Crowded Party: NEW YEAR'S EVE

New Year’s Eve is a cinematic Wal-Mart, crowded, cavernous, filled with cheap versions of exactly the products you’d expect, and no one seems particularly happy to be there. Like Valentine’s Day, also inflicted, albeit with less pain, by director Garry Marshall, the new film is a massive ensemble romantic comedy built around a holiday, a slickly produced product, nothing more than an excuse to see dozens of celebrities, or at least recognizable faces, playing just about everyone on screen but the extras. It used to be that when this many name actors showed up in one place the boat was capsizing or the skyscraper’s ribbon-cutting party was going up in flames. Now, all that happens is precisely what you’d expect in the form of predictable, plodding sitcom pandering and plots thin to the point of breaking. The only disaster is how exhaustingly cliché and dispiritingly unimaginative it is.

There are 31 recognizable faces (at least when I counted them just now on the cast list from IMDb) in New Year’s Eve, which zips around New York on December 31, 2011 as people fall in love (never out, this is one aggressively happy movie) and find their soul mates. It seems pointless to try and point out individual characters and motivations as the film is so cluttered and static that by the time we’ve met everyone and learned their main conflict, there’s barely time to resolve them before the ball drops and Times Square explodes in confetti. Besides, the characters barely registered in my head as anything but the person playing them. It’s like a bad school play in which you can only think about little Bobby when you’re meant to see the man supposedly on his deathbed.

Of course in this case little Bobby’s last name is DeNiro. His nurse is Halle Berry and his doctor is Cary Elwes. Then there’s Hilary Swank directing the Times Square festivities, fretting about the ball drop with security guard Ludacris. When, much to the dismay of Ryan Seacrest (as himself), there’s a technical glitch, Hector Elizondo shows up to fix it. There’s also Sarah Jessica Parker who says daughter Abigail Breslin can’t go downtown with Jake T. Austin. Stuck in an elevator in their apartment building are Ashton Kutcher and Lea Michele. Jessica Biel and Seth Meyers are about to have a baby and are competing with Sarah Paulson and Til Schweiger to have the first baby of the New Year. OB/GYN Carla Gugino is not amused. Mousy secretary Michelle Pfeiffer convinces bike messenger Zac Efron to help her finish her list of resolutions before midnight. Executive Josh Duhamel catches a ride into the city with Yeardley Smith and family. And Katherine Heigl and Sofia Vergara are catering Cherry Jones’s fancy party at which Jon Bon Jovi (not playing himself) will perform.

As you can see, it’s a little ridiculous. It got to the point that, when Ludacris tells Hilary Swank that “Mr. so-and-so is here,” I was only pondering which famous face would step out of the back of that limo. (Matthew Broderick). Rather than bringing all we know about the personas to their roles to serve as some kind of insta-character, the overloaded cast only points out the thinness of it all. Not a one of these plotlines could stand by itself. Worse, the way Katherine Fugate’s script stumbles from one scene to the next refuses to allow the characters to thematically interact. This is a movie that has nothing to say and little idea of how to even make that fact entertaining. We’re supposed to be delighted when, say Efron answers the phone “hey, sis,” and we learn which big name has been – gasp! – his sister this whole time! If the film were packed with too many Meet Cutes and sweeping smooches, it would still reach a point of diminishing returns well before the film’s credit cookies but at least it wouldn’t be quite so empty. For all of these actors present, so many dumb threads of plot, there’s just not enough to sustain two hours. Why couldn’t someone find something interesting for someone, anyone, in the cast to do? New Year’s Eve is a celebration of the superficial without the energy or the trashy pleasure such celebrations could provide.

Babysitting Adventures: THE SITTER

David Gordon Green, one of the best out-of-the-box auteurs of the last decade, has had difficulty adapting the style of his early art house hits to the big studio comedies he’s recently been helming. He started out his career with precisely observed little movies, gorgeous emotional films like All the Real Girls and Undertow. But ever since 2008’s Pineapple Express, a comic stoner thriller, Green’s been making comedies, working with bigger budgets to mixed results. Pineapple’s a film that spends an odd amount of time lingering on bodily harm – an extended shot of a bloodied ear with a chunk missing is just not funny – but also manages to be a scruffily charming buddy comedy that’s somewhat honest in its dealings with male friendship. Earlier this year, Green’s Your Highness, a fantasy parody, was wildly tone deaf and all around excruciating, a good concept gone horribly wrong. Now, with The Sitter, I’m happy to report that Green has found a nice spot between big lowbrow and the shaggy whimsical sweetness that made him an instant favorite for so many of us.

