Life's like a movie, write your own ending: An appreciation of The Muppet Movie

Last week I watched The Muppet Movie – the 1970s classic of iconic songs and gloriously corny jokes – at the Dryden Theatre.

The timing of this screening now seems more poignant after learning that Jim Henson died 26 years ago yesterday. In fact, three of the five main Muppet performers are now gone, and so are the vast majority of the 1970s celebrity cameos in this film. To quote a Far Side cartoon, “We’re getting’ old, Jake.”

The Muppet Movie is one of my favorite films and another influence on Saberfrog, and seeing it on the big screen in 35mm was something I hadn’t done since I was a kid. I don’t remember watching this film a huge number of times on video, but I don’t think I needed to, so deep was its influence.

I know that this film taught me the concept of puns and wordplay, since I needed the double meanings of “fork in the road” and “drinks are on the house” explained to me. It’s the earliest depiction of a romantic date that I can remember seeing as a kid. I also think that the scene where Rowlf the Dog discusses the joys of solitary bachelorhood made an impression on me – it’s the spoken intro to a musical duet with Kermit, so it was included on the soundtrack LP and was thus the dialogue I was able to hear repeatedly in the days before we had a VCR.

I have long credited/blamed (delete as appropriate) the influence of Star Wars in inspiring my younger self to become a filmmaker. But The Muppet Movie now seems like a more obvious influence, since it is explicitly the story of a backwoods boy going on a cross-country journey to enter show business. Although Kermit’s initial goal seems to be to become a performer, when Kermit actually reaches Hollywood he is shown directing a film based on his own experiences.

(This emphasis on filmmaking rather than performing seems to be further emphasized in the film’s wraparound story of the Muppets gathering at a Hollywood screening room to watch the completed film. It’s now striking to me that the very first shot of the movie is the sculpture above the studio entrance, showing a stereotypical Hollywood director balancing the world on his fingertip.)

Kermit’s saga begins when a wandering Hollywood agent (played by Dom DeLuise) overhears Kermit happily singing and playing the now-famous song “Rainbow Connection”, and thus encourages Kermit to go to Hollywood to audition. Our hero’s journey seems to be influenced by The Wizard of Oz (with its similarly-themed song “Over the Rainbow”) and I couldn’t help but notice something that both films share with Henson’s later film The Dark Crystal: The protagonist sets off alone, with no mentor or allies or safety net, and must build a family of comrades over the course of the adventure.

At first, Kermit experiences the Joseph Campbell-approved Refusal of the Call. But what seems to finally motivate Kermit to set off on this journey is the thought of making “millions of people happy”.

Rewatching this film as an adult, the innocence of that goal really hit me. Kermit is pursuing the selfless goal of being an entertainer, rather than the arguably deeper, but more self-centered, goal of being an artist. And when the villainous businessman Doc Hopper (Charles Durning) wants to exploit Kermit’s talents, Kermit ultimately confronts him by explaining that – unlike Hopper – Kermit is pursuing a goal that “gets better the more people you share it with.” So under this wacky, whimsical, light-hearted comedy is a theme about the importance of friendship and community, something that the more calculating Hopper lacks.

My earliest filmmaking efforts were motivated purely by the desire to entertain. But by the time I was old enough to go to film school, there was a growing cynicism and a growing backlash against Hollywood blockbusters, and against the very idea of “entertainment”. Anger, disgruntlement and ennui had become more fashionable. Entertainment was for stupid, shallow people who couldn’t accept the reality that everything was awful. And anyone who didn’t get with that program was made to feel like a sheep or a sellout.

I tried to resist that mentality for a long time. But in recent years I have observed mainstream commercial films becoming more formulaic, and more reliant on existing properties rather than springing from the imagination of a visionary like Jim Henson. I’ve also gotten bummed out by the constant din of Internet culture, where the most hostile and close-minded people so often seem to have the power to overpower every discussion.

I have recoiled against all this by overdosing on screenings of experimental films – they may be confusing or disturbing or sometimes even dull, but they stem from the subconscious of someone who is determined to walk his or her own solitary path, regardless of what other people think.

So rewatching The Muppet Movie as an adult was like coming home after waging a long and difficult war. It didn’t reduce me to tears (as I thought it might), but I had to sit in my car for a little while after the screening. I had to process what I had seen. I had to dwell on the difference between what I originally learned from that film as a child, and what kind of adult I have become.

I’ve had many triumphs and good experiences. But I’ve also had many moments of frustration, and many experiences that have left me more inclined to become closed-off and separatist.

