News Bites: How I Met Your Muppet

I’m still fighting this infection, but I’m feeling a bit better, and at any rate, I’m not going to let that stop me from posting the weekly dose of interesting movie and TV news. Of course, this morning I’m also having to cross over half the damned state to get my driver’s license renewed, which thanks to Oregon DMV’s idiotic policies means I need to go to Portland to get a copy of my birth certificate as proof of U.S. citizenship — the numbskulls only accept tribal IDs if they’re from in-state tribes. Apparently the 560 other federally recognized tribes don’t count in their opinion. So I may not be able to respond for a bit while I go chase down paperwork. Still, here’s the news:

Who’s next on the Marvel movie docket? Ant-Man has been in the planning stages for several years, but is supposedly coming close to fruition. He’s not the only one, though. Doctor Strange is also confirmed to be in the works.

Deadline reports that the 3D re-releases of Star Wars episodes II and III have been canceled. (Deadline throws in some possibly-spurious assertions that this is because of the focus on the new films, which they also refer to as a “reboot” because Deadline has a bad habit of using that term when it doesn’t apply.)

How I Met Your Mother has been renewed by CBS for a 9th and final season. The writers have promised the mother in question will finally be revealed.

20th Century Fox has picked up the film rights to the Dark Horse comic Mind MGMT, by Matt Kindt, about a secret government agency of psychics. Ridley Scott is set to be the producer of the film.

The new Muppet movie has a release date, March 21 2014, and a title: The Muppets… Again! Not the greatest of titles, in my opinion, but that doesn’t really reflect on the film itself in this case.

There is going to be a World of Warcraft movie, and it will be directed by Duncan Jones, director of Source Code and Moon. Filming is expected to begin this fall. Will it still hold true to the general rule of “video game movies suck” when it’s one of the most popular games in the world? Probably.

Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.
— Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, 1949

News Bites: Sunday, Smith, and Spider-Man

There wasn’t much news that I had noticed come Friday, so I posted a review instead; however, some stuff has come in during the last few days that’s of interest, so here’s a Sunday edition of the news bites.

Dane Dehaan, who played the unstable telekinetic Andrew in Chronicle, has been cast as Harry Osborn in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

In more Amazing Spider-Man news, Jamie Foxx has confirmed the rumors that he will be playing the villain Electro.

Kevin Smith has been talking retirement from directing for a while. For a time, it looked like Hit Somebody would be his last film, but with it switching to a miniseries, Smith has said on Twitter he’s now considering a different “final film”: Clerks 3. While I can appreciate the bookend nature that would add to his career, I wonder if a third film is really necessary to the franchise — for that matter, while I liked the second, it wasn’t exactly necessary either. And what’s with these relatively young directors talking about bowing out early? Tarantino has been making similar noises lately.

Christoph Waltz has dropped out of the Muppets sequel due to a scheduling conflict; Ty Burrell is replacing him in the role as an inspector.

Fox’s reboot of Fantastic Four has been scheduled for March 6, 2015. Josh Trank is directing, no casting decisions have been released.

Linda Woolverton, who wrote the screenplay for the Tim Burton-directed Alice in Wonderland, is at work writing a sequel for Disney. So far she is the only person attached to the project. She is also the writer on Maleficent, Disney’s live-action Sleeping Beauty film starring Angelina Jolie.

Top 10 Christmas Specials

It’s that time of year when TV stations start airing their annual selection of Christmas specials. Well, OK, technically that “time of year” started the day after Thanksgiving; I notice some of the cable stations such as ABC Family are going into absolute glut mode already. The production of Christmas specials seems to have taken a minor nosedive from the 1990s onward, though there have been a few produced in recent years (often as an easy way to get further use out of 3D models from animated movies). But there is no shortage of Christmas specials when we turn our eyes to the past. There are dozens, possibly even hundreds of specials — and I’m only counting actual TV specials, not episodes of TV series, not movies, and not even TV movies (for the record, I’m drawing the line at one hour.)

I haven’t seen every Christmas special made, of course. And I hope to be able to watch some more this season and in seasons to come. But I’m comfortable enough with what I’ve seen to pick my top ten.

Weekly Weblinks: Robots and Rita

Thanks to last week’s delayed post, this Friday’s edition of the Weekly Weblinks is perhaps just a bit lighter than usual (or maybe it just seems that way to me), but there are still several good blog posts and news articles to read. Some fun semi-obscure films are reviewed, and some movie franchises have new information being released. So read on for this week’s batch of the Weekly Weblinks.