The film follows Noah Griffith (Jonah Hill), a guy in his early twenties who is in a painfully relatable post-collegiate funk. He’s jobless, living in the suburbs with his mom, and settling into a dangerously lazy pattern of lackadaisical attitudes. He’s barely holding on to a deeply flawed relationship with a selfish, deceitful young woman (Ari Graynor) who’s only taking advantage of his kindness. It’s a dead-end relationship for a guy who’s not just going down the wrong path, he’s sort of fallen down in the middle of the wrong path and can’t get up. One night, his mother (Jessica Hecht) is disappointed that her friend (Erin Daniels) has to cancel a planned double date when her babysitter gets sick. Summoning up a rare moment of altruism, Noah decides to fill in and allow his mom a rare night of fun and potential romance.

Arriving at the house, he’s immediately struck with a feeling of being in over his head. The thirteen-year-old Slater (the all-around wonderful Max Records from Where the Wild Things Are) is stewing on the sofa watching a gymnastics movie and helpfully informs that he can’t be trusted to babysit his younger siblings because of his debilitating anxiety when handed responsibility of any kind. His little sister Blithe (Landry Bender) is upstairs in a mismatched outfit which consists mostly of a long sleeve t-shirt and a tutu. She’s slathering her face with her mom’s make up. The mom helpfully informs Noah that the little girl wants to grow up to be a celebrity in the bobble-headed reality show brat tradition. When he bends down to talk to the little girl, she sprays perfume in his mouth.  Then there’s little Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), a standoffish little boy recently adopted from South America. He hisses, spits Spanish invectives, and has a destructive gleam in his eyes.

There’s a feeling that things wouldn’t go well even if the plot didn’t contrive to get them all out of the house. Noah’s would-be girlfriend calls him up and asks for some help partying, namely to pick up some cocaine from her dealer (Sam Rockwell, never not welcome). With the girl dangling an empty promise of introducing reciprocation into their one-sided relationship, Noah reluctantly packs up the kids in the minivan and drives into the big city. The film then follows a broad and crude episodic farce as the kids and their sitter get into increasingly chaotic misunderstandings involving a store clerk, the drug dealers, a group of kids at a ritzy celebration, drunken partiers, menacing pool hall patrons, cops, robbers, and more. Through it all though, the performances are so charming and Tim Orr’s camera is so shaggy beautiful in its evocation of New York nightlife both shady and swanky that the broadness (or cheapness) of some of the jokes rarely rang false for me.

What did ring warning bells for me was Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka's script's somewhat problematic treatment of some of the supporting characters. A group of African American characters, for instance, swarm about in a group that appears whenever the plot requires and without much in the way of individualized personalities. It’s an odd portrayal that leans on cheap stereotypes. Similarly, little Rodrigo is given condescending characteristics that make him seem to be hostile, unpredictable and destructive simply because he’s Latino. But then, there’s a shift. He reveals that this is his third family in as many years and he’s dreading the moment when they’ll give him away. He’s standoffish because he can’t let them get too close lest he get his heart broken again.

It’s a moment of insight into the mind of a child that is carried over into the forceful and moving running subplots with Blithe and Slater. Over the course of their night, the sitter turns out to be just what the kids need (aside from the whole hopelessly misguided trip into the city thing) to help them emotionally in ways their parents haven’t been able to care about other than by making excuses and therapy appointments. Blithe gets a subplot that turns into a lovely refutation of celebutante bad girls and Slater gets one of the most remarkable character arcs of the year, a moving and matter-of-fact inspirational subplot of self-discovery and acceptance all the more surprising for appearing so unexpectedly and so casually within a broad studio comedy.