The Muppet Movie is a reminder of the importance of optimism, innocence, and pursuing your dreams. Both “Rainbow Connection” and Gonzo’s later lament “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday” have lyrics about pursuing something that is intangible or hard to explain.

The film is also a reminder that you can be irreverent without being cynical. The Muppet Movie does not shy away from depicting the hazards and pitfalls of adult life, and in fact there are some gags (such as those involving mild depictions of sexuality or alcohol use) that I suspect might upset some people if used in a kid’s film today. Doc Hopper starts out as a silly and cartoony villain, but becomes a more serious and violent threat over the course of the film.

Yet The Muppet Movie does not treat these adult-world hazards as excuses to give up or to be nihilistic. The point of the movie seems to be that idealism can and should triumph against these darker forces.

Two scenes in particular have always haunted me. One is when Kermit and friends are stranded in the desert, and Kermit wanders off alone to deal with his thoughts. He has a conversation with himself (literally – there is another Kermit that he talks to, and I needed the symbolism of this explained to me as a kid) and has to convince himself that he would have been unhappy if he hadn’t pursued this dream, and that the friends who’ve been traveling with were following the dream, not him.

The other is when (spoiler) Kermit finally reaches Hollywood and tells a studio head that he wants to be “rich and famous”. This has long struck me as an ambiguous ending, since Kermit expresses his goal more selfishly at this climax than he did at the beginning, when he simply wanted to make “millions of people happy”. The irony seems to be made more deliberate by the casting of Hollywood’s most infamous fallen angel – Orson Welles – as the studio head.

And on this viewing, I noticed that Kermit and friends essentially bully their way past the studio head’s secretary (Cloris Leachman) instead of simply going to the audition that the agent told Kermit about at the start of the movie. It’s an unexpected change of character for Kermit, especially so soon after scolding the villain for his lack of empathy.

I realize this is a G-rated family comedy whose plot is just a rough clothesline to hang gags on, and that I may be looking too hard for existential meaning in what are probably just story glitches that another script draft could have fixed. But The Muppet Movie had a huge impact on me as a kid, so it will always seem to me to be a work of Talmudic significance.

Things I learned at the IFP Filmmaker Conference: Day 5

OK, so it's obviously taken me way too long to chronicle this IFP conference, which was a month and a half ago now.

I actually wasn't around for all the panels on the final day, as I had a train to catch. However, I still managed to snag a few final pearls of wisdom.

#5. The Internet is the opposite of movies in many ways.

This observation came from “interactive art director” Jeff Soyk, one of the contributors to a panel on Hollow, an interactive website devoted to sharing stories from a struggling West Virginia community. He said that film and the Internet were “contradictory experiences,” pointing out that the web is a more information-driven medium with a shorter attention span. He added that developing the Hollow project meant getting away from the auteur approach, and developing the story as a team. (Hollow also involved giving camera equipment to the community members, and training them in how to use it, so that they could tell and record their own stories for the site.)

#4. Sound is an overlooked and underappreciated aspect of film.

This also came up during the Hollow panel. The project's creators found that sound design and music was essential in contributing a mood to the experience. One of the contributors named the addition of the music as marking the point when the project finally felt “real.”

My extreme delay in completing my IFP write-up means that this ties in with a similar point I heard yesterday at the Buffalo Dreams film festival, during a talk from Paige Davis of the distribution company Alternative Cinema. When an audience member asked about common mistakes that low-budget filmmakers make, she stressed the importance of good sound. She said that filmmakers are often so caught up in the logistics of getting the movie made that they don't give audio the attention that it needs.

You may have already heard it said that audiences will forgive a crummy picture (and even accept it as a style) but are less tolerant of crummy sound. But it's worth repeating anyway.

#3. If you've already shot your movie, think of a pitch that describes what you know you have.

Nancy Abraham of HBO Documentary Films said this during a panel on the art of pitching documentary films, but I suspect it applies equally well to narrative films.

This point is actually somewhat dear to my heart. I've met people who can come up with a catchy-sounding one-word premise, but don't know how to develop it into actual characters and scenes. Whereas a lot of my ideas come from something a bit more esoteric – a theme or mood I want to express, or a genre I want to play with – making it a challenge to figure out how to explain the story to people in a simple way that makes it sound compelling. I did several drafts of Saberfrog before getting to the point where I could easily sum up the premise of my little road movie: “An aging slacker goes on a road trip to find old friends because voices in his head tell him to.” (And if memory serves, the voices in his head weren't even in my original outline.)

#2. Anyone doing any sort of media needs to collaborate with people in different disciplines.

This came from Brent Hoff of the new Made in NYC Media Center, a venue that was on the verge of opening to the public at the time of the conference.

