The Muppets (James Bobin, 2011)

Not three minutes go by in The Muppets before the filmmakers flaunt their unabashed reverence for Jim Henson's beloved creations. A montage of memorabilia would, in other movie, be as cynical and greedy as a filmmaker could get. Here, however, it establishes character, that of Walter (a new Muppet) and his supportive brother Gary (Jason Segel, who co-wrote the screenplay), as well as setting up the deep vein of affection the movie carries for the franchise. Segel made his Muppet love plain in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and ardor bursts from every frame of this uneven but lovable revival.

In fact, The Muppets will likely play better to the parents who remember the felt-and-cloth puppets from their own childhood than the kids they take along (though the ones in my audience seemed entertained enough). Packed with self-referential jokes and the usual Muppety meta-humor, the film emerges as a true passion project for Segel, co-writer Nicholas Stoller (director of Marshall) and director James Bobin. And though their nostalgia occasionally threatens to make wall off the movie from the youngest viewers, The Muppets proves funny, and touching, enough to win the fuzzy puppets a new generation of fans.

The Muppets moves quickly through Walter's and Gary's lives, the puppet sibling never growing taller and retreating into the comfort of old Muppets tapes as Gary constantly looks after him. Their bond is so close that Gary, now a grown man celebrating his 10th anniversary with girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams), invites Walter to tag along to Los Angeles so he can visit the famed Muppet Studios. Gary is so happy to see the pure ecstasy on his brother's face that he misses the twitches of irritation on Mary's. But the mildly disrupted idyll of their trip explodes when they arrive in California to find Muppet Studios not only closed but about to be demolished by a tycoon (Chris Cooper) eager to drill for oil. The only way to stop this is to come up with $10 million in two weeks, and there's only one way to get it: Walter has to reunite The Muppets.

Largely following the schema of "getting the band back together" movies, The Muppets wastes no time adding everything that makes the franchise great. Strong opening numbers, especially the wonderfully written and choreographed "Life's a Happy Song," convey all the giddiness of the project, while later tunes play across a range of emotions in a manner so rarely seen in musicals these days. Then again, how often do we get musicals anymore period? Segel and Stoller also break the fourth wall routinely, with characters constantly referring to the audience and the film itself. They also have fun with character backgrounds, from the perpetual cycle of Kermit and Miss Piggy's tumultuous relationship to Animal, here a member of an anger management group to get his frenzied, drum-related hysteria under control.

I won't spoil the film by mentioning the range of celebrities who provide cameos (other than to express regret that Steve Martin isn't one of them), but it speaks to the lingering affection people have for what Jim Henson made that so many people would appear for a few seconds of screen time. This is all the more impressive given how culturally out of step the whole conceit of the Muppets is, something the movie openly acknowledges. When Cooper's bad-guy baron snarls that this is a hard, cynical world, he's the voice of reason, not just antagonism. Yet the sight of Kermit flailing and being tackled by Miss Piggy, of Fozzie selling those awful jokes with all his might, can't help but make someone smile.

To their credit, Bobin, Segel and Stoller don't try to modernize the Muppets, and the isolated instances where they do—a head-scratching rap from the unlikeliest of sources and a clucked sing-a-long by Camilla and the other chickens to a certain Cee-Lo song—are the film's weakest moments. Everything in the movie feels retro, from the cheeky '50s suburbia that opens the film to the parade of '80s songs that make one wonder if someone didn't just use an old mixtape for the soundtrack. But what does it say about us that something so resolutely cheerful, even at its most moving and adult, feels anachronistic?

Overlong and inconsistent in its second half, The Muppets doesn't reach the heights of the show and the original three movies. Nevertheless, it works as a heartwarming (and occasionally heartbreaking) coming-of-age tale and an affirmation of how timeless family entertainment can be when it's done with respect for an audience, not money-grubbing afterthought. For all the issues the film has, I at no point disliked it, and I felt like a kid again watching Kermit bring me to tears with just the slightest "facial expression" caused by a hand moving around inside some felt. By the time The Muppets reaches its joyous conclusion, it's demonstrated itself to be as defiantly unfashionable, chaotically absurd and utterly charming as the Muppets themselves.

