I must have missed the memo
So, a few weeks ago, I went with some serious Muppet-loving friends to see the Jim Henson exhibit at The Museum of the Moving Image. Despite not being overly in love with the Muppets, I am a fan of Henson's works post-Muppets. I grew up on Sesame Street, and I grew into adulthood watching Farscape, for which the Henson company did all the puppet work. In a world lousy with CGI, it's amazing how much more presence a puppet can have in a movie. I am a big fan of The Neverending Story, and Falcor still looks pretty awesome to me. (Compare him to, say, Jar-Jar Binks, a character created at vastly greater expense, and more recently, who looks as dated as the effects from the un-altered Star Wars.)
The exhibit is fun, and, although I admit to being much more in love with Henson's non-puppet stuff after seeing it (his posters! gorgeous!), I left wanting to see more of his stuff. To that end, I'm very much interested in seeing Jason Segel's update of The Muppets, and I was even motivated to watch, with my roommates, The Dark Crystal. The former still looks promising, the latter...
I'm going to have to admit that I don't get the appeal. I also recently watched Labyrinth for the first time, and the appeal of that movie escaped me as well. I'm guessing that having seen them in formative years, before the advent of better puppets might leave one more in awe/fond of those movies. I found The Dark Crystal completely baffling. I got the story--I checked with Wikipedia to make sure I had--it just doesn't make sense. Why it and Labyrinth have remained cultishly popular is beyond me. They're so obtuse, and not in a good way. I don't even have more to say about it than that. I watched the movie, it was ponderous, slow, and despite the creativity that went into making most of the puppets, fairly unimaginative. That's all the there that was there.
The saving grace of those movies, of course, is that someone tried something other than a reboot and did it with a metric ton of puppets. Which is good. I just wish these supposedly seminal movies were actually important after the fact. I realize that I have this problem a lot. Some movies remain important long after they have been made irrelevant--tonally, visually, etc.--by films that owe them a lot of credit. I'm told that The Godfather is one of those movies; I hated it, but supposedly it is the basis on which gangster movies ever after were fashioned, and the good ones (yeah, right, what were those again?) all are due to it. I wonder, though, whether that's fair. There are plenty of movies that pioneer effects, tones, etc. that go on to be used in better movies and we don't hold them up as all that extraordinary. I mean, The Matrix borrowed its signature effect from technology last seen in a GAP commercial and a wardrobe stolen from Wesley Snipes' Blade. Oh lord, I'm gonna hear about that from the Blade-lovers out there.
But I think Blade is a perfect example. It is decidedly not a great film. It's passable enough--like tougher version of Underworld, minus the werewolves (although not necessary without them, as some deleted scenes from Blade 3 would suggest)--and undoubtedly stylish. Otherwise, it's a fairly hollow narrative, based on a caricature better represented in several other characters. The stoic, violent anti-hero who struggles to resist becoming his enemy? Been there. It's still the reason we got X-Men made, and, subsequently, the renaissance of the comic book movie. That doesn't make it great or even necessarily worth watching. (The parts with the fat vampire being baked and Tracy Lords, just in general, make my case for me.) I think there are probably many movies that fit that profile and that people don't generally admit to not liking.
Or maybe it's just me.
The exhibit is fun, and, although I admit to being much more in love with Henson's non-puppet stuff after seeing it (his posters! gorgeous!), I left wanting to see more of his stuff. To that end, I'm very much interested in seeing Jason Segel's update of The Muppets, and I was even motivated to watch, with my roommates, The Dark Crystal. The former still looks promising, the latter...
I'm going to have to admit that I don't get the appeal. I also recently watched Labyrinth for the first time, and the appeal of that movie escaped me as well. I'm guessing that having seen them in formative years, before the advent of better puppets might leave one more in awe/fond of those movies. I found The Dark Crystal completely baffling. I got the story--I checked with Wikipedia to make sure I had--it just doesn't make sense. Why it and Labyrinth have remained cultishly popular is beyond me. They're so obtuse, and not in a good way. I don't even have more to say about it than that. I watched the movie, it was ponderous, slow, and despite the creativity that went into making most of the puppets, fairly unimaginative. That's all the there that was there.
The saving grace of those movies, of course, is that someone tried something other than a reboot and did it with a metric ton of puppets. Which is good. I just wish these supposedly seminal movies were actually important after the fact. I realize that I have this problem a lot. Some movies remain important long after they have been made irrelevant--tonally, visually, etc.--by films that owe them a lot of credit. I'm told that The Godfather is one of those movies; I hated it, but supposedly it is the basis on which gangster movies ever after were fashioned, and the good ones (yeah, right, what were those again?) all are due to it. I wonder, though, whether that's fair. There are plenty of movies that pioneer effects, tones, etc. that go on to be used in better movies and we don't hold them up as all that extraordinary. I mean, The Matrix borrowed its signature effect from technology last seen in a GAP commercial and a wardrobe stolen from Wesley Snipes' Blade. Oh lord, I'm gonna hear about that from the Blade-lovers out there.
But I think Blade is a perfect example. It is decidedly not a great film. It's passable enough--like tougher version of Underworld, minus the werewolves (although not necessary without them, as some deleted scenes from Blade 3 would suggest)--and undoubtedly stylish. Otherwise, it's a fairly hollow narrative, based on a caricature better represented in several other characters. The stoic, violent anti-hero who struggles to resist becoming his enemy? Been there. It's still the reason we got X-Men made, and, subsequently, the renaissance of the comic book movie. That doesn't make it great or even necessarily worth watching. (The parts with the fat vampire being baked and Tracy Lords, just in general, make my case for me.) I think there are probably many movies that fit that profile and that people don't generally admit to not liking.
Or maybe it's just me.