In these moments, David Gordon Green shines. So much of his early art house efforts contain this exploration of childhood and the emotional dangers of the world between the child’s and the adult’s. I was surprised to see how nicely observed some of these characters were within a film that isn’t always so nice or observant. One could hardly accuse the film of perfection – it’s, as they say, flawed – but it’s a film of such raunch and sweetness that seems to get the proportion just right, with R-rated words and fuzzy sentiment co-existing more or less peacefully. The fact of the matter is that, whatever its problems, the film kept me entertained. It’s a derivative, scruffy one-crazy-night plot (part Adventures in Babysitting and part After Hours) but imbued with surprising energy with occasional detours into depth. It’s a solid 80 minutes of set ups and pay offs.

Movie Magic: HUGO

Orson Welles reportedly called filmmaking “the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!” This line seems apt for Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a film which is built around a gorgeous recreation of 1930’s Paris, in particular a massive train station in which most of the film takes place. It builds a convincing world with several employees getting charming through-lines like a café owner (Frances de la Tour), a newsstand owner (Richard Griffiths), a florist (Emily Mortimer), and a security guard (Sacha Baron Cohen). The virtuosic opening starts high above Paris and in one fluid shot dips down into the train station, slides through the entire building, and comes to rest at a giant clock face, behind which we see a pair of eyes. This is Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a young boy who is the center of the film’s story. He sees all of these characters in the station as he scampers through the walls, winding the clocks and stealing just enough to survive. His uncle (Ray Winstone) had the job before him, but now his uncle has disappeared. As long as the clocks continue to run, no one will suspect that there’s an orphan in the walls.

His father (Jude Law) was a clockmaker and a repairman, with a house full of gears and switches, the air filled with soft, perpetual ticking. One night he brought home a silver, metallic wind-up doll, a rusty, neglected automaton that was full of promise and mystery. Hugo was helping him fix it when his uncle suddenly appeared informing him that his father was killed in a fire at the museum where he found some extra work. This is how Hugo came to be in the train station and why he is drawn to the shop run by a toymaker (Ben Kingsley) who stocks it with magic tricks and wind-up figures. When the timing is right, Hugo sneaks mechanical pieces and toys back to his hideaway where he uses them to continue to work on the broken automaton his father left behind.

The toymaker catches Hugo and confiscates the contents of his pockets, which includes a notebook in which his father had sketched plans for the mechanical man’s fixing. Distraught, Hugo follows the toymaker through the wintry streets of Paris but is so helpless and filled with conflicting emotions that he can’t figure out what to do next. Outside the toymaker’s house, he meets the man’s goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who promises to help him. Together they try to find a way to fix the automaton, but along the way they realize that another, perhaps more important, thing that needs repair is the toymaker himself. Papa Georges, as Isabelle calls him, is a man who was an early filmmaking innovator who fell on hard times and pushed his passion away out of necessity. He’s lost access to his passion and lost his films to the cruelties of his situation. It’s as if a part of him is now missing.

This is a film of marvelously fluid tone, contemplative and emotionally involving while shot through with terrific humor and quietly earned thrills. The kids are on a quest to fix the mechanical man and get involved along the way in a journey filled with learning. An elderly librarian (Christopher Lee) and a learned film historian (Michael Stuhlbarg) are happy to help them. There’s a love of facts and knowledge here that is thrilling. There’s also a very real sense of a childhood friendship developing that’s balanced quite nicely with the deep vein of sorrow and grief that runs through the film, of death and destruction, of lives shattered by war and by accidents, of people who need to continue to move forward, to do what they feel called to do, despite all their personal setbacks.

And in all this weighty material there lies a more conventional kid-friendly plot with Hugo scrambling to hide from the lanky guard who will surely send him to the orphanage. This is played for broad comedy at times (Baron Cohen is very good at it, after all), but it’s laced with such a spiky threat to Hugo that it feels funny and adventurous without pandering to the children in the audience or cheapening the film’s so very moving themes. In fact, this guard, as comedic as he is, is also a character wounded by his past, an orphan himself, and a limping veteran of the Great War as well. There’s no such thing as a simple character here. They all serve a purpose.

