This Is Not News

We saw The Muppets last week. I think it’s the first Muppet film I’ve seen in a theater since the original Muppet Movie, and I am not even 100 percent sure that I saw that one at the movies. If you want to know what I think about the movie, keep reading. If you want to know how I feel about it, skip to the last paragraph.

The Muppets is definitely a throwback to the original film – the characters are trying to put on a show while also being aware that they’re in a movie about them trying to put on a show. The breaking-the-fourth-wall and entertainment inside humor are the source of many of my favorite jokes in the film. The story and the character development serve mainly as pegs for the humor – they’re all drawn very broadly and don’t have a lot of room to develop. Conflicts are introduced and quickly resolved before the audience has a chance to really get invested in them.

The one character element that I had a problem with is that Kermit seemed a bit passive in the film. He needs to be prodded into doing just about everything, and there’s an untold story about how Kermit let the gang drift apart in the first place. He rallies a bit toward the end, but as someone who’s always liked Kermit, I felt a little let down.

The interesting theme of the movie is that the Muppets have been out of action for so long that they’re out of fashion and ignored. So they have to prove to themselves and the world that there’s still a place for their kind of entertainment. The movie plays up the idea that the Muppets are stuck in the 80s, even introducing a character called 80s Robot. It was a little weird to me to see this element. The Disney Muppets had a TV show and several theatrical movies in the 90s. They made a couple of TV movies and several viral online videos in the 2000s. I felt like the movie ignored all of that and pretended that the Muppets went dormant after The Muppet Show ended and The Muppets Take Manhattan left theaters. By all means, the movie is free to pick and choose its continuity – it’s not like there’s ever been a single coherent canon for the characters – but the meta theme didn’t totally click with me.

All of that said, toward the end of the movie, Kermit and the other Muppets perform “The Rainbow Connection,” and Alex started to sing along. In that moment, The Muppets became one of the most joyous experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater, and left no doubt that there’s still a place for these characters.

A few weeks ago I had one of those right-place-at-the-right-time opportunities that prove that the universe is not devoid of a sense of good timing. The Art Sanctuary invited a group of Parkway students to attend a special student matinee performance of selections from Can You Hear God Crying? The finished work is expected to premiere in Philadelphia in June, but composer Hannibal Lokumbe and a group of singers and musicians that included students from Philadelphia and Camden were ready to give a sneak preview to hundreds of Philadelphia-area students as part of the Reading in Concert program. Through the generosity of the Art Sanctuary, we were able to bring a group of ninth graders to the Kimmel Center for no charge.

I can not emphasize how important that last sentence is. I’ve been trying to organize a ninth grade field trip for two years and every time, the cost has become a hurdle. Now we were going to have a chance to bring students inside Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center to hear a live musical performance.

Heck, I was going to have a chance to go inside Verizon Hall and hear a live musical performance. That’s been on my To Do in Philadelphia list for quite some time.

In keeping with the good timing theme, Can You Hear God Crying? is inspired by the passage of captured Africans to the Americas as part of the slave trade, but it takes the idea of the Door of No Return and extends it to everyone, to represent those turning points in our lives where we lose touch with something dear. The good timing is that in World History we had just finished discussing the slave trade the week before the performance, so here was an opportunity to show students that something that occurred hundreds of years ago was still resonating with people in the present day and shaping events in the world around us.

The performance itself was a great experience for me, for several reasons. It was inspiring to see high school students from this area on that stage, ready and able to perform. I was intrigued by Lokumbe’s work with prisoners to use music and the arts as a means for introspection and self-improvement (the Music Liberation Project). And I welcomed the opportunity to broaden my own cultural horizons a little bit. The work has choral pieces, some of which were performed by a Liberian choir in Philadelphia. It is easy for me to forget how much power the human voice has simply as an instrument; I am so familiar and comfortable with words that I tend to focus on the meaning of lyrics rather than the emotion of the performance, but that isn’t an option when you don’t know the language.

It was also interesting to me to see the students’ response to the pieces. The earlier choral pieces, especially a mournful selection about the “Jonah people” trapped in the belly of a slave ship, were the kind of music that requires stillness and concentration to appreciate. Long single notes helped me think of a ship, tossing and lurching through turbulent seas, whose passengers had lost control of their own destiny. I am far from a musical critic or expert, but this part of the program was not what I would call accessible, and I think it was a little alien to some of the students as well.

