The Stigmata of the Muppets

The big problem with the new Muppets movie is that long-time Muppets fans are still feeling the loss of Jim Henson. He may have died almost 20 years ago, but I think it’s safe to say the Muppets haven’t been the same without him. Not that they haven’t tried; they’ve gotten different puppeteers to play the roles left vacant by Jim Henson, and Steve Whitmire is very good as Kermit the Frog, but the problem remains—the Muppets had a lot of Jim Henson in them, and without Jim Henson, the Muppets don’t feel quite right anymore.

At least that’s the way it feels to me. One of my first TV experiences was watching the Muppets, along with Sesame Street, and while I never quite warmed up to the guests (who cares who Bob Hope is when you’re four, you want the Muppets!), or appreciated the musical numbers, I could appreciate the chaos and the general silliness that the show brought to the airwaves. When I had the chance to watch the Muppet Show again on DVD, I finally understood all the adult humor that had gone completely over my head as a child, not to mention the incredible inventiveness. The “Hugga Mugga” sketch is still one of my favorites, and the rapidity with which the dumb jokes were fired off made them funny.

After Jim Henson died, Jim Henson studios did make a good attempt to keep going. In all fairness, I loved A Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island, but then came Muppets in Space, which utterly failed to thrill me. I wasn’t a fan of the new Muppets they introduced, and the guest cameos seemed to degenerate from A and B list celebs to D-listers at best. Then Disney bought the Muppets, and my expectations went completely down the tubes. I don’t know how anyone else feels, but when I think of “quality all-ages entertainment,” I usually think of anyone but Disney. Yes, they can market to kids like nobody’s business. Yes, they’ve put out a lot of animated movies that are supposed to be all-ages, but with pretty much all of their movies until “Princess and the Frog,” I’ve never actually wanted to watch one, and when I have I’ve never felt at all engaged by their stories, which are basically fairy tales and folk tales remade with a healthy dollop of junior high wish fulfillment. Someday your prince will rescue you, provided you’re beautiful! If you’re down on your luck, you might discover you’re the chosen one who will discover a genie and the princess won’t really care that you lied to make her like you! The message Disney sent out pretty much appealed to either the popular kids in high school or the kids who wanted to be the popular kids in high school. If you didn’t fall into either of those groups, Disney wanted nothing to do with you. Plus, Disney is about as forgiving with their copyrights as Kim Jong Il is with North Korean dissenters. Who can forget the touching story of the time Disney made a nursery school paint over the Disney characters it had in their coatroom?

So yeah, when I heard they were making a new Muppet movie, I thought I knew where this was going. I could see Bob Iger sitting in the Disney boardroom and saying, “Yeah, Jim Henson had one or two good ideas, but now we’re really going to make the Muppets good! Now who has a movie script that we can make into toys and a Disneyland ride?” The fact that Frank Oz wasn’t in the movie, and had in fact condemned it, struck me as an extra little slap in the face to the remaining puppeteers and Muppets fans. Still, I heard good reviews, and I really did want to like it. So I bought a ticket the Sunday after Thanksgiving and braced myself.

You know what? It was a really good movie. Jason Segal should be congratulated for managing to make a movie that manages to hit all the notes it needed to, and it embraces some of the best parts of the Muppets. All the Muppets are themselves, and I want to point out that Sam the Eagle and Bo the janitor may be the two best character moments in the show, bar none. Not that the rest of the Muppets suffer, though. They’ve all been updated to keep up with the times, and I personally loved seeing where the characters had ended up.

Then you have a staple of the Muppet movies—the guest stars. There were a lot of cameos, and I think most of them were well-deserved. I’d like to give special kudos to Kristen Schaal, who played the most violent anger management therapist ever, Selena Gomez, who did a pretty good job spoofing herself, and Neil Patrick Harris, who definitely should have been the guest host.