That point is something else I've been learning through experience. Being a filmmaker isn't just about knowing how to write a script, block a scene, or choose lenses. You need to know about business. You need to know about the Internet and social networking. You need to know about promotion. And while I've enjoyed wearing a lot of hats on my past films, I've found that not all of these areas are strengths of mine.

#1. Filmmakers should look at other measures of success besides box office and Facebook likes.

This came up during a curious talk by Debika Shome, representative of a big-data organization called the Harmony Institute panel. Shome introduced her talk by discussing several possible measures of success and impact – not just box office and Facebook likes, but also awards, critical response, and the number of press articles covering the movie.

Shome was promoting the idea that you should think about “optimizing” your work, and evaluating its effectiveness in tangible terms. This seemed to be a potentially controversial area: One audience member criticized the idea of equating impact with popularity and performing statistical number-crunching when developing a project, saying “This is what Hollywood does” and implying that this approach was incompatible with the indie spirit of doing something original and personal.

Shome responded by discussing the documentary film Waiting for Superman, about the problems in the U.S. educational system. She said that the Institute studied what “frames” and metaphors did and didn't resonate in audiences and press. If you pick an approach that doesn't resonate with the public, she said, then even a hard push might not be successful.

General thoughts …

Whenever I return to NYC for one of these events, I'm always struck by how the artistic community's attitude has changed since I was a student there in the 1990s.

The idea that being unhappy or helpless makes you deep was mercifully absent. It was smarter to be clever and to do something and make a difference.

Obviously not everyone has changed with the times. During that week (but not while at the conference), I overheard some nerds complaining – only half-jokingly – that being able to look stuff up on the Internet makes it harder to have arguments about trivial knowledge. To me that says something: some people would rather feel that they're right, rather than take the effort to learn and correct themselves. Today, I feel like the old snobbiness of “I know something obscure that you don't, I'm part of this exclusive scene” has sort of vanished in the Internet age, when theoretically anyone can know anything if they bother to look it up.

(Of course, maybe the new challenge will be to try to reintroduce value-through-scarcity. As of this writing, I am possibly the only person who has seen both the rediscovered Orson Welles film Too Much Johnson and the new Troma film Class of Nuke 'Em High Part 1, because I attended exclusive regional premieres of both.)

Everything at this conference was very positive and high-functioning. No one really gave in to the low-achiever pastime of complaining incessantly about conservatives – and those who did were motivated to make documentaries! Even the criticisms of Hollywood were fairly low-key and determined to find the silver lining – discussing what we as indie filmmakers can do, not what we can't do.

Being in NYC, among smarter and more creative people, did a lot to recharge me. Years after leaving school, I've encountered more and more people who complain about the status quo without ever quite seeming to consider that anything better could be possible. It's easier to bitch about how your favorite franchise isn't satisfying you than it is to show interest in anything new.

But it seems that younger, smarter, niche audiences do want something new. They want compelling ideas. They want community. Everyone at this conference assumed – perhaps naively? – that the web is a place where people are positive and constructive. It's only dumb “mainstream” stuff that is dependent on old or aging brands, aimed at an ever-more-arrested audience that only wants more of the same.

But maybe these themes are region-specific. In cities like New York, the emphasis is on being big and important and influential and cutting-edge. In Rochester, there's more of a middle-class culture of learning the existing rules and following them, and being grumpy when someone doesn't. In rust-belt areas like Buffalo or Pittsburgh, there's more of a gritty underdog attitude, in which artists either embrace horror and exploitation genres or become underground and avant-garde.

So it's been quite the learning journey this fall.

But now it's time to move on to what I should be doing – which is developing some new stories. November is National Novel Writing Month, and I had planned to spend it finishing the writing of these damn novels. The month is now one-third half over and I haven't had the time to do much. So time to buckle down and do some writing...

Three big lessons I've learned about writing

So I've got a draft of the first novel done, and I've gotten some feedback from friends. It's been surprisingly positive. I say 'surprisingly' because writing the book was a slow and difficult writing process, and getting it above novella length has been a struggle. Being much more used to writing screenplays, I knew that there would be a learning curve, and that by the time I got to the final book I would know a lot more about writing, knowledge that I could then apply to revising the earlier volumes. (I'm not gonna think about publishing – self or otherwise – until I'm sure the books are as good as I can make them.)

Now I'm starting to write the second book, and I find it's flowing a lot better. Thinking about why that might be, and thinking about things that I and other people have written, has made me think about some lessons that I've learned about writing.

