Posted on by chasinvictoria

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Disney Studios
Director: Brian Henson


We have a Christmas tradition of what I think is the best version of “A Christmas Carol” ever committed to film, the 1951 Alastair Sim version (UK title: Scrooge, and my review of it is here). This year, just to do something a little different, we revisited The Muppet Christmas Carol after not having seen it since its 1992 theatrical debut, just to change things up a bit. The film sticks to the same story (more faithfully than Scrooge, in some ways), but approached the source material in an almost-completely different way: it’s a musical, for starters, and it only has two substantial speaking roles for human beings.

In short, this film is a technical marvel, and the overall story is well-executed — but Caine as Scrooge is curiously flat, and the songs (by Paul Williams) are both samey, and rather meh. I’d certainly recommend this one over my beloved 1951 version when it comes to “suitable for kids, grandparents, pets, and the whole family,” but while it scores well on some fronts, its general over-busyness, the decision to make it a musical, and the changes to the story probably won’t sit well with Dickens fans.

Statler & Waldorf as the Marley BROTHERS (wtf?) was the film’s first overreach in shoehorning Muppets into the story.

I’m not sure who’s to blame for Michael Caine’s mostly-lifeless portrayal of Scrooge; director Brian Henson was of course focused on his muppets, and they uniformally shine here, so he may have decided that Scrooge’s inhumanity to his fellow man should be more low-key until his reformation. Or maybe Caine thought the movie was dumb, and did it for the paycheck (that’s certainly the vibe he gives off for the first two-thirds of the film).

For what it’s worth, I think the film would have worked better with maybe one big musical number at each end rather than making the whole thing a musical, since the songs are, to be frank, unmemorable and just fill time. The Muppets’ recasting into various roles from the story, on the other hand, works surprisingly well, with The Great Gonzo (Dave Goelz) as Charles Dickens (among many other roles) and Rizzo the Rat (Steve Whitmire, again also playing Kermit, Beaker, Bunsen Honeydew and a half-dozen other parts) serving as the Greek Chorus to Gonzo’s Dickens narration. Long-time Muppet veterans Jerry Nelson and Frank Oz take up their usual roles with wit and gusto, with David Rudman handling some minor roles and a cameo from the Swedish Chef.

Gonzo (left) as Charles Dickens narrates, while Rizzo questions the story.

When Scrooge is seen in flashbacks in the early parts of his life (Raymond Coulthard, Russell Martin, Theo Sanders, Kristopher Milnes, and Edward Sanders), the character is more “alive,” a trait Caine slowly picks up on during his ghostly visits, and finally brings to the fore at the very end. The other main human-being speaking role is Fred, Scrooge’s nephew, and actor Steve Mackintosh is just fine in the role, but should have been used elsewhere (we’ll come to that later).

A lot of respect must go to the muppet performers in the lead roles, who have decades of experience with these familiar characters and carry it off on a movie scale just as well as they do on television. Special respect must go to the muppet performers who play the ghosts: the floating and diminutive Ghost of Christmas Past (Karen Prell with voice by Jessica Fox), the giant Ghost of Christmas Present (Jerry Nelson and Donald Austen), and the effectively haunting Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (Rob Tygner and Donald Austen).

The Ghost of Christmas Present guides Scrooge through London
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is suitably spooky but not TOO scary for kids.

There are also dozens of “little” Muppet characters (mice inside the homes, rats who work for Scrooge’s office, etc), and some giant characters, and the spirit of Jim Henson lives on in these parts and the talented people who bring them to life. In the finale, we get to see over 100 muppets in a panning shot, a very impressive accomplishment that makes them all the more “real” throughout much of the film.

It later came out that English actors David Hemings, Ron Moody and David Warner (the latter would have been my pick), alongside American comic George Carlin (who might also have been quite good) were considered for the role of Scrooge before Michael Caine finally won the role. I’m still not sure if Caine’s low-key misery was his choice or Henson’s, given that this is a family/kids version of the tale, but Caine noted that he based his portrayal on the present-day vultures of Wall Street and the banks, which may account for the more bloodless, cynical portrayal.

This is as evil looking as Caine gets, and he looks more bored than menacing.

The “London street set” used in the film was uncannily similar to the one used in the 1951 Scrooge — modified for scale, obviously — which delighted me, but while I understand the decision to keep the Muppet characters the audience would know using their original voices, the lack of UK accents from nearly everyone apart from Mackintosh and Caine was a disappointment to me, especially for the Ghosts. Given that the story, author, characters, and filming location were all in the UK, I felt like every character (with the Swedish Chef obviously exempt) should have added a UK lilt to their voices.

I haven’t mentioned Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit thus far in the film, for two reasons: first, although Bob is the raison d’etre of Scrooge’s reformation, he’s hardly in the film; and two, he doesn’t really communicate Cratchit’s plight because Kermit is a good-natured, happy frog at heart and is incapable of portraying suffering. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Kermit was badly miscast, and should have played nephew Fred — while Steve Mackintosh, who played Fred, should have played Bob.

Fred, the Cratchit family and friends, Scrooge, etc – nobody seems poor here at all.

Nitpicking aside, the film does carry a lot of family-friendly humour, and succeeds in reforming Scrooge and being generally heartwarming. It’ll never replace Scrooge for me, but that said it is also nowhere near the worst version of A Christmas Carol committed to film. As a first version for kids to see that might get them interested in the story and other film versions, it’s fine.