Finally, I’ve got to say, this movie had heart. I’ve seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which is perhaps my favorite comedy about romance (NOT a romantic comedy) ever. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about breaking up and moving on, and while it does have the occasional misfire it deserves a lot of praise for showing not only how the process of breaking up and moving on really is, it makes the process funny and, just as important, it doesn’t pick sides of the breakup. Yes, the movie focuses on one side over another, but that one side is not necessarily always correct. I bring this up because in the new Muppets movie, Jason Segal manages to craft another relationship problem between the brothers Gary and Walter, and Gary’s girlfriend Mary, where Walter and Gary spend almost all their time together, and Mary wants to have some time alone with Gary. Jason Segal manages once again to give all three characters a valid point, and the way the situation is resolved isn’t forced or solved by a dues ex machina. The characters actually get to make choices consistent with their characterization to that point, and the movie is so much stronger for it that it almost overshadowed the main plot for me.

Still, you can feel the hole where Jim Henson’s presence was. I found myself asking, “Would the Muppets do that?” or “Is this appropriate for a Muppets film?” At least one joke in the film I could see being included by Bob Iger just to give Frank Oz an emotional backhand. Also, the film had a lot of focus on “the way the Muppets do things,” calling back to previous TV shows and movies. There’s only so many callbacks you can do before having to include new material, but with the Muppets the new material almost has to remind people of the old material without being the old material itself. It’s similar to when a band gets a new guitar player, or even more disruptively a new lead singer—fans of the way the band used to be pine for the original lineup, but they don’t want the band to simply rehash all its old songs. In this instance, I think every Muppet fan out there is going to have to ask themselves what new material they’re willing to accept. I think we’ll see a lot of different answers.

Getting Suckerpunched by Tron Legacy

[There will be significant spoilers in here for Tron Legacy, Suckerpunch and Phantom Menace. You have been warned.]

To give you a sense of how bad I thought Suckerpunch and Tron Legacy were, I can now safely say that The Phantom Menace is actually a pretty good movie in comparison. I am completely serious here. I know this is blasphemy to many sci-fi/fantasy fans, but here’s the thing—Phantom Menace has a lot of solid storytelling elements that the moviegoing public takes for granted.

Characters are one of these overlooked elements. Jar Jar Binks is one of the most annoying characters to ever set foot on the silver screen, but he’s consistently annoying. You know more or less what you’re getting. He also has a motivation—to stay near the Jedi who gave him a lifedebt. I don’t like the fact that he’s completely incompetent and succeeds because of some accident or another, but Jar Jar Binks is a more substantial character than any of the girls in Suckerpunch. He’s even more substantial than Babydoll, the main character in Suckerpunch. At the beginning she’s a blank slate. She has no personality, other than a very nasty event about to happen, and it’s only when her fantasy becomes the movie that she, or pretty much any other character, develops a personality. The more you think about it, the harder it becomes to reconcile. Even in the Wizard of Oz, if it’s only supposed to be a dream, Dorothy has a clearly-developed character before being swept away by the tornado.

In fact, since there isn’t any characterization in the real world, the motivation and reasoning behind almost any part of the plot is “because.” How do Babydoll’s friends join her in the action sequences? Because. Why is the wise man there? Because. Why do they have to kill all these monsters? Because. Why does one of the characters have to sacrifice herself? Because.

In fact, it’s the whole sacrifice of Babydoll that really makes the entire movie meaningless. She doesn’t escape, her fantasy ends with her getting lobotomized, and Sweet Pea escapes. Granted, the only thing we know of Sweet Pea’s character is what we’ve seen in Babydoll’s fantasy, and how much of that is supposed to transfer over to reality the audience has no idea. Again, why are we supposed to care about Sweet Pea? Because. How does the Wise Man who has supposedly been in Babydoll’s fantasy become a real person with no connection to the asylum where the girls are housed? Because.

In the Phantom Menace, on the other hand, the characters are in the same reality all the time. What happens to Qui-Gon Jinn affects everyone and you know why you should care. It’s a luxury I was unaware I needed until Suckerpunch came along. Not only that, there are definite answers to some of the questions. Why does Padme act so odd toward the Jedi? Because she’s the queen in disguise! Why does Darth Maul have that battle with Qui-Gon on Tattooine? Because he’s tracked a signal to Naboo, sent search droids out, and they located her ship! It’s almost a spiritual experience to watch the Phantom Menace and see just how well the plot fits together when you compare it to Suckerpunch.