These are lessons I learned by doing. Some of this is stuff that I've always believed but couldn't articulate until now, and some of it is stuff that I learned only after making mistakes.

LESSON ONE: Your character needs to be active. He or she needs to have a goal, and be willing to do something to achieve it.

The biggest mistake that people seem to make when they first start writing is having a character who doesn't do anything, who is introverted, alienated, lonely, and passive.

Everybody does this when they start writing. Everybody. Even people who are proudly anti-art and anti-independent in their tastes, who never watch a movie with subtitled dialogue that isn't spoken in Klingon or Huttese, seem to want to write an Antonioni film on their first attempt. If they ever go to film school or take a writing class, and have to read or watch the equivalent efforts by their fellow students, they would probably discover how boring that is for the audience, and it might make them realize that their own version is probably just as bad.

Why do new writers tend to fall into this trap? I can think of two possible reasons. One is that, as a new writer, you are trying to Express Your Personal Self, and writing is an internal process anyway. So it just feels good to write a character who is caught up in his or her thoughts, cut off from the world.

The other, and much worse, reason is that they allow themselves to think that being weak and passive and doing nothing is somehow … deep. I'm not sure how this attitude caught on. Once upon a time, even punks and hippies and grungies wanted to actually do things and make things. But nowadays I notice that a lot of people – especially on the Internet – really can't identify with anyone who had a dream and put in the effort to make that dream come true.

Somehow the people who strive and aim high, and pick themselves up when they fall, are the villains that deserve scorn whenever they do even a single thing wrong … while the people who just sit back and do nothing but complain about everything have somehow convince themselves of their own superiority.

All I can say is that when I was first trying to teach myself to write screenplays, I tended to look at movies that I liked, and try to figure out how they work and what made me like them. I know that many other people have done that also, but it might be less common than I thought it was. How else to explain why people who take pride in only liking genre films – movies about characters who DO THINGS – keep wanting to write dramas about navel-gazers who are helpless and passive?

When people write, they reveal a lot about their own psychology. People who are unambitious, and see life as one big conspiracy against them that they can do nothing about, are unlikely to be able to lead a main character through the process of changing the world. The people who write one page of something, and then can't think of what happens next, are perhaps struggling to understand how a person might go about making things happen.

Sometimes I hear people say “Well, I want to write about character rather than plot.” But here's a secret: Plot is what reveals character. What your character does to achieve a goal, how s/he treats people, how s/he responds to challenges … those are the things that reveal character. Not just sitting around spouting monologues.

So if you're thinking about writing about a character who does nothing, try writing about a character who does something. If that's not true to who you are, then watch some movies or TV shows, or read some novels or comic books. See how fictional characters respond to stuff, and try to learn from that. Study some successful models and try to follow them. Get your character off the sofa, wipe the streaked mascara off her face, and send her out on a journey!

And just having your character do what other people tell him to do? Not quite enough. It's a step in the right direction, but it's not quite enough. Ever heard of the “refusal of the call”, that Joseph Campbell moment when the hero doesn't want to accept the mission he's been given, before eventually agreeing? Until now, I never thought about why that trope is there. But now I realize why it works: It shows the character actually doing something. By choosing the life that's familiar to him over the one that's being presented to him, he is taking a stand. And when he decides for himself that the mission is actually important and that he is willing to take the risk – often for personal reasons other than the ones initially presented to him – he is again taking a stand. Without this element, the character is merely a pawn.

I've certainly written – and even filmed – scripts about a character who is introverted and alienated, as a vessel for my own feelings at that particular stage of my life. So I can't be too smug about this. However, a trick I used to compensate was to surround my alienated protagonist with more assertive and colorful characters who get pulled into his or her orbit.

Which brings me to ...

LESSON TWO: Your character should have, or make, friends.

I'm calling this a “should” rather than a “needs to” because it's certainly possible to tell a decent story about someone who is alone on his or her journey. However, it's damn hard to do this well.

And why do you want to? When have you ever seen a movie that you liked, that did this? I guess it gets back to the “I'm alienated, no one understands me, so I'm going to write about loneliness” approach again, so I won't repeat points I've already made, except to add one thing: Stories with multiple characters are more interesting.

You know how a lot of people say that TV is now better than movies? Why might that be? One reason is that there's more time for big story arcs, but another reason is character. A modern TV drama tends to have an ensemble of characters, each of whom gets his or her moment in the sun, and viewers often have a particular character that they love (or hate).

An important thing about writing for an ensemble, rather than a solitary protagonist, is that you have to write characters who aren't you. Rather than just having a sullen loner who is meant to represent your own sad-sack viewpoint, you have to imagine characters who stand on their own merits as fictional creations, who have their own hopes and dreams and quirks and strengths and weaknesses.

