I kept thinking Natalie Portman was going to be in this, but that's a whole other 2019 space-madness movie, Lucy in the Sky, which has an oof IMDB rating of 4.5.
As for myself, it was great to see Tim "the human Muppet" Curry serve up the ham, and I loved the fresh Kermit/Sam relationship where Sam—whose defining characteristic is craven service of power—sees Kermit as "power" rather than a suspicious intruder to be reported on Nextdoor.
Overall, this adaptation made me want to read the book, whereas The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) makes me feel like I've gotten everything good that the book has to offer. That's an impossibly high bar to expect from a film adaptation, but Christmas Carol meets it.
After seeing this we walked through the museum's Jim Henson exhibit, and nephew (again, no previous Muppet experience) instantly recognized and loved the Big Bird puppet. Although we didn't run the experiment, I don't think he would have reacted the same way to the mo-cap dataset used to map Benedict Cumberbatch onto a CGI Grinch.
Anyway, this was a really solid straight-down-the-middle gangster film, but overall I'd rather see a weirdo entry in the genre, like Comfort and Joy.
I knew going in that The Irishman had a scene that was filmed in a bank in my neighborhood. It's an antique bank building, and I was looking forward to it as a little easter egg. The whole time I expected the old-timey bank scene to show up in the 1960s timeframe, but that scene takes place around the year 2000. My own private plot twist!
One cool thing about Uncut Gems is that it's set in 2012 because the plot hinges on real-world events from that year, but if you live in NYC it's pretty easy to see it was filmed recently. Scorsese would have spent millions digitally erasing the LinkNYC kiosks and changing the ads on taxis, but the Safdie brothers are more chill. It's not important to the film!
Wed Jan 01 2020 11:13 December Film Roundup:
A pretty highbrow month with some well-done films but not a lot of joy. Thank goodness for the Muppets, that's all I can say.