The Muppets, The Movie . . . And Me

British TV may be fabulous, but it's not the only thing worth doing. Right in line with that theme, I just came from the new Muppets movie and I'll tell you this: it was great. There were as many "unaccompanied" grown ups in the audience as there were kids and most of them were laughing hard.

The movie was unusual for its continual breaking of that "4th wall" with characters referring to the earlier song numbers or making little jokes about the plot and length of the movie. The whole thing was charming, funny and self aware with lots of great cracks directed at the washed up Muppets of the olden days.

Somehow all the silliness managed to inspire real moments of wistfulness and remembrance and I was surprised to find a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes when Miss Piggy and Kermit finally reunited on stage for a rendition of The Rainbow Connection. There were lots of new songs too and many were quite excellent -- especially Man or Muppet which now plays continually in my mind (owing to the fact that we immediately bought the soundtrack) and in which Jason Segel gets to sing lines like "Am I a man or am I a Muppet?! If I'm a Muppet. .  . then I'm a very manly Muppet." He is brilliant in this role, managing to really make us believe in the strange set up.

Amy Adams too, is simply made for movies like this. She's become a Carole Burnett-like figure -- in that blatantly talented, beautiful, singing, dancing, poised and funny sort of way.

And whatever musical genius arranged Smells Like Teen Spirit for Muppet barbershop quartet needs, seriously, to win some awards. Stunningly funny.

A great many stars have cameos in the movie, including Neil Patrick Harris -- which caused me to have a major breakthrough -- I realized I get him confused with Justin Timberlake. This has happened to me before, but I never put my finger on the phenomenon until now.  I don't know if anyone else has this same Harris/Timberlake problem  -- so I am posting the following just to prove I am not crazy. (Although, maybe the following just proves that I am.)