Masterful filmmaking is in evidence here, inventive and visually striking in ways that support the enthralling magic of the film. Scorsese is playing with all kinds of technological tricks new and old, from wonderfully expressive, layered and dynamic 3D angles (this is a rare film for which a 3D screening would be essential) to sweeping, fluid tracking shots. The plot, when you get right down to it, is rather simple and certainly was of no surface need to last over two hours. But any shorter and Scorsese wouldn’t have had time to explore such wonderful emotion, to show us all he wanted to show, his gorgeous, fully realized world with cinematography from Robert Richardson and production design from Dante Ferretti. This is a beautiful film to regard with a color palate of icy blue and rich gold. It’s easy to get enfolded into the film’s warmth and power. Much like Brian Selznick’s incredible book, on which the film is based, didn’t need all those pages of beautifully sketched illustrations, but would certainly be less distinctive and less artful without them, Scorsese creates a fully realized cinematic environment that doesn’t slip away easily.

There’s a bit of Scorsese in the characters, the curious boy, the bookish girl, the bearded scholar, and the clever toymaker. In them is the a man who loves finding what makes things tick, who loves stories, who loves learning, and who loves to entertain. This feels like an intensely personal film, a lovely interior adventure, a small-scale epic of character and emotion that is also a moving tribute to the importance of film history and film preservation, a cause near to Scorsese’s heart. One of the most spellbinding moments of the film – of the year, even – is a sequence that dives deeper into the past and gives us an enchanting montage that offers a look at the career of film pioneer Georges Méliès. In another delightful moment, the kids sit in the library and read to each other from an early history of cinema and the pages come alive. Here is a film with an absorbing narrative that also effectively communicates the deep core reasons for why I love film. When Hugo tells Isabelle his fond memories of going to the movies with his father, the words he spoke resonated not just with his story but also with my own. It was a nearly overwhelming moment. For all of Scorsese’s work teaching the importance of preserving and appreciating the cultural heritage of cinema, this might be his most important and vital teaching tool yet.

I saw the film in a theater that had several young kids in the audience. They were having a great time and left the theater saying to each other “What a great movie!” Maybe, just maybe, one of them will be inspired to learn more about the movies. (Perhaps the best Christmas present for a child who loves Hugo would be a kid-friendly book about film and a box set of early cinema, especially the comedies). Scorsese isn’t content to say that movies are magical and then simply show us familiar clips of great silent films (no matter how surprising and joyful the appearance of Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, and more on the screen of a modern multiplex was to this cinephile). Instead, Scorsese goes ahead and makes a magical film about movie magic, proving his point in practice.

Reindeer Games: ARTHUR CHRISTMAS

Arthur Christmas is a bright, colorful, nonthreatening CGI kiddie film about Santa Claus and his family and his elves up at the North Pole. It’s adequate, passable entertainment in that it’s not actively terrible or aggressively annoying, but it’s also bland and with only faint glimmers of personality. It feels homogenized. That’s a shame. It comes from Aardman, the British animation company that brought us the droll, delightful stop-motion Wallace & Gromit films and Chicken Run. I expected more from them.

Still, it’s a perfectly acceptable film that’s in no ways insulting. It tells a sweet story about Arthur (James McAvoy), Santa’s youngest son who’s a bumbling guy always messing up the plans of his older brother (Hugh Laurie), a strict manager who makes sure Santa (Jim Broadbent) and the sleigh run on schedule. In this film the sleigh is a giant spaceship-like construction that hovers invisibly over a town, deposits thousands of black-ops elves to deliver the presents, then, mere seconds later, moves on to the next town.

The system’s perfect. Of course, any movie about a perfect system must throw a wrench in, so this Christmas Eve one present is left behind. That’s within the acceptable margin of error to the older brother and to Santa, so Arthur recruits his grandfather (Bill Nighy), a retired Santa, to help him deliver the present. They borrow some of the old reindeer and sprinkle some magic dust and away they go. Hijinks ensue, as does familial healing and a reinforcement of a deeper, warmer meaning of Christmas.