The Muppet Christmas Carol

"The greatest story of all time is A Christmas Carol. And there is only one way to make that better, and that is The Muppet Christmas Carol." — Ricky Gervais

Of the four or five versions of Dickens' classic that I enjoy each year come Yuletide, my favorite by far is The Muppet Christmas Carol. Better than any other adaptation of the story, and perhaps any other Dickens story, is the understanding on behalf of Jim Henson Productions that what makes Dickens such a powerful and serious writer is the degree to which he capture childlike joy. What better fit could there be, then, than Muppets, those agents of eternal elation, capable of putting a smile on my face long after I have outgrown so many other relics of childhood.

The film has fun with the mash-up from the start, using The Great Gonzo to play a narrating Charles Dickens, only for his companion, Rizzo the Rat, to instantly call foul on some blue, fuzzy thing posing as the author. The two hang around for the rest of the film, offering half-narration, half-reflexive commentary. "Why are you whispering?" Rizzo interjects as Gonzo intones quietly to the audience. Exasperated, Gonzo replies, "It's for dramatic emphasis."

Remarkably, for all the vibrancy of the Muppets jumping about in their greens and blues and browns, the sets themselves capture the grim, sooty look of industrializing London. The filmmakers understand that if Dickens could make his delightful tales without sparing detail of his surroundings, they should be able to do so too. Besides, of the author's best stories, A Christmas Carol contains the least amount of social misery, its conditions of poverty and urban malaise something that happens around Ebenezer, not to him. In fact, Scrooge is the kind of man who inflicts that kind of despair on others.

Michael Caine proves one of the finest Scrooges put on screen, and he must deal with the added strain of maintaining his dour mood around puppets. So good is he at tapping into Scrooge's bile that he never lets the Muppet aspect of the film derail the power of the story. He's playing straight man, but not to let jokes bounce off him. The merriment and glee that occurs all around him stops cold when it slams into the brick wall of Scrooge's unfeeling aura. The decision to use a human for the villain is a sly move on the creative team's part: as with Tim Curry's Long John Silver in the Muppet version of Treasure Island, Caine brings a menace that just could not have existed if they'd used a fuzzy, wee thing to spit out his bile. I mean, has anyone ever truly feared Oscar the Grouch?

There's no need to go into the story, which everyone knows and is unchanged for the Muppet version. But there's just something wonderful about watching Kermit the Frog play Bob Cratchit, and even more heartbreaking to watch Tiny Tim when he's a sickly puppet frog. I love that Robert Marley is invented as a brother to Jacob so that Scrooge can be haunted, well, heckled at least, by Statler and Waldorf. My only quibble is that the Ghost of Christmas Past looks creepy, with its porcelain doll face and digital alterations, but that's atoned for with my favorite view of Christmas Present, which is not only a masterfully designed puppet but also displays the traits of the character better than most other versions, capturing his rapid aging and his mercurial, in-the-moment nature. And I never fail to smile when Christmas Past shows Scrooge his first job, now altered so Fozzy Bear can replace Fezziwig as Fozziwog and Michael Caine bursts into glee when he breathlessly utters the words "rubber chicken factory."

The great thing about this movie is that, as ever, no one set out to just make a trifling puppet movie but a legitimate version of a classic. Scrooge's story loses none of its emotion, and the design is impeccable -- be on the lookout for nightmarish, even Expressionist skewing of houses in the Christmas Future segment. Paul Williams' songs are fantastic, especially his "Marley and Marley," which uses the haunting as an excuse to return to full-on rock opera mode even as he injects some of his most poignant lyrics, such as "Freedom comes from giving love as prison comes with hate." Yet even it cannot compare to the brilliance of "It Feels Like Christmas," one of my all-time favorite Christmas tunes, capturing the joy of the season better than nearly all of the treacly, overplayed sap on the radio.

The Muppet Christmas Carol has become something of a cult item over the years, but that's only because it so deftly mixes Muppet-style comedy with the lingering power of what is certainly not Dickens' finest literary achievement but perhaps the most immediately visceral. It somehow manages to wink at the audience throughout without bringing the whole thing down with lazy irony. The Muppet Christmas Carol acknowledges that it is following in the footsteps of countless adaptations before it, then it tries to argue that there is still something left to say. It succeeds.