By comparison, Tron Legacy has clear characters. Somewhat eye-rolling, because the main character is an extreme sports nut who is also an expert at high-security break-ins and is also a master hacker, but clear. Then he gets swept into the world of Tron, and the whole movie pretty much goes down the toilet after that, in a storm of “because.” How does Rinzler, aka Tron, manage to overcome his programming in his final moments of life? Because. Why can’t Flynn destroy Clu without destroying himself? Because. In fact, why can’t Flynn fight Clu? Because. Why is Quorra’s race so important? Because. Why is Quorra supposed to change everything when she gets out of The Grid? Because.

I’d also like to mention that in both Suckerpunch and Tron Legacy characters utter lines completely at random, without really any context to what is going on around them. When Kevin Flynn rants about how they should just stay at his little villa off The Grid, neither Quorra or Sam actually says why. When Sam decides to go back into The Grid, he says it’s because this is something he has to do with absolutely nothing in the film leading to this moment. When the Wise Man in Suckerpunch gives the girls advice before each mission, his final words of wisdom have nothing to do with the situation they’re in. It would be like if a coach in a football locker room said, “Okay guys, before you go out for the second half, remember—Velcro fastens quicker, but tying your shoelaces gives you more satisfaction.” Compare this to Yoda’s talk to Anakin about how fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate and hate leads to suffering.

I’ll grant you that Jake Lloyd’s performance as Anakin can be wooden, but at least Anakin and all his dialogue fit into the movie. Could Obi-Wan have been used more in the Tatooine sequences? Yes, but at least there was a reason for him to be where he was. Compare this to Sam trying to find the black market program Zuse, who does almost nothing for the movie. He’s this big secretive character, and his secret identity? A slick club owner who you’d expect to be a black market dealer anyway. After that, his only role is to call down the forces of Clu on Sam, Quorra and Flynn, and then stand around while Clu puts a bomb in his hand, which has to rank as one of the most pathetic character deaths of all time. No running, no action whatsoever. He just holds the bomb in his hand and complains as he waits for it to go off. It’s one of the most unnecessary scenes in the movie, and I say that knowing that the best fight scene in Tron Legacy was in the club, thanks to Daft Punk’s “Derezzed.”

I really want to know how anyone could like either of these movies, and why Phantom Menace is still held in such low esteem after these movies came out. Let me know if you can help me on this. I’ll be waiting in line for the Phantom Menace 3-D.

It Sure Ain’t Miller Time Any More

In case comic fans across the world haven’t seen it yet, Frank Miller posted a rant about the Occupy Wall Street crowd that basically says they’re a bunch of whiny spoiled brats and that if they really wanted to make a difference in the world they’d go out and join the army instead of fighting the made-up villains at home. I’m sure by now a lot of people have focused on the generally-accepted irony of the man who popularized Batman as taking down the status quo and Daredevil standing up for the little guy—not to mention the man who wrote all those Sin City yarns about life on the streets pulling down the corrupt in power—saying that the people who are right in the real-life application of his ideology are the Kingpins, the Sal Falcones and the Roarks. (If you’re interested, you can see his rant here: http://frankmillerink.com/ )

You know, I despair of what Frank Miller has become, but I can’t exactly fault him for it. You see, his apparent ideological shift to championing the Roarks of Sin City coincidentally mirrors another Miller whose ideology shifted in the wake of 9/11: Dennis Miller.

For those unfortunate individuals who did not get to see Dennis Miller before he became exclusively Fox News’ parrot, you missed a great comedian. He owed a lot of his attitude to George Carlin, but he had a sense of intelligence and wordplay that really made you pay attention to him. Who else would compare a transparent vending machine to watching people commit suicide? Who else would say, “I was in LA recently…always love Louisiana.” Or who else would compare East and West Germany’s reunion with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis? “I was never a fan of their material before, and I don’t want to see what they have cooked up this time.” I loved it all, and I shamelessly stole a lot of his jokes in countless failed attempts to be cool in high school.

