Breakfast with Pandora

The Muppets: nostalgia on steroids

I never watched a lot of the original Muppets television show, although I knew it was a very big phenomenon. All the characters, all the inside jokes, all the celebs who made appearances-- it was a big deal.

Image from here.

But that was back-- I don't know-- 25 years ago?

(No, more.)

And there's no way the Muppets are going to make a comeback.

But everyone in Hollywood does make a comeback, and the Muppets have, too. And even if the voices don't sound quite exactly like they used to, the trademark Muppet comedy is back and better than ever.

The original Muppets show started in 1976, which is actually 35 years ago, but one thing they did is still very "now:" self-consciously play with the idea of show.

The Muppets never just did a show where you saw the performance and that was it. They interspersed scenes behind the scenes, showing the sausage-making quality of putting on a stage show. Kermit the Frog's ultra-nerd nervousness and neuroticism added humor as he tried to make sure all was well amidst the floating chaos of bahk-bahk chickens, prop mishaps, and Miss Piggy divadom.

All that comes back in spades in the new movie, along with plenty of self-referential break-the-fourth-wall intertextual inside joke stuff. Which means that the adorable and star-powered Amy Adams, looking very wholesome with long, curled hair, actually has very little to do in the picture. 

Yes, there is plenty of show in this Muppets show. To spare, in fact. Almost as if they took the original show and pumped it up on Muppet-Growth-Hormone. At the end, despite all the self-consciousness, it would not be surprising if you wipe away a bit of a tear.

Congrats to the people behind all this. And congrats to everyone who kept the flame burning all these years.

It was worth it.

Netflix Follies: "The Card"

My uncle, a beloved person, was a theater professional in England for a long time and once introduced me to a group of British actors.

Movie still from here; nice review, too.

"I love acting," I gushed. "Why?" they asked.

"Because it's so exciting to become someone else for a little while," I said. "It takes so much passion to get it right." I was about twenty, and had acted in two college productions.

They all exchanged glances. "I shouldn't expect so," one of them said. "Yes, it's just another job, isn't it?" another said. "What do you need passion for?" a third said. "All this method acting. It isn't necessary. Just do your job."

My uncle smiled. "You see the difference between American and British actors. It's very marked, isn't it?"

I thought of that exchange when I saw "The Card," a British comedy starring Alec Guinness, on Netflix this Thanksgiving. The film was made in 1952 when Guinness, known now to most Americans as Obi-Wan Kenobi, was just starting his career. It's a rags-to-riches story of the son of a washerwoman who rises to wealth through his wits, charm, guile, and opportunism (thus the title, a "card" being a one-of-a-kind person).

Guinness is aided considerably by a trio of stunningly beautiful actresses, Valerie Hobson, Glynis Johns, and Petula Clark, the latter going on to megastardom as a pop singer.

Image: My favorite of the three actresses.

The plot is not what captivated me, but the acting. It is not a spoiler to say this comedy is armor-plated against misfortune. Guinness as Denry Machin can do no wrong; you're just waiting to see what his next triumph will be.

So the delight, for me, is in how the actors navigate their roles, injecting humanity and humor that comes not from the situation or even, much of the time, the script, but in how each of them reacts to one another.

Maybe the most important of these scenes concerns one of the less stunningly beautiful players in the drama, Denry's washerwoman mother, played by Veronica Turleigh. After Denry has made a large fortune, he buys his mother a sealskin coat, which is as luxurious, it seems, as a fur stole. Turleigh, a proud, stoic commoner who doesn't go in for her son's ridiculous financial ambitions, tries to play off her happiness at receiving the coat. Clark, as the ingenue Nellie, gushes over it, and Guinness is perfect in his disappointment when Mother masters her wordly desires and decides to put it in mothballs.

Every gesture, tone and mannerism in this scene is spot on. In less accomplished hands, the scene would have just been cheesy. I dare say, many scenes like this one have aspired to such spot-onness and failed.

I wondered how much these actors just went to work on that day they did that scene, and "just did their job." Tremendous.

So see it if you haven't cancelled your Netflicky subscription.

One other thing relating to mythology and pop culture criticism, in the Breakfast with Pandora way: I found this comedy to be quite amazing for 1952, a time in the UK when the British were still recovering from the devastation of World War II. In its optimism the movie is downright American, and in its obliteration of class differences (a defining issue of the British ethos) it just seems extremely, extremely unlikely.

The movie is set in 1911, when class differences were even more marked in the UK than they are today. The beautiful period costumes and the attitudes of the people emphasize that there is a difference between commoners and the upper class, and that Denry, as a kind of trickster god, is magically making that all go away.

Indeed, all that Denry does has that feeling of fairy tale, a Puss-in-Boots type of story, but set in pre-World War I, the unreality of it all is even more marked.

Was it that the British public just needed that type of light, optimistic, magic realist type of story at a very bleak time in their history? If so, then Miss Hobson's last line, the last line of the film, would make perfect sense.

Is there a recurrence of this type of story through British cinema? And how optimistic are other genres of British film? In America, we love resurrection and happy endings, even in drama. Was it always the same in the UK? Or was this just a moment in time?

We continue on. Pass the tea cakes, Pandora. 

The utility of studying Latin and Greek

Over here a mini-controversy on the utility of studying Greek and Latin, sometimes called Classical Studies, or (as I prefer) Classics.

(Image: Cicero orating against Catiline)

My position on that is summed up in the following: 

My ideal primary school would have the following four core subjects: Art, Music, Physical Education, Latin and Greek.

Yes, students would take Latin and Greek in kindergarten and they would learn to read English like demons. In fact, they would devour books. Guaranteed.

Middle school would retain the four core subjects. English and history would be combined into one cross-disciplinary class, and math and science would be combined into another single class, and they would be electives.

In the upper school, students could opt for a more conventional subject smorgasbord, including modern foreign language with immersion in target language nations for up to a year.

Post-secondary education would focus on training students in specific skills, except for the next generation of teachers, who would be further educated in a liberal arts and sciences track.

My sense is that education means equipping the brain to think broadly, liberally, humanely, critically, and deeply. Training, by contrast, is equipping a human being to do a specific needed skill.

Therefore, we should have students study at a young age those subjects that form the brain in the most comprehensive way possible. And it has been shown scientifically that the four core subjects of my ideal school are those that do that. Music is probably best in this area, but I think Latin and Greek are a close second.

Once students get older and have an established foundation for critical thinking, they can easily acquire all the skills they need, or study further the subjects that interest them.

So I think Classics is very important to education.

But I am not so thrilled with Classics as a university research subject. Classics is a very old subject and has been studied thoroughly. In the mid- to late-twentieth century there was a flowering of interpretive studies that were the happy result of hundreds of years of painstaking philology-- that is, scholars making sure the surviving manuscripts of ancient texts were as readable as possible.

Nowadays we do not need another book about the Iliad, and we most certainly do not need more books on the less important authors such as Silius Italicus. My sense is that we could do without any more research on Classics for the next 50 years and we would not be the poorer for it.

I would encourage the next generation of Classics Ph.D.'s (of which, I am told, there are too many) not to pursue a tenure-track job (of which, I am told, there are too few) at a college of university. Teach high school, middle school, elementary school Latin and Greek. You will be happy, your students will be happy, and the nation will thank you.