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Black Friday Blues? Observing Buy Nothing Day? How about a family excursion back to the future of simpler times with the new movie “The Muppets”?
Terry Gross of Fresh Air has the definitive interview.
November 23, 2011Nicholas Stoller made his directorial debut with the raunchy 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which starred Jason Segel as a guy who had to reassess his life after his girlfriend of five years dumped him.
Segel famously dropped his towel in the opening scenes of the film, which led The New York Times to call him “a young actor with nothing to hide.”
The two filmmakers have teamed up once again — this time with Miss Piggy, Gonzo and Fozzie Bear in tow — for the family film The Muppets. Segel tells Terry Gross that the only frontal nudity in this film comes from another star of the movie: Kermit the Frog, who never wears pants.
“In terms of our R-rated past, there’s an essential sweetness to what we try to do. And that’s not that dissimilar to The Muppets even if in Sarah Marshall there’s cursing and nudity,” adds Stoller. “We’re still trying to get at something that’s not cynical.”
The premise of The Muppets follows three Muppet fans — Segel, Amy Adams and a Muppet named Walter who’s voiced by Peter Linz — who want to reunite the Muppet cast and make them as famous as they were back in the day, when movies like The Muppets Take Manhattan and The Great Muppet Caper regularly appeared in theaters.
“We set out to make a Muppet movie that harkened back to the late-’70s, early-’80s Muppets that we grew up with,” Segel says. “I had the opportunity to work with my childhood idols, and I wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer. So I set out to make that happen.”
Having written a script, Segel and Stoller asked Bret McKenzie, from Flight of the Conchords, to write the lyrics for several original songs featured in the new film.
“We didn’t have to tell Bret much in terms of tone, because he’s by nature very Muppety,” says Segel. “Flight of the Concords is a very Muppety vibe — it’s two wide-eyed innocents making their way through a tough New York. So he knew what to do … right from the start. [And] all the great Muppet movies were musicals.”
The film opens with a grand production number featuring hundreds of cast members singing and dancing down Main Street in a place called Small Town USA. It’s campy — but intentionally so, says Stoller.
“The Muppets are always winking, there’s a kind of self-referential thing going on, so with a little wink, you can get away with a lot of campiness,” he says.
The two filmmakers also turned to another Flight of the Conchord salum — James Bobin — to direct The Muppets.
“As soon as he expressed interest, it was a no-brainer,” says Stoller. He explains that Bobin often helped them realize if the scenes they had written were realistic.
“It was easy for us to imagine scenes,” he says. “We imagined one scene with 10 full-body Muppets running away from an explosion — and James said that it was impossible. He had to do the heavy lifting.”
Once Disney gave Stoller and Segel the green light to make The Muppets, the Muppet puppeteers helped fill them in on the cardinal rules of the Muppet world. For instance, Muppets think of themselves as humans in their world. And they are never, ever mean.
“The Muppets don’t get laughs at other people’s expense,” says Segel. “It’s part of what I really loved about the Muppets. They don’t even want to destroy their villains. They want to reform their villains.”
He points to the first Muppet movie, when the villain Doc Hopper wants to cut off Kermit’s legs to make frog legs.
“As opposed to destroying him, Kermit is like, ‘Maybe you should think about why you don’t have friends. Maybe you’re just lonely and you need to be a happier person,’ ” he says. “The Muppets are pure.”
The Muppets are also really honest.
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The subtle mind-smithy with which The Takeaway approaches controversies often irks me. They accept unquestioned Oakland Major Jean Quan’s suggestion that protesters asked her to come in and control fringe elements that the could no longer control, or that Adbusters were somehow crying uncle with winter coming. One can read the what Adbuster’s tactical briefing, titled “Occupy the High Ground” actually said.
Police in New York cleared the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park in the early hour of Tuesday morning, in what could possibly a coordinated effort to break up Occupy protests in Denver, Salt Lake City,Portland, and, notably, Oakland. The eviction in New York happened less than 24 hours after police in Oakland arrested 33 people while dismantling the Occupy camp in a downtown plaza. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said the move was necessary because “the Occupy Wall Street movement itself is having a hard time controlling the encampments.” Protesters returned to the camp Monday night.
Monday’s eviction in Oakland came on the same day Canadian magazine AdBusters, which is credited for inspiring the movement, released a “tactical briefing” warning protesters to “declare ‘victory’” and scale back the camps before winter sets in.
Ben Brock Johnson, digital editor for The Takeaway, is at Foley Square, where the Occupy Wall Street protesters have gathered to regroup. He reports on the latest Occupy news.
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Not when the consumer is paying for airtime, you don’t.
Melissa Block speaks with Randall Stross about the “Mobile Informational Call Act of 2011.” In his Digital Domain column for the New York Times, Stross writes that the act would clearly define what constitutes consent for receiving automated calls — also known as “robocalls” — on cell phones.
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It has taken me considerable time to realize… that I am a procrastinator.
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Who’s wrong here? People occupying a public space to talk about the problems in our society and how things could be better or is it the banks that we’re camped out next to that are taking people’s homes, ruining the world economy? They’re at fault. They’re at fault. And yet it’s people from Occupy Boston who are in court today, not people from banks.
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| — | Kari Peterson-Smith “Across The Nation, ‘Wall Street’ Protests Continue” : NPR 10/11/11 |
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This was my driveway moment today. Now I have a good example for my students of an “inquisitorial” as opposed to adversarial legal system. Burleigh’s caution notwithstanding, it does occur to me to ask of this apparently tabloid justice “What will Inside Edition cover now?”
After four years in prison, Amanda Knox walked free on Monday. The 24-year-old American woman, and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher in 2009. Sollecito’s conviction was also overturned by an Italian appeals court in Perugia. The story of sex, drug-using, exchange students, and murder became a media sensation around the world. The prosecution’s case against Knox was derided as based on circumstantial evidence doubted by independent experts.
Journalist Nina Burleigh says the Amanda Knox case shouldn’t just dismissed as tabloid fodder. Much of the case, she insists, is about cultural misunderstandings between the U.S. and Italy. Burleigh is a contributing editor at Salon.com and Elle Magazine and author of “The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox.”
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This was my “driveway moment” this morning. I loved learning about the local nature of these remedies and the communal nature of the venues.
EnlargeLibrary of Congress
A soda fountain in south Texas in the early 20th century. Modern mixologists are discovering old recipes and forgotten flavors of the soda fountain era.
text size A A ASeptember 1, 2011If you’re hankering for something new to drink — something more interesting than the usual cocktail or soda — you may want to look to the past. Way back in the 19th century, pharmacists and soda-jerks created all sorts of exotic, lip-smacking sensations by mixing fizzy mineral water with unique blends of sweet syrups and bitters.
“The soda fountain was once an equivalent to the local saloon,” says Darcy O’Neil, the author of Fix the Pumps, a history of the golden age of soda fountains. In 1875, he explains, there was a soda counter in almost every American city.
By dusting off these old recipes and publishing them, he’s helped launch a bit of a renaissance. From New Orleans to Boston, Nashville and Washington, D.C., mixologists are serving up this style of drinks.
EnlargeMaggie Starbard/NPR
Phosphates and bitters, a mixture of herbs steeped in alcohol, are part of the revival of old-timey soda fountain drinks at places like PS7’s in Washington, D.C.
The trend reflects a shift away from the industrial soft drinks most of us grew up with, says Melissa Abbott, director of culinary insights at the Hartman Group, a consumer trends consultancy. “Old-timey sodas represent the movement toward higher quality — meaning seasonal, small-batch, local, even organic,” she says.
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