So, it’s not that bad. The set-up is fun and the follow through is more or less what you’d expect. In fact, in patches, like a fun opening sequence that follows the covert ops as a bunch of elves deliver the presents, the film runs quite smoothly and charmingly. I was expecting something with just a smidge more wit, just a smidge livelier. It’s good enough, but that just didn’t feel like enough.

After some time, I started pondering the ways of the North Pole as presented here. Santa is an honorific passed down the family line from father to son. At one point in the film he’s called a ceremonial figurehead. (Mrs. Claus (Imelda Staunton) seems to be a nickname for whoever happens to be married to Santa). The elves are a vast army of what exactly? Feudal serfs? Indentured servants? Residents of a company town? Clearly this was not what director Sarah Smith and her co-writer Peter Baynham wanted me to be thinking about, but under the low-level antics and red, white, and green Christmas palate I often found little else to distract me.

Quick Look: CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS

One of Werner Herzog’s two documentaries this year, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, creates a space for wonder. How often are we allowed that in this day and age? This is a film that stretches out as a hushed visual reverie allowing for quiet reflection upon the deepest questions of the nature of mankind and the nature of art. The lovable eccentric German auteur received rare permission from the French government to enter the Chauvet caves in the south of France to film the oldest discovered cave paintings. Because of the fragile ecosystem within this ancient geographic formation, the cave is sealed off year round, only open for brief periods of time for a select group of researchers to spend fleeting moments gathering data. Herzog meets them and lets them speak to us in his typical style of allowing digressions and tangents to unravel with a charming patience. How else would we learn that one researcher was once a circus performer? Who else would find an archeologist who likes to dress up in caveman-style pelts and plays a handmade bone flute, the better to interact with the ancients? Who but Herzog would find it necessary to give us a scene with a man who uses his sense of smell to search for caves? The delightful oddities of these people add interest to the main attraction, which are most definitely the cave paintings themselves. Gorgeously preserved and shot in stunning 3D, which allows their contours and textures to extend towards and curve away from the audience with exciting depth, these paintings are shared to a wide audience in a stirring and enchanting style. These paintings have been preserved and explored in a way only filmmaking would allow. Herzog’s typically lovely narration, droll and inquisitive in his soft German accent, and a swirling choral score that seems to be bubbling up from the very souls of the ancient artists, help create the film’s successful atmosphere, an absorbing, endlessly fascinating window to the past.

The Lost Girl: MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

Where are we? When are we? As Martha Marcy May Marlene opens we see men and women working in fields and a farmhouse, chopping wood, harvesting, laundering, cooking. At the end of the day, the men eat slowly, quietly, huddled around a dark table in a dark kitchen. They slowly file out and the women take their place, finally their turn to eat the meal. The sun sets. Members of this group go to sleep on mattresses packed on the floor of unfurnished rooms.

In the haze of daybreak, one of the young women (Elizabeth Olsen) slips away from the farmhouse, across the fields and comes upon a thick slice of asphalt breaking up the natural world and helping to narrow down the period of time in which she lives. She crosses the road and disappears into the forest beyond. We follow her as she seems to escape, eventually ending up in a modern small town where she uses the pay phone outside of the diner to call her sister. “Martha?” her sister says. “Where are you?”

We learn that Martha’s family hasn’t heard from her in two years, knowing only vaguely that she was “upstate” with a “boyfriend.” Her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), and Lucy’s husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), pick her up and drive her back to their vacation house. They quickly decide to take her in, to help he get on her feet. They seem remarkably uncurious as to where Martha has been or what happened to her. Something is so very wrong here that, though this couple’s attempts at kindness is sympathetic, their situational blind spots contribute to the film’s dread. How can they so easily ignore the warning signs that this young woman is so troubled?

After all, what could explain her behavior? She seems, in subtle ways, unaccustomed to what we would call a relatively normal life. The house in which she now lives is an expansive wood-and-glass lakeside domicile surrounded by woods. It’s modern yet secluded, different from where she was, but with resonances of reminders. She will cast her gaze nervously about her surroundings, as if anticipating sudden danger, or else remembering the possibility. The married couple can’t quite see how disturbed Martha is. There are unspoken histories between these characters, familial tensions that are teased out with some subtlety by the capable cast.