Maybe it's just me, but I always liked movies where there was a gang. I always liked it when there were a lot of characters with different abilities or personalities. You know, obscure arthouse fare like Star Wars and Aliens and, I don't know, The Goonies.

Having a gang means that your characters can talk to each other about the plot. When something happens, they can all have different reactions. The brave one, the fearful one, the smart one, the naïve one, all can have different perspectives on the action. Also, you can split them up and send them off on different subplots. This might be a challenge if you have difficulty coming up with one plot, let alone two or more, but that's part of why you should try it.

What can I say … As a writer, I guess I've always found the Wizard of Oz template more appealing than the Eraserhead template. Even though I like both of those movies.

LESSON THREE: Having a story is more important than having themes or a message.

You might be expecting me to drop the Sam Goldwyn quote “If you want to send a message, call Western Union,” but I personally think that's too cynical and discouraging. Film and literature are certainly capable of having something to say.

I prefer a quote from Orson Welles, who said that “most movie messages … could be written on the head of a pin.” I take that to mean: you can put a message in a movie if you want to, but it won't actually amount to that much. It won't be as important and earth-shattering as you think it will.

There certainly have been moments when it seemed like movies could change the world. The late 60s/early 70s has been widely hailed as such a period. I would argue that the late 80s through the 90s – an indie-friendly period stretching from Blue Velvet and Do the Right Thing all the way up to Fight Club – was another one.

I'm not sure we're living in a time like that right now. Maybe once upon a time it was oh-so-shocking if a movie made a political statement or criticized something about our society. But now we have blogs, talk radio, and entire cable TV channels devoted to decrying how much worse things have become since … well, since the last time people said how much worse things have become.

With indie cinema seeming to become ever more marginalized by franchise Goliaths, I don't really like to discourage anyone from consciously putting a personal philosophy or political viewpoint in their scripts. However, I'm not sure any philosophy is likely to be compelling enough to compensate for the lack of a decent story.

First of all, with all the chattering going on out there on the Internet, the chance that you genuinely have an absolutely unprecedented opinion about something is somewhat low. If you think you do, then by all means go for it. But you can't just (to paraphrase Team America) read the news and then repeat it like it was your own opinion.

And usually what people have to “say” is grouchy and negative. Every once in a while we get an Amelie or a Ferris Bueller's Day Off or something that tries to convey a positive philosophy, but usually we get A Hard Hitting Satire rooted in anger. To some degree that's the rebellious spirit of youth and/or art … but man, we are so knee-deep in that toxic negativity now. It used to be a brave thing to create art that challenged the status quo, but that hostility is now so omnipresent that it has become the status quo.

For me the absolute worst is when people write a script or make a film that merely exists to criticize something ephemeral ... like a particular politician or celebrity who's going to be out of the limelight before you know it anyway, or a current pop-culture trend that you find annoying (often for no better reason than that it differs from the pop-culture of your own childhood). When I see something like that, I tend to think: Come on, dude. You had a chance to make something cool. You could have been part of the solution. Instead you gave the problem free publicity.

I guess it's easy for me to say all this stuff now that I'm more experienced. I've done much of the above, and have now gotten it (largely) out of my system. Maybe people need to do it wrong first, not just for practice but because you need to get those things off your chest somehow. But what motivated me to write all this up was encountering a lot of scripts recently that are about self-absorbed inaction.

Two decades ago, indie filmmaker Hal Hartley complained about the “empty formal posturing” of suburban film students trying to make urban gangster films. He said that, instead, they “should be writing stories about sitting on their couch watching gangster films.” But since then, we've gone so far in that direction. We've had so many Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino wannabes who've embraced the “dude, we can make a whole movie just about guys in one place talking” aesthetic of both directors' debut films without demonstrating the wit or cleverness of either. Spouting opinions has become a substitute for actually doing anything or having any ambition.

So I think a little of the “formal posturing” that Hartley complained about 20 years ago – understanding how drama and storytelling and genres work, rather than just snobbily rejecting them or nerdily critiquing them – would go a long way toward making off-Hollywood scripts and movies better.

And novels, too. Speaking of which, time to get back to work ...

Movie Review: The Muppets

Some years ago, during the Park Ave Fest, I was walking down the street with some friends and I noticed some guys sitting on the roof of their house, drinking beer. I pointed and joked, “Look. Drinks are on the house!” A complete stranger in front of me then turned around and told me that my joke was terrible.