Then September 11^th, 2001 happened. Then George W. Bush and Dick Cheney really seemed to take us down the rabbit hole, rights were thought of as quaint fads of yesteryear, and some genuninely scary news started coming out, including the little fact that Osama bin Laden was no longer considered a high priority, as opposed to staying in Iraq forever and ever, despite the ever-increasing obviousness of the fact we’d gone to war with them for no reason. Okay, from all this you can probably tell that I’m not a George W. Bush fan, but I do know that even as there were people who were really against what Bush was doing, 9/11 hit a lot of people hard. We were at war with a hidden enemy, and the only things we knew about them for sure was that they were terrorists, and they were Muslim.

The reaction was actually pretty similar to how people felt about the Japanese in World War II. If you looked Asian, then you were probably a Japanese sympathizer. The reaction at that time was to gather up anyone who looked Japanese and stick them in an Internment Camp. If you notice any parallels with the German concentration camps, you’re not alone. I will say, in the defense of the U.S., that the treatment of the Japanese was slightly better than at Auschwitz or Dachau. There were no gas chambers and  no mass graves, but they did live in tarpaper shacks with very public communal bathrooms and has only $0.45 a day for rations. Even in 1943, this wasn’t a lot.

My point in all this is when you look at history, a lot of people reacted badly to the surprise attack on our country. It shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of people’s ideologies took a hard right to conservatism, because after the Trade Centers were attacked, after all those people were killed…it’s pretty easy to reach the conclusion that national security and defense is not all that matters, they are the only thing that matters. As a corollary, if a few rights have to be given up in order to achieve this…well, the ends justify the means.

Here’s the problem with taking a side in politics, though—you start to get sensitive to attacks on “your side.” I know that once I got to the point where I was pretty sure I wouldn’t vote Republican for a long while, attacks on liberals became less funny. And I had LOVED making fun of such liberal staples as political correctness! I’ve laughed at attempts to decriminalize marijuana, and thought that people who staged sit-ins were being unrealistic in solving the world’s problems. Granted, I realize this, and even though I have apparently taken a side, I can still laugh when somebody calls someone “differently abled,” which to my mind seems to be needlessly sugarcoating an issue, or make a good joke about the fact that Democrats in Congress have less spine than a paramecium. I think that’s missing from Frank and Dennis Miller, and I also think that’s why their work has suffered in recent years.

See, if you’re an artist like a comic book writer or a comedian, you have to have an open view of the world. Artists reflect what they see around them, and if you wholeheartedly cling to one ideology, you eventually find yourself getting swept up in it. It’s like Catholics who refuse to acknowledge that the Catholic church has a problem with child molestation, or like Penn State students refusing to acknowledge their football program had a problem with child molestation. If you believe too deeply in an ideology, you can find yourself saying that, as Dennis Miller said when talking about cutting benefits, “It’s time to acknowledge that there are people out there that aren’t worth saving. Just let ‘em die!” OR you can find yourself on the opposite end of the spectrum from where you were years ago, saying things you might have previously found abhorrent. I don’t know that Frank Miller or Dennis Miller actually really changed, but they ended up believing so deeply in one part of the conservative ideology that they had to accept the rest of the conservative ideology as well.

I don’t mean to tear into conservatives here, just so we’re clear. It can happen to almost any group. I think the solution is not that you shouldn’t believe in anything, but to keep in mind a sense of persepective. Otherwise, you may find yourself on Fox News. Or you may find yourself ranting against people and looking foolish online. Or, you know, you may find yourself pressed into service as a suicide bomber.

Sex, Lies, and Joe Paterno

 If you ask people who know me, they’ll tell you I’m not a sports fan. I used to have sports heroes, like Alan Trammel and Pete Rose, but these days I’m not really surprised when a scandal breaks out, like Tiger Woods or Brett Farve or the current mess with the Minnesota Vikings and their little spat with the state of Minnesota about whether they deserve a new stadium, paid for by the state of Minnesota of course. God forbid pro sports teams have to pay for something.