The full extent of Martha’s previous two years is slowly parceled out by the film, which slips between the two time periods with chilling silkiness in the editing. We continually return to that farmhouse with the eerie timeless quality of the dress and codes of conduct. We come to learn that the group of people living there are all enthralled by a cult leader (John Hawkes, seemingly effortlessly disquieting) who slowly draws his victims in with his soft-spoken philosophizing and simply plucked guitar compositions, creating a sense of community. Then, we come to understand how he uses psychological domination and torture as well as ritualized patterns of behavior, a strict work ethic, an unflinching schedule, and punishing initiations including shocking violence and rape, to control and retain his followers. As what we know more about Martha’s time amongst these people, the darker and more disturbing the implications grow.

As the trauma of her time in the cult regularly intrudes upon the film’s present tense, the collision draws the atmosphere into the same haze of paranoia and aftershocks of anxiety that Martha is feeling. This is remarkably assured debut work for the writer-director Sean Durkin who keeps the focus on fuzzy compositions and ominously open spaces in the blocking and backgrounds of shots. (In some ways it reminded me a bit of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, but that’s a fairly obscure connection for the benefit of what is likely to be only a small portion of those reading this). The visual style of the picture matches Martha’s fuzzy mental state, clear and warm at times, but all-too-soon giving way to confusion and cold, unflinching traumatic memories. It’s a slow mystery – what is the full extent of the awfulness of what happened to her, and will she get the help she needs? – that is in some ways a slow-motion horror movie. One sequence late in the film is a like a quieter, simpler, though no less startling, version of something right out of a slasher flick.

The film tells the story of Martha’s steps towards a new, better life, tying it relentlessly to the slow and steady reveal of what she must overcome. It took great courage for her to escape her situation, but is it possible for Martha to outrun her past? We are given reason for hope, but as the end credits crash in, it’s still very much a tense, pressing, frustratingly unanswerable open question. In that moment, the film reveals itself to be a bit too teasing in its restraint to be fully believed (I’m tempted to call it Haneke lite). But it’s overall an undeniably effective piece of filmmaking and a strong debut.

Inspirational Celebrational Muppetational: THE MUPPETS

Now this is the Muppets! Jim Henson’s cast of lovable, furry misfits, oddballs, and weirdoes from The Muppet Show and several delightful feature films, haven’t been seen on the big screen for twelve years, languishing all this time in a couple TV specials and a handful of YouTube videos. They haven’t been gone, not exactly, but they haven’t been a cultural presence the way they once were. Since Henson’s untimely death in 1990, the characters have seemed every-so-slightly lost. This new feature, called simply The Muppets, reintroduces them in the biggest, funniest, loveliest, way possible. This is a hugely satisfying film that scrambles all definitions of kids’ films and grown-ups’ films, a giddy nostalgic reunion with old friends, and an unmitigated success.

The Muppets have found a great new voice, one that sounds as close to their old voice as possible without Henson, in co-writers Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller. You might remember their Apatow production Forgetting Sarah Marshall in which the main character wants to produce an all-puppet Dracula musical. That film’s grand finale was that production, complete with sweet song-and-felt numbers. Of course, that film was most definitely R, but their love of G-rated Muppetry was obvious in that sequence. The Muppets have an earnest and earned innocence, a broad delight in vaudevillian antics, puns, slapstick, heartfelt musical numbers and staying true to yourself while sticking by your closest friends. Segel and Stoller get that perfectly in a splashy, witty musical with great numbers written by Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords, who knows a thing or two about funny songs. Together they create a film that starts by acknowledging that the world has seemingly left the Muppets behind, but, even if unexpressed, the world is desperately in need of their return.

At the film’s start we’re introduced to Gary (Segel), a human, and his brother Walter, a Muppet in Smalltown, USA. They’re big fans of The Muppet Show and plan a trip with Gary’s girlfriend, Mary (Amy Adams), to Los Angeles, the main attracting being the Muppet Studios. They set off to L.A. on a bus by way of a musical number. When they arrive at their destination, they’re disappointed to discover the place run down, an unenthused tour guide informing them that the Muppets haven’t been seen in years. Poking around the rundown buildings on his own, Walter overhears the property’s owner, Tex Richman (Chris Cooper), explaining to Statler and Waldorf (the old heckling duo) his plans for bulldozing the place to drill for oil. The Muppets would need ten million dollars to buy back the old theater.