But in the second half of the performance, the drums and piano and other instruments kicked in, and Lokumbe attempted to convey the possibility of joy and hope that exists in each of us. The music was more of a jam session with an upbeat tempo, and as the students began to clap along and move in their seats I could tell that this was a musical experience that they could completely engage with. It made me think of the impromptu singing performances I’ve seen break out at school, and it reminded me once again that art is not an option in human lives – it’s something we need and a fundamental part of who we are.

As the performance came to a close, Lokumbe answered some questions from the audience, and one of our students got to ask the final question. Another student turned to me, out of the blue, and said, “I’m glad we came to this.”

Some days, teaching isn’t just a holding action against all the challenges we face. Some days, you get to do something special. I’m very grateful to the Art Sanctuary, the Kimmel Center, Hannibal Lokumbe, the performers, and to the students and my colleagues at Parkway for making December 13 one of those days. And until June, I’ll be keeping my eye on the Kimmel Center site for more information about the finished version of Can You Hear God Crying?

By the time 1997 hit October, I had already started calling it the Year from Hell. I had graduated from Fordham and already found myself foundering professionally. I had compiled a jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none resume that left me unsure of what field to pursue and without the confidence to sell myself in interviews. I was about to leave my second job since graduation, my apartment in New York was a disaster waiting to happen, and I often supplied the disaster. Friendships strained as my fellow grads and I adjusted to “the real world” and its new demands on us. Wherever my happy place was, it was pretty vacant.

And then I read that Bill Berry was quitting R.E.M. Clearly, the universe had quit playing fair.

I can’t say I was surprised. The poor guy had an aneurysm on stage. If he wanted to go take it easy for life, he was more than entitled. Still, it was one more signal. The glory days of high school and college were over. Time to start moving on. Except, of course, I didn’t. I went to the library, checked out a book collecting all of Rolling Stone’s articles about the band, and served myself a crash course of R.E.M. history as it happened. And I waited for the next album, to see what Berry, Buck, Mills, and Stipe minus Berry would produce.

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Note: One of the perils of blogging for ten years is that you forget which movie quotes you’ve already used for post titles. Turns out this was not the first attempt to write a post called “Have Fun Storming the Castle.” Pattie beat me to it by four years. Who knew?

While I’m on the subject of my favorite movies, it’s worth checking out this Entertainment Weekly feature on The Princess Bride. I remember being in the schoolyard in grade school as a couple of my friends started quoting this movie to me. It sounded crazy, so of course I wanted to see it. When I finally did, I was hooked. I’ve been watching and quoting it ever since. Getting my sister to watch it was one of the awesome things about being an older brother. “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya” is like the secret handshake of a club of cool people who like this cool movie. That movie made me search out William Goldman’s original book – very good, but different in tone – and his nonfiction books on screenwriting. And I’m always careful to note the difference between mostly dead and all dead.

I should have taken Vizzini’s advice, though.

No, not “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.” I’ve got that one pretty much down. And I’ve never gone in against a Sicilian when death was on the line.

But I should have paid better attention to: “You’ve heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? . . . Morons.”

This story of R.E.M. begins in 1988. Sure, the band had formed in Athens, GA more than eight years earlier. Absolutely, by 1988 they had already helped to usher in the age of college rock, built a large fan base through years of near-constant touring, and even had a Top 40 hit with “The One I Love.” But in my grade-school years in Northeast Philadelphia, I missed all of that. So this story has to begin when R.E.M. left its independent label and signed with Warner Brothers Records.

If they hadn’t “sold out,” I never could have bought in. And what a shame that would have been.

One winter morning, school was canceled because we were supposed to get snow. The snow never really came, so my mother took us out bowling instead. Car rides usually involved a protracted sequence of negotiations, because I usually wanted to listen to the Top 40 station and my mother’s tastes were more to the soft-rock side of the spectrum. She was willing to humor me on many occasions, and this was one of them. As we were driving, a somewhat goofy song started playing. It was catchy, and I thought it was a little absurd that the singer was telling me to stand in the place that I was. But I liked absurd things, so the song stuck in the corner of my mind. But that didn’t quite do it.

Some time later, I came upon a Time magazine review of the album with that song on it, an album called Green. The review led off with the fact that the last song on the album had no title, and the reviewer imagined that this could make for a somewhat difficult situation when fans would want to request the song at concerts. The phrase, “Hey, play “ stuck in my head, and I was once again impressed by the quirkiness of this band. I brought up this fact a year later when I saw a friend had the cassette, but that still didn’t do it for me.