What that guy didn't know was that I didn't really write that joke myself. I stole it from 1979's The Muppet Movie, which I genuinely believe is one of the greatest films of all time, and was certainly a huge influence on Saberfrog.

I learned a lot from that movie as a kid. It basically taught me the concept of the pun (at that age I didn't know phrases like “drinks are on the house” and “fork in the road”, and needed to have their double meanings explained to me) and thus has much to answer for, as my family and friends would doubtless agree. It also introduced me to the grown-up world in subtle ways – it was definitely the first film I ever saw to depict characters going on a date, or to show guys bonding over their relationship troubles.

The Muppet Movie achieved the impressive juggling act of being simultaneously a family-friendly comedy, an origin story, a work of postmodernism before that was cool, and the last of the 1970s existential road movies. Without making a big deal of it, Jim Henson and company succeeded in making a big-screen version of Don Quixote (a task that both Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam have been defeated by). While I enjoyed the jokes and slapstick as a kid, the film had some deeper themes that have only grown deeper as I get older.

If you've seen the film (and if you haven't, you owe it to yourself), you know that Kermit leaves his swampland idyll when a conversation with a displaced talent agent inspires him to go on a quest to Hollywood with the goal of “making people happy”. Along the way he assembles a gang of followers and friends, only for their car to break down, stranding them in the desert. Kermit wanders away to have a soul-searching conversation with himself (onscreen he's actually talking to another Kermit, something else I needed explained to me as a kid). “They believed in me,” says a guilt-ridden Kermit about the family he's assembled. His doppelganger replies, “No, they believed in the dream.”

As a kid, this scene was just cryptic and weird. But as an adult (and filmmaker) who's actually experienced that kind of responsibility, it hits a nerve. That's genius, but what's even more genius is that the film is able to handle such profound themes without taking itself too seriously. (Kermit and friends are set free from their dilemma by a light-hearted, breaking-the-fourth-wall gag.)

An even greater moment occurs at the climax, (sorry to give away the ending of a 32-year-old movie, but it's your own fault for not having seen it yet) when Kermit and friends finally reach the promise land and enter the office of a studio executive, played by Orson Welles. Kermit says he's come here to be “rich and famous.” There's a long, awkward pause, after which Welles tells his secretary to “prepare the standard 'rich and famous' contract for Kermit the Frog and company.” While most of the Muppet gang erupts into cheers, the camera zooms in on Kermit just looking stunned.

This ending, to me, is as mysterious as the ending of Kubrick's 2001. Did Kermit win or lose? Why did his goal change from “making people happy” to becoming “rich and famous”, and did the studio head approve or disapprove? Was the casting of Orson Welles – who so famously fell short of his early promise in Hollywood – meant to be significant in some way, or was it just another celebrity cameo?

So I'm obviously pretty hardcore about The Muppet Movie. I can't claim to be that extreme a fan of the Muppets in general, though. I was into The Muppet Show as much as any other kid, but that show didn't seem to get played on TV much after it was canceled (it never had the syndicated afterlife of, say, Star Trek or The Twilight Zone), so the Muppets kind of faded from my awareness as I grew up.

But then, I'm not Jason Segel, who has apparently spent his life obsessed with the Muppets, and has spent years' worth of energy and clout trying to get a new Muppet movie made from his own script, which has now resulted in The Muppets.

A lengthy article in Entertainment Weekly last month described how Segel had to interrupt a readthrough of the script so he could step out for a moment, because hearing Kermit utter dialogue he had written reduced him to tears. (And frankly, it chokes me up just to type that.) Yet the article also quoted some Henson-era Muppet veterans, including Frank Oz, expressing disapproval of some of the humor in Segel's script. There are plenty of fanboys who are obsessed with something and yet have no insight into what made it good – would Segel turn out to be one of them?

Begin actual review here:

I've seen almost nothing Segel has been in, so I have no prejudgment about him one way or the other – to me, he's just some dude who really, really cares about the Muppets. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt. And I have to say, I think he did a pretty good job.

The previous Muppet movies seemed to follow the approach of the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, etc. in that each installment was self-contained and had no continuity with previous installments. (As a kid, I was annoyed when The Great Muppet Caper claimed that Kermit and Fozzie were brothers who grew up together, contradicting the origin story given in The Muppet Movie.) The Muppets, on the other hand, takes the unusual – and moving – approach of recognizing the past. The Muppet Show is acknowledged as a long-cancelled TV show, and the Muppet Movie origin story is treated as canon; the “rich and famous” contract from that film plays a key role in the plot.