Horrified, Walter sets out determined to save the Muppet Theater. Luckily, he eventually runs into Kermit the Frog and convinces him to try and raise the money by getting the old gang back together and putting on a show. Why not? After all, it was Mickey Rooney himself who helped see Gary, Mary, and Walter off at the Smalltown bus stop. So, Kermit his new pals set off to gather up all the Muppets they can find, all of whom have long since gone their separate ways. Some are struggling, singing in a Muppet tribute band at a shady hotel lounge, for instance. Others are doing reasonably well for themselves, like working at Vogue’s Paris bureau. Regardless of circumstance, though, most are more than happy to jump back into their old variety show ways. It’s an utter delight to see the Muppets reunite one by one: Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Animal, Rowlf, and Miss Piggy. And what would a Muppet movie be without Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker? Sam Eagle? The Swedish Chef? Dr. Teeth? They’re all here and more besides, including some ingenious celebrity cameos I wouldn’t dare spoil.

What makes the movie so very entertaining is the nonstop hilarity that comes from a sweet, good-natured desire to do nothing more bring joy and laughter to the world. The script is filled with funny meta flourishes that comment on the Muppets’ faded cultural status and extended absence as well as the film’s very nature as a film. In an opening sequence, a terrific Broadway-style musical number, there is a pause in the music and the dancing townsfolk are seen lounging around, waiting for their cue to start up again. Later, plot points are resolved through literal movie magic. How to drive to Europe? Let’s go by map! How to pick up all the rest of the Muppets in a timely manner? Use a montage! Director James Bobin, veteran of TV comedy, brings an effortless cinematic quality to such playful filmmaking, allowing these gorgeously simple piece of felt to find their footing once again without ever once letting it feel dated or quaint. He wrangles the production well. The familiar felt faces (performed and voiced by Steve Whitmire, Eric Jacobson, Dave Goelz, Bill Barretta, David Rudman, and Matt Vogel) mix well with the game human cast, who are entirely unselfconscious in the face of such broad and varied, smiling wit and whimsy. The film’s hip, clever, and witty without feeling edgy or contemporary. It has the timeless feel you’d want.

What makes the movie somewhat moving is the way it uses new Muppet Walter to illuminate that which has always made the Muppets so singularly special. They’re all misfits in some way. They’re too loud, too corny, and too musical. They try their hardest and seem unfazed when they fail. They’re not afraid to get mad at each other, but they’re even less afraid of forgiving each other. They’re friends and colleagues who have come together in spite of their weirdness, united by their desire to bring happiness into the world and to celebrate the weirdness, the boundless hope and enthusiasm that makes them so wonderful. Walter doesn’t fit in. But with the Muppets, he can find acceptance. The Muppets have always communicated this message. It gets better. All you have to do is be yourself and there’s a chance that you’ll find just the right group of misfits who love the same things you do, who support you every step of the way, and who will pick up a friendship right where it left off, even if it’s been years. The humor and the wisdom of the Muppets come from their unwavering consistency of personality. They are who they are.

I hadn’t seen these guys on the big screen since 1996’s Muppet Treasure Island. So, I was somewhat surprised to find that, as I waited all day to see an evening show of The Muppets, I felt a rare anticipation of the kind I associate only with childhood Christmas Eves. The film was a present worth waiting for. It’s the funniest movie of the year, the best movie musical in many a year, and a film so purely, warmly enjoyable that I had a smile on my face from the first scene to the last credit. It’s a joyous return for these characters, a generous, contagious, blast of effervescent exuberance and fun that recaptures the old magic. The film’s working title was The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made. I’d imagine a humble deference to the characters’ legacy caused the change, but now having seen it, that original title would have barely been hyperbole. This is as good as these iconic characters have ever been and certainly their best feature film since 1979’s The Muppet Movie. It’s truly a rekindled rainbow connection. Welcome back, Muppets!