move! This narrative of what is presumably bipolar disorder will ring several bells and whistles for those of us who have had unpleasant dealings with such sufferers – manic, aggressively obnoxious highs and a long, slow descent into a trough of weird behaviour which is usually deflected onto carefully chosen targets in their orbit with a cunning worthy of secret agents (hello Carrie in Homeland! Thankfully Hall is never so inaccurately wild-eyed and ludicrous.) Unfortunately in this case the protagonist directs her violence towards herself in an instance of desperate attention-seeking which according to her lead-in is “an attempted suicide”. A tad on the long side, it’s hard to know which is actually more depressing – the outcome, or the conditions of the workplace which drove her to it. As sad as the yellow-tinged cinematography. Screenplay by Craig Shilowich and directed by Antonio Campas.
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
Have you ever noticed how everything seems better at Christmas? It’s Christmas Eve. Kermit the Frog is Bob Cratchit the put-upon overworked office clerk of stingy boss Ebenezer Scrooge (Michael Caine). Miss Piggy is his wife (their family are quite the example of inter-species marriage with Robin playing Tiny Tim) and other Muppets – Gonzo, Fozzie Bear and Rizzo (who are Dickens and his friend) and Sam the Eagle – weave in and out of the story, as Scrooge reluctantly agrees to give his book keepers a day off. Scrooge falls asleep and receives a visit from his late business partners the Marley Brothers (Statler and Waldor) who warn him to repent or he will live to regret his ways. Then he is visited by the Ghosts of three Christmases – past, present and future. They show him the error of his selfishness but he seems past any hope of redemption and happiness until a vision illustrates that not everything valuable is a financial transaction … Dickens’ melodramatic classic gets a sharp treatment that oozes wit, wisdom and charm in an adaptation by Jerry Juhl that avoids the most sentimental and condescending aspects of this morality tale. Stunningly made and told, with Caine’s underplaying of the old miser merely heightening the immense charm of the enterprise, brilliantly offset by the songs of Paul Williams and music by Miles Goodman. Funny, inventive, smart and humane. Probably the best Christmas film ever. Directed by Brian Henson.
Paris When It Sizzles (1964)
Every day when I get up and I see there’s a whole new other day I go absolutely ape! Richard Benson (William Holden) is holed up in a swish Paris apartment with a great view and he has two days left of his 20-week contract to fulfill a screenwriting assignment commissioned on the basis of the title by a monied producer. He’s spent all that time travelling around Europe, having an affair with a Greek actress and drinking. Now he’s hired a typist called Gabrielle Simpson (Audrey Hepburn) who’s really a wannabe writer who spent the first six months of her two-year stint in the city living a very louche life. He dictates various opening scenes of The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower and eventually constructs a version which takes off with Gabrielle standing in for the lead actress in a story which mutates into a spy thriller. Her actor boyfriend in the story (Tony Curtis) dumps her (in reality she has a date to keep in two days – Bastille Day) and she gets embroiled with Benson himself as the presumed villain. When Gabrielle takes over the storytelling she turns him into a vampire because of a childhood obsession with Dracula. He rewrites it like the hack he really is and gives it a Hollywood ending – straight out of Casablanca… If we are to have a happy and harmonious relationship, I beg of you, never answer a question with a question. Is that clear? Real life meshes with reel life and Noel Coward – playing his producer Alexander Myerheim – materialises at a party in the film within a film. Marlene Dietrich has a cameo and Curtis has great fun in his supporting role as a narcissistic Method actor. This postmodern remake of the French film Holiday for Henrietta by Julien Duvivier and Henri Jeanson got a rewrite by George Axelrod and it’s brimming with Hollywood references and a surplus of nods to the films of both stars: talk about meta! It was put into production by Paramount who exercised their contractual rights over Holden and Hepburn, reunited after Sabrina a decade earlier. They had had a much-fabled affair then and Hepburn allegedly turned down Holden’s offer of marriage due to his vasectomy as she was obsessed with having a child. She was by now married to actor and director Mel Ferrer and Holden turned up to the set in a very bad way, still not over her. His drinking was out of control and he had numerous accidents befall him which ended up scuppering the final scene. It was directed by Richard Quine, who had previously made The World of Suzie Wong with him and that gets a shout out too. Hepburn’s husband Ferrer has a cameo here as a partygoer and Sinatra does some singing duties when Benson announces the titles of the film within a film. There are far more laughs here than the contemporary reviews would give it credit, with some shrewd screenplay analysis and Benson even talks at regular intervals about his planned book The Art of Screenplay Writing which sounds like a useful handbook. Hepburn was outfitted as ever by Hubert de Givenchy who betrays her terrifyingly anorectic frame and he also gets a credit for her perfume despite this not being released in Smell-O-Rama. Hepburn had legendary Claude Renoir (the same) fired as director of photography because she felt he wasn’t flattering her and had him replaced with Charles Lang, who accompanied her to her next film, Charade, which shares a location with this – the Punch and Judy show at the front of the Theatre de Marigny. They started film that just two days later! There’s a sinuous score by Nelson Riddle. Now then, the mysterious stranger. Who is he? What does he do? What suffering, what torment caused the deep sadness that lurks behind his eyes? And why, while we’re asking questions, didn’t I listen to my father and learn some sort of useful trade?
mondomovies 