In early 1991, I had carved out a little workspace in the family laundry room, with a desk, a computer, and a radio. I was still listening to Top 40 stations, although format changes meant that I wouldn’t necessarily stick with one for any length of time. One night the DJ announced a new song by R.E.M. and played “Losing My Religion.” That first time, even that didn’t do it for me. It took another few months, of hearing the song on the radio and hearing Green and Out of Time when I hung out with my friends. I got more and more into the music, and I finally borrowed both albums and brought them home.

My mother heard one of them – I’m not sure which – and commented that this was a point where her taste and mine diverged sharply. I don’t think she knew how right she was. This was my entry into a new world of music, music that combined melodies with layers of instruments and often-earnest lyrics to create a mood that could surround me and lift me up; a world that featured people that didn’t fit in everywhere but fit in somewhere and were OK with that. It was the perfect world and the perfect music for a teenage me, and R.E.M. was always at the front of it.

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R.E.M. announced today that they are no longer a band. This bums me out, and it’s hard to explain why. No one’s coming into my house to take my copy of Automatic for the People, after all. I think that what makes me wistful is that, as we grow older, we change. And sometimes we celebrate the growth and change, and sometimes we want to reconnect with our long-gone self. Having things in your life that have grown older with you kind of helps. I will never be 17 years old, sitting in a newspaper office at Holy Ghost listening to Automatic for the first time, again. I will never be 21, sitting in the basement of the McGinley Center at Fordham, typing an article for The Ram while I listened to “New Test Leper” from New Adventures in Hi-Fi for the first time. (If you’re detecting a lot of newspaper offices in this story, you win a prize. That trip downtown to buy New Adventures was my first official date with Pattie, by the way.) But when I listened to Accelerate or Collapse Into Now for the first time, it was a way for my 36-year-old self to look back and wave at those younger mes. I kinda liked that, and now that particular musical gateway is closed.

I may take advantage of the weekend to ramble a little more on the topic, but for now, I just want to present a by-no-means-complete list of 10 R.E.M. songs that are very awesome.

1. Nightswimming, from Automatic for the People.
2. Leave, from New Adventures in Hi-Fi
3. Fall on Me, from Lifes Rich Pageant
4. Half a World Away, from Out of Time
5. Let Me In, from Monster
6. Uberlin, from Collapse Into Now
7. Sad Professor, from Up
8. Sitting Still, from Murmur
9. The Lifting, from Reveal
10. Life and How to Live It, from Fables of the Reconstruction

I went with a one-song-per-album limit there, or I may have just wound up reposting the track list to Automatic. I have around 200 R.E.M. songs on my iPod and I love ‘em all. Since it looks like there’s a greatest hits package coming up just in time for the holidays, maybe there’ll be one more chance to add to the list.

Interesting side note from Sunday night’s Eagles-Falcons game: The major reason why the Eagles did not challenge a key interception play is that NBC, which broadcast the game, didn’t show any replays that suggested the play was not, in fact, an interception. Coaches don’t have their own camera feeds, so they are dependent on whatever the TV broadcast shows. It wasn’t until after it was too late to challenge the play that the director found a definitive angle, so the TV broadcasters were able to comment on the play not being an interception and wonder why the Eagles didn’t challenge it – without commenting on the fact that they hadn’t found the relevant information at the time. If they had, the outcome of the play, and thus the game, might have been different. The broadcast wasn’t just showing the audience at home what happened in the game – they were affecting the outcome of the game. There’s a metaphor there somewhere.

I am slightly bummed that I did not get to see The National when they performed in Philadelphia this week. But given that it’s the first week of school and we’ve had some wacky weather here in the city, I’d probably be re-enacting the song “Conversation 16″ if I had tried to go to an evening concert during the work week. (The song is about someone concerned that he would eat someone else’s brain. I am implying that I would be a zombie if I went to the concert. I don’t know why Pattie says this band is depressing. End of digression.)