The film's probably-autobiographical opening scenes introduce Gary (Segel) and his brother Walter, who happens to be a puppet (I won't call him a Muppet, for reasons that become clear if you see the film), who grow up as huge fans of Kermit and the gang. During a trip to Hollywood with Gary and his girlfriend (Amy Adams), Walter overhears a scheme to tear down the Muppets' abandoned theater to drill for oil (due to a loophole in the aforementioned “rich and famous” contract), so the trio set out to reunite the Muppets so they can raise money to save the theater.

Perhaps the simplest way to praise The Muppets for what it is is to point out what it's not. The film was preceded by trailers for several other upcoming kids' movies. The trailer for the new Alvin and the Chipmunks movie made a big deal out of the chipmunks performing Lady GaGa's “Bad Romance” (as if mentioning a familiar song was by definition side-splitting) and also featured a group of female chipmunks doing a booty-shaking dance. The Mysterious Island trailer showed Dwayne Johnson getting hit in the face with feces from a flying monster. The trailer for a new pirate movie from the Aardman animation studios in Britain had a man raising his kilt and waving his (presumably bare) ass in someone's face while saying “Feast your eyes!”

I don't mind a kid's movie getting a bit raunchy here and there. But the fact that that kind of humor is so prominently featured in trailers indicates that this is what Hollywood thinks family entertainment should be – bathroom humor, sexual innuendo and lame pop culture references. What parent wouldn't want to take their kids to see that, right? I haven't seen a lot of the Muppet stuff made after Henson's death, but some of what I have seen seemed to fall into a similar trap: trying too hard to be risque, and being too reliant on pop-culture quoting rather than doing actual jokes.

The Muppets is making a clear effort to be more old-fashioned and wholesome, and the style of humor (especially the breaking-the-fourth-wall gags) did remind me very much of The Muppet Movie. It manages to be genuinely funny and anarchic without straining to be cynical or offensive. Segel may be more famous for his work in R-rated comedies, but he plays his role with a boyish innocence that I found entirely convincing. It's no surprise to say that Amy Adams does just as well, since her role as a live-action Disney princess in Enchanted proved that she was born for this kind of thing.

The loss of that bygone innocence in modern culture is a noticeable (if unsubtle) theme in the film, and one would almost guess that the contrasting trailers preceding it were actually designed to be part of the movie, like the fake trailers at the start of Tropic Thunder. Whatever Frank Oz and his colleagues were objecting to in Segel's script, it either didn't make the final cut or must have come across differently on the page than it did on the screen.

It was also a huge relief that the pop culture references were few and subtle. I only spotted three – to Scarface, Dirty Dancing and The Devil Wears Prada – and they were all subtle enough that someone who didn't get the reference wouldn't have noticed the joke at all. (In fact, I only recognized the Devil Wears Prada reference because I happened to see part of that film at my girlfriend's house the night before.)

That's how you do it – as a secret wink to the people in the audience who get it, while leaving everyone else to just enjoy the movie on its own terms. That's better than just re-enacting, at length, a scene from someone else's movie in the belief that this is an acceptable substitute for writing your own material. I know some audiences have a Pavlovian reaction to any quotation from something in their own DVD collection, but to me that's the nerd equivalent of a fart joke. So kudos to Segel for taking the high road.

There were some things in the film that bothered me. First, the enormous emphasis on Gary's and Walter's fannishness kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Creative people used to be role models, not just idols worshipped from afar. But ever since Generation X took over the culture, there's been more of a sense that being imaginative and creating your own characters and stories is something that other people do, not something you could do yourself. In The Muppet Movie, the old-time ventriloquist act of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy had a brief cameo, presumably because Henson was a fan. I can't help but think that if Henson had been a Generation X-style fanboy like Segel, he would have made a film about trying to get Bergen and McCarthy to perform again, rather than being inspired to create his own family of characters. The Muppets would never have existed.

My second problem is that I found the film's premise a bit morally dubious. It's supposed to be awful that the villain (played by Chris Cooper) wants to tear down the old Muppet studio to dig for oil. But as far I can tell, Kermit just left that place to rot. I realize it's just a movie and that you gotta pick something as your MacGuffin. But when the heroes ended up arranging a telethon to raise $10 million to save the theater, to me that seemed like a lot of money to ask from the public to save a building that, again, the Muppets couldn't be bothered to take proper care of in the first place.

Perhaps both of these problems are really the same problem. The Muppets identifies more with the fanboy newcomers than with the title characters, and because of this we're given virtually no backstory as to why the Muppets left showbiz and drifted into obscurity. The film seems to regard them as victims of fate, left behind by an uncaring world rather than being capable of controlling their own destinies. For me that wasn't enough. I wanted more of an in-universe explanation for why these characters parted ways in the first place, since their reconciliation is meant to be emotionally significant.