So in the last week, when the scandal broke at Penn State, I wasn’t too surprised that people rioted on behalf of Joe Paterno. What’s a few raped kids when winning a football game is at stake? That was before I did some reading into Penn State. It was also before This American Life devoted its show to Penn State. It painted an entirely different picture of the Penn State football team than I was expecting. I felt conflicted, and I was happy to feel that way. I’ve gotten much too comfortable with thinking of athletes as bad people by default. It was good to get the other side of the argument.

                 

Joe Paterno, if you weren’t familiar, has an incredible other side. After he wins his first championship, he tells the university they’re going to build…a new library. Because a top-notch university should have a top-notch library. I think that alone blew my mind. Most of the coaches I’m familiar with simply don’t care about academics. When I was in East Lansing, for instance, the Michigan State University football team got a new athletic center. This building was easily the nicest on campus at the time, and I found myself wondering how much money they had sunk into this place and how much could have been spent on renovating some of the older academic offices. Of course, the donor was a pro basketball player, but still…Joe Paterno was different. He held his players to a higher standard, and he chewed out a player for celebrating too much in the end zone after he had made a touchdown. For that kind of person, I think I would have less of a problem being a football fan.

                 

And yet. He ignored the fact that a graduate student had said one of the assistant coaches was raping children. He ignored it for ten years. That’s a hard thing for me to comprehend. How could someone who thought so much of doing the right thing, of holding people to a higher standard do that?

                

 You know what? I was going to dig in deep and bring up some psychological motivators. I was going to talk about the infamous case of Kitty Genoveese and point out that everyone involved pretty much just passed it on, doing the bare minimum in each case without really confronting the problem and then just assuming the proper actions had been taken. I was going to talk about whether things would be different if he had raped underage girls, and how strange it is that raping girls seems to be more of a concrete wrong to stop and that raping boys seems to not only be wrong, but surreal somehow, and how we can change that. But I’m sure other people are talking about the reasons on every single medium available to them. I wonder if they’ve brought in a psychologist on ESPN or if it’s the same bunch of journo-fans spinning their wheels. What I’m really thinking about is an associate in high school, Joe X.

                 

Joe and I fought sometimes, but toward the end we were kind of on good terms with each other. I knew nothing about him—we shared some classes together—and I cannot for the life of me remember seeing him at graduation, which was not uncommon.

                 

A few years ago, while I was talking with my mom on the phone, she asked if I’d gone to school with Joe X, and I replied that I had.

               

“Oh,” my mom said, and then paused. “Well…Joe was arrested for raping and murdering a woman last week.”

               

 Even now, it’s still hard for me to comprehend. Joe didn’t seem like a killer at all. Let me say that once more—he didn’t seem like a killer at all. I have no idea why he did what he did, and even now it’s hard to reconcile the Joe X in my mind with the Joe X who is on death row. It’s hard to think of Joe X and not feel some sympathy for Joe Paterno. Hey, someone you’ve known for a long time likes raping children—now what do you do?

                

 You know what again? It doesn’t matter. The part that’s indefensible isn’t that he knew—it’s that he knew about it ten years ago. Let me repeat that. Ten. Years. Ago. That’s ten years of more kids at risk, ten years of almost willful blindness. That’s the part that is so hard to wrap my head around. If not once in ten years did Joe Paterno look at Jerry Sandusky and think, “I wonder if he’s raped any more children,” then I will go cliff diving off Niagra Falls.

                 

To me, the biggest tragedy is that the more I learn about Joe Paterno, the more I think that there is someone who could have shattered the negative stereotype into a thousand pieces if I’d heard of him without the scandal. I would have liked that. Instead, I’m just unsurprised. Again.

Female Characters and Nerdy Birds

Noted comics blogger Jill Pantozzi recently put up a post discussing why Marvel doesn’t have any famous women. She also discusses the mystifying cancellation of X-23, written by novelist Marjorie M. Liu.