The one high mark I will give this version is that, despite the musicality and comedy inherent in it, it does not shy away from painting the capitalist banking system as morally bankrupt and preying on poor people — the point of Dickens’ original tale in the first place, so good on them for that.

There’s a moment where Sam the Eagle, the All-American type, gets corrected in scene that this is a British story, and does a retake correcting “the American Way” to “the British Way” that I found quite amusing. On the whole, it’s a classic aimed at the smols in your household, it’s cute, it’s fun. There’s an extended version of the movie that restores one cut song, but don’t bother with that — one more song is exactly what this movie didn’t need.

Sam Eagle has a brief but amusing cameo in the movie. Yay!
Posted on by chasinvictoria

Lynch/Oz (2022, dir. Alexandre O. Philippe)


⭐️⭐️½
52-week film challenge, film 48

The short version: this film-school set of academic essays read aloud with visual accompaniment, which collectively try waaaaaay too hard to connect everything David Lynch has done to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is overlong and misguided.

That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of references and visual cues in Lynch’s work that parallel TWoO; of course there are.

He’s obviously influenced by it, and there’s plenty of examples, either spoken in his films or visual/story metaphors. In answer to one essayist’s question at a Q&A somewhere, Lynch himself says that not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about that film.

Glinda the Good Witch literally makes an appearance in Wild at Heart, FFS.

The problem (one of several) with the central premise behind this is that most artists Lynch’s age or younger can easily be demonstrated to have been influenced by The Wizard of Oz: it was a unique film that embraced Technicolour in a new way, giving new life to L. Frank Baum’s first Oz book (he went on to write another 13 in the Oz series). The film version’s characters, dialogue, and songs have all entered the public consciousness in a huge and enduring way, thanks to the film’s yearly repeats on television and its extravagant, nearly-timeless tale of poverty, fantasy, and the power of friendship and imagination.

Even if you accept that Oz was a major influence on Lynch’s films — and there’s plenty of evidence that it was, in places — the documentary goes on to point out that it was also a significant influence in dozens and dozens of other films that have nothing to do with Lynch at all, thereby diluting Lynch/Oz’s central premise. This adds significant time to the already-thin but interesting premise, with the documentary running a very long-seeming hour and 49 minutes, when it could have been a really tight and more interesting hour.

Lynch/Oz is divided into six chapters, following what director Philippe probably thought was a Lynchian oddball introduction by odd-looking Jason Stoval (as Sid Pink) that falls very flat, as does the reprise at the end of the doc.

Another element that might have helped make this tribute less dull would have been to actually see the six essayists who read their written analyses of Oz’s influence on Lynch. Instead, we get clips from many other movies that also in some way reference The Wizard of Oz, seeming undermining the point of this particular doc — Oz is a very influential picture across all of the last 80 years, we get it.

Amy Nicholson has one of the weakest premises in her section, titled “Wind.” Yes, she talks about the use of strong winds to be transformative agents in both The Wizard of Oz and Lynch movies, of which there are but a handful of examples. Rodney Ascher’s “Membranes,” which posits the dividers between “reality” and the things beyond that (often illustrated with curtains in Lynch’s work, akin to Toto pulling back the curtain to reveal that the Wizard is not who he seems), is much more successful. It’s a very, very, obvious point, but well-explored.

Lynch’s films frequently deal with a character discovering a larger — and more sinister — world than the one they live in, which sparks a journey of discovery.

The third essay is the one that is the most completely worth watching: fellow filmmaker John Waters, who has a delightful personality and distinctive speaking voice that radiates joy, talks about how he and Lynch are of similar age, and so of course are in some ways influenced by the same films they saw as kids — not to mention that, like Lynch, he developed a fixation on the undersides of façades. Waters shares an anecdote of meeting Lynch, talks about their shared influences, and similar — but very distinct — desire to poke around underneath the fantasies we all try so hard to fit into our realities: it’s by far the best of the essays.

That’s not to say Karyn Kusama’s pondering on “Multitudes” in her exploration isn’t good also, but it marks a return to the more dry and academic style of analysis that has dominated this documentary until Waters brought some fun in with him. Thankfully, this is followed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s humourous ruminations on the frequent reference to a never-seen “Judy” in Lynch’s TV and film work, which brings in an excuse to explore the influence of Judy Garland’s own life on Lynch — a genuine and, once you see it, obvious musical influence that their essay makes clearer.

I did appreciate the documentary pointing out some examples of red heels (and even clicking them) in Lynch’s work.

This leaves David Lowery to bring up the rear with his essay on the theme of digging — a pretty weak link, and a curious choice for the finale of the documentary. He pokes around at the rather obvious point that Lynch’s characters often try to either bury things they don’t like, or have such things dug up (metaphorically or literally).

As a Lynch fan, I was hoping I’d get more out of this documentary than I did, though I do appreciate both some of the essays and examples they gave to support their point, and of course the archival footage of Lynch interviews, which are sprinkled throughout. Lynch doesn’t talk that much about his own work, so these nuggets are rare and Lynch’s obtuse way of answering questions about his work are mischievous and amusing.

If they’d drop the pretentious opening/closing, the seemingly-endless references to non-Lynch films that have obvious Oz references, and maybe the weakest of the essays (either “Wind” or “Dig”), you’d have a smart, shorter documentary with some real insight. It’s too bad director Philippe didn’t do that, because what he ended up with is a documentary that will have you squirming in your seat — for all the wrong reasons.