Noiseless Chatter Archive

Let’s not mince words. Of the classic Muppet films, The Muppets Take Manhattan is my least favorite. I know, I know. I’m an awful human being who hates fun. But I think part of the reason this one leaves me cold is that it sits between two of the best things Jim Henson and his collaborators ever did: The Great Muppet Caper , which is the Maltese Falcon of movies staring piles of colored felt, and Follow That Bird , which I won’t be covering here, but which I assure you is brilliant and which you need to watch even if you think you’re way too old for it. The Muppets Take Manhattan is just…strange. It doesn’t feel like the Muppets to me. Or…well, scratch that. It absolutely does feel like the Muppets, but only intermittently. When it does, it’s great. But when it doesn’t, which is most of the time, I find myself tuning out. My eyes wander. I look for interesting background details or try to figure out how much of a given street or park was blocked off for filmi...

My trademark griping about things I love aside, The Muppet Movie is wonderful. Maybe not the film I’d like it to be, but if you do the math Jim Henson was slightly more of a successful artist than I am, so it might be worth deferring to his judgment now and again. It was sweet. It was funny. It had incredible music. What more could you want? I’m glad you asked! Because The Great Muppet Caper provides my answer: The Great Muppet Caper . Everything good about The Muppet Movie is, simply, better here. And any niggles I have with The Muppet Movie are entirely erased. The Great Muppet Caper is sweeter, funnier, and features even better music. The one area in which the first film might edge this one out is its sheer volume of great cameos. The Great Muppet Caper has admittedly fewer, but it does have the single best Muppets cameo ever…and we’ll get to that in due time. My love for The Great Muppet Caper probably doesn’t come as a surprise. It’s a common referenc...

So! Rule of Three. This something that I’ve been meaning to start as a complement to Trilogy of Terror . In that series we look at three related horror films in the runup to Halloween, so I thought Rule of Three could serve as a nice balance in which we look at comedies. Like the Trilogy of Terror selections, these could be films in the same series, films by the same director, films with a common theme, or films with any relationship, really. The title Rule of Three refers to the comedy theory that if you say the same thing three times, Beetlejuice will appear. Anyway, I had a few ideas for how to kick off this series, but, really, there’s only one way I knew I’d be happy with: by looking at the three Jim Henson-era Muppet films. Well, the theatrical ones, anyway. …and not Follow That Bird. And…you know what? It’s The Muppet Movie , The Great Muppet Caper , and The Muppets Take Manhattan. Now leave me alone. I’ve been running this site for around five years, and ...