Anyway, I went to the band’s website and found that they had a link to the setlist for each show, which took me to a site called sitelist.fm that I had not previously known about. (Here’s Wednesday night’s set. Looks like a solid list.) The site is sort of a wiki dedicated to tracking concerts, and the setlists include links to YouTube videos of the songs. In this case they included a note that the Thursday concert had started late, so I’m really glad I took a pass on that one. I also went and looked up the last R.E.M. show I saw in Philly. (The National was the opening act that night, which is how I discovered the band. One more thing I owe R.E.M.) One of the things I really liked about that show was that Eddie Vedder came out and sang with the band on “Begin the Begin,” but Setlist.fm linked to a YouTube video from the band’s 2003 concert film Perfect Square. The sound quality was better on the DVD, of course, but this was a really cool moment to see live.

At any rate, I constantly manage to forget exactly which songs I’ve heard at concerts I’ve been to, so Setlist looks like a good site to keep in mind.

And while I’m embedding YouTube videos, check out The National playing “Afraid of Everyone” on Letterman. Awesome song.

Anyone who doubted that George Lucas was going to make more changes to the Star Wars movies got a rude awakening this week when various sites reported that Lucas has added blinking Ewoks, additional desert rocks, and anguished Skywalkers yelling “NO!” in climactic scenes. Plenty of people are upset about this, and we’ll see whether this affects sales of the Blu-Rays coming out this month. But I’m going to take a different tack. At this point, I don’t think Lucas has gone too far. I don’t think he’s gone far enough.

He should just bite the bullet and remake Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

Maybe he doesn’t want to trudge back to Tunisia. Fine. Do them as animated films, in the same style as the Clone Wars TV show. Use the original soundtracks if he likes, or hire new actors to do the voices. Heck, since Lucas has managed to create a whole new audience of Star Wars fans who know Cad Bane better than Lobot, an animated version of Luke and Leia’s story might be just what the doctor ordered.

‘Cause here’s the thing. Movies filmed with 70s and 80s technology are never gonna look the way 2011 George Lucas wants them to, and they probably won’t look like 1976 George Lucas wanted them to either. But slapping some 2011 effects on a frame here and there and trying to edit in a few bits of dialogue to the audio track is just going to call attention to the patch job. Nobody’s satisfied. So go ahead. Start from scratch. Stick Emperor Palpatine in Episode IV. Show Bail Organa trying to save Alderaan. Do all the crazy effects shots you want. Those of us with fond memories of 1977 through 1983 can hang out with our VHS, laserdisc and DVD copies, and the audience that likes the prequels and TV show can see the story end in a way that’s familiar to them.

And then, some time in 2027, he can start all over again. Yeah, he’ll be 83, but I expect he’ll have himself digitized by then anyway.

I made it out to see Captain America: The First Avenger last weekend. I enjoyed it. It was definitely a well-done origin movie, and while I haven’t seen Thor yet, it definitely seems like Marvel Studios has its formula down.

The most important thing that Marvel achieved with Iron Man and Captain America is to give the audience ample reason to like the title characters. If you like the character, you’ll want to follow his exploits in sequels, spinoffs, and the Avengers movie. Iron Man achieved this by letting Robert Downey, Jr. loose to make wisecracks and have a ton of fun being Robert Downey, Jr. Captain America does it by using just about every scene to establish what a good, decent, nice guy that Steve Rogers is.

At the beginning of the film, Steve Rogers is a complete physical basket case – he’s short, he’s scrawny, he’s sickly, he’s not particularly coordinated. The film demonstrates this by sticking Chris Evans’ head on a much smaller person through CGI. It looks a little odd, but you get over it, because even as a 98-pound weakling, Steve Rogers is a good guy. He’s trying to enlist in the Army in order to do his part during World War II. He gets himself beaten up by trying to hush someone heckling a newsreel. He ditches a double date to try, yet again, to enlist. He is, in short, the Hero Who Never Gives Up, and it’s easy to be on his side. Contrast that to the hatchet job that Green Lantern did in trying to introduce Hal Jordan.

Once Rogers’ character is established, the movie gets the action plot moving, and that’s competently done. Hugo Weaving does a nice job of portraying the Red Skull as a Nazi who’s decided to break away from the Reich and try to take over the world himself using advanced technology. As a result, the movie is a weird mix of a World War II era war movie and a science fiction action film. Since the filmmakers have tied this movie to the cosmology established in the other films, especially Thor, it’s easier to buy into than I expected.

I think that years from now, people are going to be writing books about the way Marvel has established a film universe. It could all come crashing down at some point, but right now they’re writing a new rulebook.