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Like so many things I claim to love my experience of The Muppets is narrower than I realised, particularly when it comes to their earlier work. More familiar with their films of the nineties, when they moved onto film parodies/pastiches, I had never seen The Muppet Movie before I sat down to watch it for BlogalongaMuppets.

What a disappointment.

What little plot The Muppet Movie has revolves around Kermit travelling from his swamp to Hollywood, picking up Muppets along the way and evading capture from an ad man who wants the dancing frog to star in his TV commercial. There’s not a whole lot to grab hold of here, just a few disjointed and underwhelming scenes ties together with lacklustre songs about rainbows and “moving right along”.

The film is at a risk of being a little too meta, with one character forced to catch up on the plot by reading the screenplay. It’s as if we’re supposed to accept the meagre plotting because no one onscreen is pretending that this is a reality.

For a film relying so heavily on an existing knowledge of (and unconditional love for) the Muppets, The Muppet Movie lacks the energy and excitement we fell in love with in the first place. The film isn’t terrible, just not what I had been expecting. It probably doesn’t help that most of the cameos completely passed me by, at 23 am I too young to appreciate The Muppet Movie?

Most damning of all is that Kermit’s journey to Hollywood seemed to change him. Setting off from his swamp the plucky frog just wanted to make people happy, but by the time he reached Hollywood he simply asked to be rich and famous. Maybe this is a deeper film than I first thought, one about how fame and fortune corrupts? Oh Kermit, you should have stayed at the swamp.

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Melancholia
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The Muppets are a beloved institution, known for their energy, humour and heart. Across the years they have starred in numerous TV series, released albums, made the transition to the big screen and more recently starred in TV movies. Hard to believe their last theatrically released film was way back in 1999. This will of course change when Jason Segel’s The Muppets is released in February 2012.

That is five months away and with six existing films, watching one a month until then is just about feasible. This is why The Movie Evangelist has introduced BlogalongaMuppets. The rules are simple, watch one Muppet film a month, starting in September, until February when it is time to finish off with Muppets in Space and then see The Muppets in the cinema.

Luckily for me this fits in nicely with my plans for Body of Work and I bought the first three Muppet films a few weeks ago, already owning two of the later films. Below is the schedule, wish me luck!

September – The Muppet Movie
October – The Great Muppet Caper
November – The Muppets Take Manhattan
December – The Muppet Christmas Carol
January – Muppet Treasure Island
February – Muppets from Space
Also February – The Muppets

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With sixteen films out tomorrow it’s not hard to see why this documentary has snuck out a day early. If nothing else, it earned itself a solo post on this humble blog.

The Boy Mir – Ten Years In Afganistan
Following on from the acclaimed documentary The Boy who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan, British film-maker Phil Grabsky returns to document a further 10 years of young Mir’s life as he grows up in Afghanistan, from the age of eight to eighteen . Check out the maths on that.

Body of Work is a new feature we’re going to be running here at Mild Concern, or more accurately a new feature consisting of more features consisting of reviews. Welcome to a post about some posts about yet more posts. In Inception, this is me drugging you on a plane.

It has become clear to me that in order to truly understand and appreciate modern cinema, for better or worse, it is important to understand everything that has come before it. How can we judge a remake without knowing what it is remaking?

To better understand the journey of film we can’t just rely on watching The Story of Film: An Odyssey, we need to get our hands dirty.

In Body of Work we will take a director, writer, actor or group of puppets and watch their entire output from start to finish. This will be a lot easier for some subjects than others but should be an enlightening process. You never know, we might uncover a few gems along the way.

We’ll introduce the first Body of Work tomorrow and see where it takes us. If nothing else this is going to be a great way of generating content in slow weeks.

I’ll pop buttons in the sidebar so the progress is easy to follow and the list of subjects will be below as soon as there are some to list.

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