What About Bob? (1991)

Director: Frank Oz

Cast: Bill Murray, Richard Dreyfuss, Julie Hagerty, Charlie Korsmo

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Relatively sure I saw it in theaters.

Did I Like It: If pressed, I would say that the peak period of Bill Murray probably started with the famous Saturday Night Live sketch where he admitted that he wasn’t really doing so great on the show*, and goes up to about Scrooged (1988). His current era is a bit more reserved and attracts some awards, give or take a handful Ghostbusters legacy sequels. Then there’s that middle era, where he was a holy terror to everyone he worked with. Starting here, and culminating with him not being asked back for a second Charlie’s Angels film.

What we have here is a basic, even erring on the side of too-broad-for-its-own good comedy. This is especially true in the third act, where the wide-release sensibility prevents the story from reaching its natural conclusion, where Dreyfuss strangles the life out of Murray, and instead culminates in a comedy of error that sees Dreyfuss blow his own house up.

What the film has going for it is that it is perhaps the perfect matchup of two actors who make it a point not to get along with people. Their chemistry is palpable and might very well have propelled a far less competent screenplay to be just as watchable. What we may all have missed in that is that a far less competent director than Oz would have had no hope at all of keeping this all together. He doesn’t get nearly enough credit for his work behind the camera, in favor of his work as a puppeteer.

*One might make the argument for the moment when he called Chevy Chase a “medium talent” back stage and then got into a physical altercation, but we mostly have to imagine how that one played out.

Bowfinger (1999)

Director: Frank Oz

Cast: Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Heather Graham, Robert Downey Jr.

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. It feels like one of those movies that everybody had to see in the summer of ’99.

Did I Like It: There’s an easy criticism of this film that compares in unfavorably to Ed Wood (1994). It’s easy because it is, fundamentally, true. The story of Ed Wood and Bobby Bowfinger (Martin) are roughly the same. The down on their luck scurrying creature of Los Angeles stops at nothing to make a movie—any movie—and brings the people in his orbit along with him. Ed Wood is the superior film, but between being a black and white movie about a transvestite (complimentary), there was never any hope that it would play in Poughkeepsie. Reaching to make everyone funny, and filming it in the same colors everybody expects to see in any other movies, means that the film is ready for all time zones.

The film is lucky that it is quite funny, owing to able and steady direction from Oz. The film winds up taking skillful shots at both Anne Heche* and Scientology**, thanks to a wry script from Martin.

But the real secret here is Eddie Murphy. Certainly the most popular comedy movie star of the 80s—even Bill Murray often needed backup, and even Chevy felt compelled to make Oh! Heavenly Dog (1980) and National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985)—Murphy spent most of the 90s quietly becoming less and less funny. Here, he is back in fine form, thanks in no small part to the fact that he is able to let go of his well-earned leading man ego to alternately be the least cool guy in the room and make fun of his own image.

*Don’t believe me? Martin didn’t even try to hide it all that much.

**How is Tom Cruise expected to complain about the cracks, when MindHead is depicted as being almost too into psychiatry. People really should take lessons from him in how to make fun of someone not only to the point that they don’t know that they’re being made fun, but that the mockery actually reinforces their prejudices.

The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)

Director: Frank Oz

Cast: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I’m the guy who keeps noticing that the diner Jerry and George eat in the pilot of Seinfeld is actually the exterior of the luncheonette where the Muppets work here. It’s the movie released the weekend of my birth, no less.

Did I Like It: I really wished I did. It doesn’t have the heart of The Muppet Movie (1979), or the demented, anarchic glee of The Great Muppet Caper (1981). It might be unfair to say that a film based on characters who made their bones in a variety format is short on plot, but those previous films made good—and in the case of Caper, great—cases for their existence. Here, the Muppet gang are small-timers who want to make it big with their obvious talent and charm. Sound familiar from The Muppet Movie? It should. And then—surprise of all surprises—they do it. Without ornate sequences involving Kermit (Henson) and Piggy’s (Oz) nuptials and imagining the muppets as babies* which add nothing to the proceedings, the runtime might not have even qualified as a feature.