Weekly Weblinks: Rummaging and Wrecking

I’m out hitting a 52-mile stretch of garage sales today, and a community garage sale tomorrow, so I may not be right here on the site for a bit. But that doesn’t stop the Weekly Weblinks from going up right on schedule! This week’s blog posts include a review of a film coming out today, a couple films debuting at a film festival, and some retro classics.

In the news there’s some info on Michael Bay’s fourth Transformers picture, the latest on the Bay-produced Ninja Turtles, and some more puppets coming to the big screen that, as far as I know, have nothing at all to do with Michael Bay. This week’s selection of posts and news is also surprisingly heavy on Disney, but there’s more to the Weekly Weblinks than Bay or Disney, so whatever you’re interested in, read on!

Favorite Films: The Muppet Movie

“Why are there so many songs about rainbows,
and what’s on the other side?”

In 1979, the Muppets were at the peak of their popularity. The Muppet Show had been running since 1976, and children and adults both regularly tuned in to watch the silly, surreal antics of Kermit the Frog and his cast of performers attempt to put on a show every week. The time was ripe for Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and the rest of the Muppet performers to take the characters to the next level, to produce a movie: The Muppet Movie. The feature-length format allowed them to tell a complete story, the story of how the Muppets first came together. “Well, it’s sort of approximately how it happened,” as Kermit tells his nephew Robin. The movie starts out with the Muppets attending the private screening of their own film, and that subversive meta-humor peppers the entirety of the movie. The movie is filled with lots of other kinds of humor as well, from character humor, pop culture references, situational irony, running gags and hilariously bad puns. It also throws in some sentimentality, some excitement, some music, and a whole herd of guest stars.

Respecting the Source: Some Guidelines For Adaptations

It’s occasionally said that Hollywood is out of ideas. The truth of the matter is that Hollywood has been cheerfully purloining ideas from other media for as long as Hollywood has been around. Novels, cartoons, live-action television shows, comic books, video games, and even the occasional board game have yielded their characters, concepts, and storylines to films. Some of these have been successful, commercially and critically; there’s a reason why the Academy Awards have an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Some of them, however, are successful on no meaningful level. And sometimes even when the adaptation is successful among some of the general public, the fans of the original remain displeased.

There are several reasons why this can happen, with the most basic and obvious being “they just didn’t make a good movie”. But when making an adaptation — especially of a well-loved property — there are additional pitfalls to be avoided beyond the normal concerns of making a good movie. (Of course, if the source material is terrible to begin with, or just has no story whatsoever, your battleship may be sunk from the get-go.) In my eyes, there is a certain basic rule that all adaptations should try to follow: Respect the source material. There are several different factors that go into that, but they’re all important, and while a film can sometimes get away with bending one or two, if it goes too far astray, it will probably get a severe backlash from the fans.

So what does it mean to respect the source material?

So long 2011!

It’s just a few short hours until the year comes to an end, so — along with pretty much everybody else in the world of blogging — I thought I’d take a look back on the past year of entertainment and my blog. I’m picking my favorites and least favorites, but I’m not getting too fancy with any awards ceremonies or anything like that. You want that, check out Fogs’ Movie Reviews’ Major Awards. The man has put himself through some inhuman suffering to be able to review not just the best but also the worst of the year, and if someone sits through both Jack and Jill and Big Mommas, he deserves some reward for his pain.

Me, I’m just keeping it simple with this one post. A little talk about the blog, a little talk about movies and TV.

The Muppets

Tonight — well, last night at this point — I went out to see The Muppets. I had high hopes, thanks to rave reviews everywhere. It’s inevitable that this film will draw comparisons to 1979′s The Muppet Movie, the first film of the franchise. After all, not only was that the big film of the series, but the two films have more in common with each other than the other films. In some ways, nearly every Muppet movie since the first has been about the Muppets in different roles; as investigative reporters, as Broadway hopefuls, as characters from literature. Muppets From Space is the biggest exception, and even it was about the Muppets in a situation outside the show. Only the first and most recent films are really about the Muppets as an act: The Muppet Movie showed how they came together in the beginning; The Muppets shows how they come back today.

In the interest of being a proper critic, and not just a Muppet fanboy, I have to say that The Muppets does not come close to being as good as The Muppet Movie. I also have to say that this doesn’t matter. A film can fall pretty far from that height and still land very high, and The Muppets is a great movie. If you have ever loved the Muppets, you will love The Muppets.