Of course, a real-world factor in the Muppets' gradual decline was probably Jim Henson's death. I'm not saying Segel necessarily had to use that specifically (although that might have been interesting; Henson clearly exists in this film's universe, as photos of him appear in a couple of shots). But because Segel's script puts the Muppets on a pedestal instead of relating to them as heroes (as the previous films had done), there was perhaps a missed opportunity to deal with some more grown-up themes such as loss and regret and broken friendships. Giving these beloved characters real, adult problems, ones that their former child audience might find themselves relating to as grownups, might have made this film a true successor to The Muppet Movie instead of just being pretty close.

But perhaps it comes close enough. The fanboy aspect of the story does pay off emotionally through the story of Walter, who starts out wanting the Muppets to enter his world but ultimately gets to enter theirs. His climactic contribution to the story is an act of Napoleon Dynamite-esque randomness that you could actually imagine Jim Henson writing. I also liked that this film, like The Muppet Movie, had a scene in which Kermit tries to reason morally with the villain, who turns him down. There were one or two character moments that were just as moving as that desert scene I mentioned from The Muppet Movie, but I won't tell you about them (because I've already forgotten what they were).

And Segel does work the nostalgia angle pretty well. After spending my adult lifetime not thinking much about The Muppet Show, it was astonishing to see the show's title sequence and song recreated in the full glory of 35mm, and to see Scooter pop his head into the dressing room to say “15 minutes to curtain...” and to remember how deeply these conventions were ingrained in my skull through childhood repetition. There is also a performance of “The Rainbow Connection” that is perhaps a bit too obviously calculated to bring a lump to the throat of anyone who grew up obsessing over The Muppet Movie, except that it entirely succeeded at this (at least in my case) so, you know, well played.

Speaking of music, I guess I could mention that I wished the songs in the film were just a little bit better. I thought I hated musicals as a kid, but many of my favorite films – The Muppet Movie included – had musical numbers. It turns out that what I really hated wasn't the idea of people breaking into song. It was the sappy, cutesy tone of so many crappy kid's movies, plus the fact that the songs often sucked. (Whenever a new cartoon TV special aired, I was always annoyed if there was a lame song, because it meant losing precious minutes of a twenty-something-minute special that could have been spent instead on jokes, or at least storytelling.)

Anyway, the songs in The Muppets are okay (and the film tries to milk some humor out of acknowledging the strangeness of people bursting into song), but I didn't find many of them all that catchy. Although Leonard Maltin thought that the songs in The Muppet Movie weren't that great. So who knows? Maybe these new ones will also become classics with age.

I might also mention that one of the film's funniest gags – involving someone who has no desire to work with the Muppets – might have been even funnier if they hadn't picked a celebrity who, in real life, seems like someone who would jump at the chance. (I've tried to think of someone who would sell the joke better, though, and I can't do it, so maybe the filmmakers couldn't either.) And if the Muppet News Flash newscaster had had something heavy fall on his head (as happened almost every time he gave a newscast on The Muppet Show), I would have cheered out loud in the theater, so that was another missed opportunity.

OK, I'm pretty much nitpicking at this point. But the fact that I'm still digging seems like a good sign. So often we see mediocre films only to shrug our shoulders and say, “Yeah, that was OK, I guess.” If you find yourself analyzing a film to death, that probably means that it spoke to you on some level, even if you're just poking holes.

Perhaps the neatest thing about The Muppets is its absolute willingness to embrace the style and tone of its own franchise. It's rare to see this done, or even attempted. When something that was popular years ago makes an unexpected comeback, it's usually been overhauled in order to appeal to a completely different audience. Ronald Moore's Battlestar Galactica, Russell T Davies' Doctor Who and J.J. Abrams' Star Trek were clear attempts to remodel has-been brands to appeal to viewers who hadn't previously cared, and the old guard just had to get used to the changes in tone, budget, shooting style, and special effects technology.

I'm usually critical of fans who are stuck too far in the past and can't accept change. We should embrace change. But we should also embrace tradition. There is something very satisfying about seeing, for a change, something new that actually does play by the old rules, that is unashamed of the past and unafraid to be the thing you remembered. The Muppets takes the perhaps-radical view that kids today aren't that different from kids back then, that both generations can like the same thing for the same reasons, and that the values of that bygone time are still valid.

So well done, Mr. Segel, for making your dream come true, and for making an entertaining film.

Just one question, though: Where the heck was Robin? You bring back one-joke characters like Lew Zealand but you leave out Kermit's nephew? So much for trying to make a family film.