The Muppets have always been more than your average children’s entertainment featuring puppets. Take the original television series. What they were presenting to the TV viewing public was essentially a fake documentary series investigating working life behind the scenes at a live variety program. Which would be an interesting enough show in itself, except here our central characters are a frog, a bear, a pig and all other form of strange talking creatures.

The original ‘Muppet Movie’ plays along those same lines. The Muppets are watching a movie that they have filmed in which they’re playing themselves on a quest to find fame and fortune in Hollywood. Sounds a bit confusing…but it works.

The sequel, ‘The Great Muppet Caper’, marked the first time that the Muppets played characters in a film (which they would go on to do again for ‘Christmas Carol’ and ‘Treasure Island’ films), asking us to suspend our disbelief and watch Kermit, Fozzie and Gonzo (in the same way that we would watch human actors cast in a regular movie) play investigative reporters, hot on the trail of a jewel thief .

A double dose of afternoon Mayfair Muppets, happening February 22nd & 23rd. Featuring human being appearances by the likes of Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Charles Grodin, Peter Falk, John Cleese and Orson Welles.

PS – If Kermit singing ‘Rainbow Connection’ doesn’t pull at your heart-strings, there’s something wrong with you. You should look into it and speak to a professional…you might be dead inside.

‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ looks, well…fantastic. Hate to sound like a bad film critic looking to get his quote tagged onto the add campaign…but it does. A stop motion animation movie directed by cult indie visionary Wes Anderson (’Rushmore’, ‘Royal Tenenbaums’), based on a book by Roald Dahl, starring George Clooney and Meryl Streep, along with returning Anderson alum Bill Murray, Own Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and Willem Dafoe. Such great combination’s of talent have gone wrong before of course, but this one seems right on the mark.

The most amazing thing is how much it still looks like a Wes Anderson film. Admittedly I’m judging from the trailer alone, but he still managed to transfer his very quirky style over from the live action film-making world (the music, the title-cards, distinctive colour schemes, foreground placed characters standing looking into camera, etc…).

Originally intended as a collaboration between Anderson and Henry Selick (director of ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’). Selick ended up leaving the project to focus on ‘Coraline’, and now both films are up for Academy Awards in the Best Animated Film category.

Catch ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ from February 20 – 23, only at the Mayfair.

Whet your appetite here – then come see the films (and some of the filmmakers) in the flesh on Feb 12, starting at 9:30 pm.

(And yes, you must be 18 years of age or older to attend.)

Since we started our regular Participaction screenings of the film several months ago, audiences have grown and grown. Inexplicably, Ottawa wants more The Room! So, when Tommy offered us a couple of cases of The Room bobbleheads, we had to say, “Spoon!”

Uh, I mean, we had to say, “yes.”

The bobblheads arrived today, and they’re going on sale at the Mayfair asap.

He speaks! He nods! He’s made in China! He’s a better actor than the real Tommy Wiseau!

(See him in action here: The Room Bobblehead.)

So next time you come to the Mayfair, bring some extra cash, because starting today, for only $25, you can bring the star of The Room back to your room!

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The distributors of Street Trash (playing Friday, Feb . 5 at 11:15), however, came through with flying colours this month. We just received the vintage lobby cards below, and couldn’t wait to share them with you.

Enjoy!

Check out a bevvy of reviews, both positive and negative, at the Movie Review Query Engine.

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Spoilers, ho.

HIS SOUL’S STILL DANCING

by Ian Driscoll

In the course of making The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, Werner Herzog seems to have discovered how to save Nicolas Cage: let him drown.

Why am I writing about Nicolas Cage again, after effectively writing him off in a previous column?

Maybe because, with his ferocious performance in TBL: POC-NO, Cage has been resurrected for me.

It’s a resurrection that happens onscreen as well as off. The film opens with the camera following a snake as it swims through what turns out to be a flooded precinct jail, where bad detectives Nic Cage and Val Kilmer are taking bets on how long it will take a man locked in one of the cells to drown. Cage eventually abandons the game, though, and jumps in to save the man, at which point the screen goes black.

We catch up with him again some months later, as he’s being promoted from bad detective to bad lieutenant, primarily for saving the man’s life. But he has emerged from the water wracked with chronic pain from the back injury he sustained jumping in – a staggering, lurching Frankenstein’s monster, constantly holding one shoulder higher than the other (a crooked man, walking a crooked mile).

The allusion to Frankenstein is deliberate, and none too subtle. Cage’s lieutenant is, like the monster, reanimated flesh. He is the walking dead.

And if there was ever a city in which to be a zombie, New Orleans is that city.

Herzog’s New Orleans is a drowned city, and even years after Katrina, the (shore)line between land and water is blurry at best. Aquatic reptiles wander everywhere: into jails, as in the film’s opening.  Onto roads, as in the sequence where Cage visits the scene of an accident both caused and watched by alligators. And, inevitably, into Cage’s mind, as in the stakeout sequence where he hallucinates lizards: “What the hell are those iguanas doing on my coffee table?”

This is a place where the dead dance. There’s a sequence – the one that people walk away from the film (or even the trailer) quoting, in which Cage tricks a group of drug dealers into shooting a group of gangsters (who are trying to extort money from Cage). When all the gangsters are down, Cage demands that the dealers shoot the lead gangster again. When asked, “What for?” he responds, punctuating his explanation with a gasping laugh: “His soul’s still dancing!”

While the dealers are deciding what to do, we get to watch as the dead man breakdances around his own corpse. It’s a mesmerizing scene, and in the film’s voodoo-inflected setting, it doesn’t even need Cage’s uninterrupted drug abuse to seem plausible.