This is all perfunctory, as if all of the Muppet crew (here all together for the final time in a feature before Henson’s passing in 1990) desperately wanted to be doing something else. After reading the recent Brian Jay Jones biography of Henson, I’m thinking that was probably the case. Oz never felt comfortable with the Muppet label and seems to tolerate this exercise so he can have a hit under his belt so he could start directing what he might have viewed as real movies. The Dark Crystal (1982) bombed somewhat scandalously two years earlier, and I even get the sense throughout the is film that Henson hoped Crystal’s failure wouldn’t mean he’d have to be attached at the hip with Kermit for the rest of his days.

*Even the Muppets characters themselves stop the movie cold to eye a Saturday Morning cartoon deal.

The Great Muppet Caper (1981)

Director: Jim Henson

Cast: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Jerry Nelson

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. A VHS recording from a local UHF station in the `80s became a regular staple in my house growing up. As much as I had uncertainty that I actually had seen The Muppet Movie (1979) in the past, that doubt was completely absent here.

Did I Like It: I can feel the criticisms of this movie as I watch it. It’s too jokey. It’s too irreverent. It’s too—dare I say it—clever?

Those people are wrong. The entirety of Henson’s output has been a concerted fight between goofing off (anything with the proper Muppets) and more earnest whimsy (anything Disney decided wasn’t worth buying after Henson died). This is the peak of that former mold, and it is in every way authored by Henson. Whereas The Muppet Movie (1979) had to shoulder the not insignificant burden of proving that the Muppets could even conceivably work on the silver screen, everyone could relax here and dwell on the absurdity that are the confines of a movie. Preposterously bad casting of family members (a running gag has Fozzie (Oz) and Kermit (Henson) as twin brothers) , credits (“Nobody reads those names anyway, do they?” “Sure. They all have families.”) and the very notion of exposition (“It has to go somewhere.”). All of it is picked apart directly in the movie and singularly fuels the best parts of the Muppet’s sense of humor in movies to come.

But in that wry sense of the absurd, in that chasing of the laugh, the film doesn’t try to shed the things that made the Muppets beloved in the first place. The Happiness Hotel might very well be the nastiest hotel that the movies have ever brought us (I include The Overlook from The Shining (1980) in that calculus), but who wouldn’t want to stay there when Dr. Teeth (Henson) the Electric Mayhem (feat. Rowlf (also Henson*) are around? It’s not just that the Muppets are lovable, it’s impossible to not want to be around the characters whenever possible.

*My working theory after also spending some time watching The Muppet Show? Dr. Teeth is merely a vaguely humanesque suit that Rowlf wears for certain gigs

The Muppet Movie (1979)

Director: James Frawley

Cast: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt

Have I Seen it Before: You know… I can only say I’m kind of sure I have. Large portions call up a memory, but others are a complete blank. Ours may have been more of a The Great Muppet Caper (1981) house.

Did I Like It: Is it even possible to dislike the Muppets? Especially in that uniquely, brazenly period of cascading creativity when Jim Henson wielded these characters to their maximum potential?

No one would have been considered controversial if they spent the `70s convinced that Kermit (Henson) and company were a phenomenon that could not move beyond the scope of television shows like Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. They are funny, and they are cute. But can anything surpass the confines of television when, by their very nature have to be shot from the waist up?

That wasn’t enough for Henson*. He proceeded to make a movie that is just as funny and charming as his television work, but credibly lets the characters inhabit the big screen. Cameos abound, and any movie filled with that many famous people would be almost automatically considered a case of subtraction by addition. But here, it’s somehow both expected and adds to the material. Everyone fits into the movie like. puzzle piece, and it’s just an absolute head scratcher that Orson Welles didn’t end up guest starring on The Muppet Show, considering how fond he was of Henson’s work.

And what’s more, this is just the opening salvo in Henson’s brief quest to see just how far his deceptively simple puppets could go. One could only imagine how far he might have gone if he had lived just a bit longer.

* He didn’t direct the film or write it, but anyone who thinks he’s not the author of any Muppet production prior to his death is kidding themselves.

Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird (1985)

Director: Ken Kwapis

Cast: Carroll Spinney, Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Thomas

Have I Seen It Before?: That poor VHS copy we had never stood a chance. Smash cut to the 2000s, I find a copy wallowing quite unfairly in the five dollar DVD trough at the local Wal Mart. Watching it again, I was likely emotionally compromised, whether from being at a sensitive age, or having a normal amount of some substance pushing me along in that direction*.

Did I like it?: There is a tendency in children’s entertainment—especially feature films geared towards children—to eschew any sense of an auteur. The puppets of Sesame Street may have originated with Jim Henson, they were further refined by puppeteers like Frank Oz, Carroll Spinney, and Kevin Clash, and the program may have been nurtured through its first several decades by producer Joan Ganz Cooney. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t watch this film now, notice that a number of characters including Big Bird (Spinney) and Miss Finch** (Sally Kellerman) staring at the camera and expressing their frustration and bemusement, and couldn’t help but notice that director Ken Kwapis was forming the skills he would bring to bear twenty years later in the US version of The Office.

That, however, is only what I noticed on this particular viewing of the film. I’m brought back to it because of its pointedly cinematically literate. The film should have made 100 million in the box office, based soley on the notion of everyone’s favorite eight-foot-tall bird in the place of Cary Grant in that most famous sequence from North by Northwest (1959). Alas, it bombed and put the Children’s Television Workshop’s financial life in some jeopardy for the next few years.

It is fast paced—naturally to keep pace with a child’s waning attention, even in the 1980s—but never deigns to skip over real peril or stakes for the characters. The wants and needs of Big Bird that send him through the story are real, and he comes through the process having changed, realizing all the family he really needs or wants are at Sesame Street. At the same time, Sesame Street’s selfless, almost unconscious, collective efforts to jump into action to find him are enough to send this reviewer to a point where faith in humanity may not be the craziest idea in the world.

With human society feeling like it might just possibly crumble or snap, I think we all may need to give this one a whirl in the DVD player again.

*Is this the first piece of writing about Sesame Street that alludes to the use of marijuana? Surely not…

**Every time I hear a mournful wail of that name, I am reminded that such calls became synonymous with “Oh no!” in my house for several years.

Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)*

Director: Irvin Kershner

Cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Frank Oz

Have I Seen It Before?: Yes, but probably in the wrong way. I missed all of the original trilogy in theaters by one year, and so had to watch them on VHS in the late 80s and early 90s. So, the first time I saw Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) it was preceded by an ad for the rest of the series, including Luke (Hamill) asking Yoda (Oz) that trilogy-spoiling question: “Is Darth Vader my father?”

So it’s kind of like I had the experience of seeing the film before I ever actually got to see it.

Did I like it?: It would be pretty disingenuous of me to say anything other than “yes” here. It is universally accepted as the greatest of all Star Wars films. It is truly great, not possessing one moment or element that annoys or distracts, and in fact adds so much to the tapestry of the saga, that it probably has had a hard time recovering in the 39 years since its release. It is thrilling and funny in equal measures, and even its supposed “down” ending hints at the—for lack of a better term—new hope just beyond the horizon.

But is it better than A New Hope? I’ve probably spent most of my life thinking so, but I’m not sure why I have changed tracks in the last few years, but I think… (I think) I prefer A New Hope at this moment. It’s an incredibly close comparison, at any rate.

That may make the debate about which film is “better” a fundamentally meaningless one.

It is a far better sequel than we had any right to expect from the original Star Wars. As such, it may be partly to blame for the litany of movies we’ve received since, each one demanding of us as viewers to not so much react and take in the subsequent films, but create positions on which one we like and which ones we don’t. It has reduced fandom of the series to a tedious xerox copy of partisan politics in America. 

Stop ranking movies. Enjoy them, don’t enjoy them. That is up to you. Just watch them.

With that in mind, both this film and the one that preceded it are great and you should watch them, if you haven’t.

Which you almost certainly have.

*I watched the unaltered versions available on the 2006 “limited edition” DVDs. See my review for A New Hope for further thoughts on this.