I’ve got to be honest, I agree with her, with one caveat—Marvel women can absolutely kick butt when it comes to team books. Here are some notable female characters that stand out for me who have only existed in teams:

Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Tigra, Storm, Rogue, Psylocke, Jean Grey, Moonstar/Mirage, Invisible Woman, Valkyrie, and Spider-Woman II.

These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I’m sure I could come up with more, but you get the idea. Then there are the female characters who apparently can’t keep a single title running to save their lives. She-Hulk is a pretty obvious stand-out in this category. So is Ms. Marvel. I should include Spider-Woman I in this category, but her ongoing was canceled decades ago.

I’ve got to be honest, part of the problem has to be the writers. She-Hulk seemed to be doing pretty well under Dan Slott’s guidance, but when Peter David took it over he disbarred She-Hulk, made her a bounty hunter, and introduced all sorts of subplots that first left me confused, and then just left me cold. As an aside, I hate to come down on Peter David like this because I genuinely like most of his work…but his She-Hulk run was completely unmemorable. The same goes with Ms. Marvel. It was somewhat interesting, but Brain Reed just constantly failed to deliver. I think part of that had to do with all the fallout from Civil War and Dark Reign, but come on—she recruits Machine Man and Sleepwalker to aid her in one issue, has a beach wrestling match with Tigra in another issue, and then disappears to be replaced by Moonstone, with absolutely no suspense, at least not to me.

This leaves us with one question—why are there so many great female characters in team Marvel books? I hate to harp on the point again, but let’s face it, female characters in team books have been fortunate enough to get some grade-A writers. Chris Claremont invented some of the greatest female characters in X-Men. Jean Grey became Phoenix under his reign, and then simply settled for being one of the most powerful telepaths and telekinetics in the Marvel Universe. Storm became the leader of the X-Men, Rogue became a mainstay and he turned Psylocke from a British telepath into essentially the female version of Wolverine—put through the wringer only to come out stronger on the other side.

John Byrne turned the She-Hulk into the fun-loving character we know and love today, someone who can either beat you in a physical fight or beat you in a mental battle using the legal system. He also turned the Invisible Girl into the Invisible Woman, and in the process made her one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe.

I’d also like to point out that Fabian Nicieza is no slouch at this, either. Namorita and Firestar were second-rate castoffs before he put them in the New Warriors. Then he introduced Silhouette, and then Turbo, a new character based off an obscure old character.

You might be able to say that with team books writers can juggle characters, give each member some kind of subplot that you don’t have to spend too much time with before leaping to another character. So all the characters can shine, and everyone gets a chance to look good. You might also be able to say that when you put women in their own book, they are mostly written by men, and the target demographic is largely male, so who cares unless the heroines are being fetishized.

However, here’s another thought. Wolverine, one of the most popular characters to spin out of a team book, got his own miniseries back in the 80s when his popularity was soaring. It worked so well Marvel started putting out more miniseries, like Meltdown, and then spun him off into his own series. In the 90s, they did the same thing with Gambit. Over at DC, the same thing happened with Robin. I also think the same thing happened with Power Girl, too. Geoff Johns put her on the Justice Society, she got a two-issue spotlight in JSA Classified, and then got her own book. I’d like to make the case that maybe, what Marvel should do, is spin one or two characters off into their own miniseries for a bit. Maybe Brian Michael Bendis has a Spider-Woman solo project he’d like to do for four issues. Maybe Rogue needs to go off on her own for a bit. It’s worth thinking about.

The final point I’d like to make is that female writers on female titles, which should be the best combination ever, seem to be criminally undervalued. I thought Marjorie M. Liu was doing a great job on X-23, giving someone who was created with no personality some personality. Similarly, Gail Simone’s run on Wonder Woman was pretty good—and as a plus she made Giganta an engaging character, which seems to have been forgotten after her run. I’m not going to speculate on any goings-on there except to say I think pulling those writers off their respective books was, and still is, unfair. Right now Gail Simone is writing Batgirl—we’ll see what happens.