(Side note: I really wish that scene weren’t in the trailer. It would have been great to stumble across it in the course of watching the film. It would have been a stunning discovery.)

Of course, because this is nominally a police procedural, with Cage investigating a murder, the film also places emphasis on people who speak for, and act on behalf of, the dead. And in the course of the film, acting on behalf of the dead becomes an exercise in just plain acting.

Cage’s performance in TBL: POC-NO is all about acting. That is to say, he’s playing a character who’s constantly acting, pretending, lying. He acts the part of a cop while being a crook. He acts the part of a crook while being a cop. He acts straight when high, dedicated when desperate, confident when utterly lost. He approaches everyone he encounters with a new face (if the same improbable hairline), and fools the audience enough to leave unanswered questions about where his loyalties lie. Is he undercover or under-undercover?

The point is that he never stops performing, within the film or for the camera. He does what it takes to become the bad man for Herzog’s bad world.

And make no mistake: this is a bad world. It does not reward good behaviour. It does not spare the innocent. As Herzog himself puts it in Grizzly Man: “I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”

Of course, like practically everything that comes out of Herzog’s mouth, that’s probably at least part exaggeration and part straight-faced joke. Truth be told, he’s not really interested in the truth.

While he works in both narrative and documentary forms, he eschews the term “documentary,” instead preferring to label his films “fiction” and “non-fiction.” They’re all stories, it’s just that some of them are made up, and others aren’t. Several of Herzog’s films straddle the line, or get to be both: take a look at how his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly relates to its narrative remake Rescue Dawn, how the polygraph-buster that is My Best Fiend writes and rewrites personal history, or how Grizzly Man treats the comforting (and sometimes deadly) narratives/lies we tell ourselves.

All of which is to say that, yes, the common character of the universe may very well be chaos, hostility, and murder. But in New Orleans, at least for Nicolas Cage, there’s life after death.

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That’s part of what Martin Scorsese had to say in his speech at the Golden Globes about the importance of preserving old. You can hear and see the rest of what he had to say here:

Scorsese at the Golden Globes

it can be very difficult to find prints of older films, but we’re constantly on the lookout for classics and forgotten treasures. What old films would you like to see at the Mayfair?

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We’d expected the regular theatrical version – that’s what we were told was available – but we got this instead. Not that we’re complaining! It just means an extra 30 minutes of Tolkien-tastic entertainment to share with you, the most discerning film fans in Ottawa.

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On yesterday’s show, we shared our lists of the best films of the decade. It’s a thing people are doing. Here are each of the hosts’ lists. What do you think? Are we crazy? What did we miss? What should we have given a miss? Let us know – that’s what the comments section is for!

(And if what you read interests you, you could do worse than tuning in every Wednesday, from 5-6, live on the mighty 93.1, CKCU on your FM dial.)

Adrian Tripod’s best films of the decade

Adaptation
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Battle Royale
Borat
Capturing the Friedmans
Casino Royale
Dancer in the Dark
The Departed
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Exiled
Ghost Dog
Grizzly Man
A History of Violence
Kill Bill
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
The Life Aquatic
The Man Who Wasn’t There
Marie Antoinette
Mayor of the Sunset Strip
Mulholland Drive
The New World
Ong Bak
Palindromes
Shaun of the Dead
There Will Be Blood
This is England
Zodiac

Alvy Singer’s best films of the decade

2000

memento

high fidelity

saving grace

vinyl

2001

ghost world

in the bedroom

the royal tennenbaums

storytelling

2002

secretary

bowling for columbine

adaptation

2003

house of sand and fog

lost in translation

a mighty wind

elephant

2004

before sunrise

sideways

2005

Enron: the smartest guy in the room

A history of violence

match point

march of the penguins

The squid and the whale

2006

borat

volver

casino royale

the devil and daniel johnston

thank you for smoking

2007

the diving bell and the butterfly

no country for old men

sicko

2008

man on wire

the dark knight

milk

the king of kong:a fistful of quarters

in bruges

elegy

the wackness

2009

ponty pool

rip: a remix manifesto

frost/nixon

inglourious basterds

the cove

Colonel Trautman’s best films of the decade

THE TOP 10

There Will Be Blood

Mulholland Drive

The Queen

25^th Hour

Grizzly Man

The Royal Tennenbaums

Adaptation

The Dark Knight

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

WALL-E

RUNNERS UP

Caché

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Lives of Others

Barbarian Invasions

Hustle and Flow

El Aura

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

When the Levees Broke

Primer

Before Sunset

BODIES OF WORK

Steven Spielberg: A.I./Munich/War of the Worlds/Minority Report/Catch Me if You Can

Gus Van Sant: Last Days/Elephant/Gerry

Peter Jackson: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

ONES I’M SURE WILL BE ON OTHER LISTS

Battle Royale

Infernal Affairs

No Country for Old Men

Kill Bill

American Psycho

Requiem for a Dream

Ong Bak

The Host

King of Kong

Oldboy

Lists from co-hosts Carrie Nation and the Drunken Master still to come (whenever they get around to emailing me)!

Check back soon for more, and in the meantime, let us know what you think – what are  your top films of the decade?

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When we asked them how the bustin’ made them feel, they replied simply, “Good.”

For a more in-depth look at their visit to the Mayfair, check out their site: CrossTheStreams.net

(And feel free to show up in costume yourself, any time, for any film. Tuxedos for Bond? Zombie makeup for Zone of the Dead? Chain mail for Lord of the Rings? Valentino for Valentino? Why not?)

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