Movie reviews
When Gary and his sweetheart Mary (Amy Adams) travel to Hollywood to celebrate their anniversary, Walter tags along, only to discover, during a tour of the dilapidated Muppet Museum, that dastardly oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) plans to buy the museum and tear it down in order to drill for oil. Can Walter, Gary and Mary get the Muppets back together for one last fundraising show? Directed by former Ali G and Flight of the Conchords writer James Bobin, The Muppets is a suitably barnstorming return to form by Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, et al. The movie is as happy poking fun at the Muppets’ legacy as it is in providing some classically hopeless slapstick courtesy of Fozzie Bear. The Muppets are a little less anarchic than of yore, but Segel’s script is largely intended as a heartwarming homage to the timeless charm of the Muppet Show, and may well end up as the dictionary definition of entertainment for all the family.
Keira Knightley’s performance in A Dangerous Method (16s) is so outlandish at times that you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she’d been taking method acting lessons from Muppets drummer Animal. David Cronenberg’s film about the relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) puts her in an almost impossible position, playing Sabina Spielrein, a woman so conflicted by her masochistic sexual desires that she is at times reduced to a desperate grunting while hunching over like a wounded bird. Sabina recovers to become a well-respected psychologist, although the main thrust of Cronenberg’s narrative veers away from this potentially fascinating tale to concern itself with Freud and Jung, adroitly played by Mortensen and Fassbender, respectively, who are so restrained by comparison with Sabina that they tend to fade into the backdrop whenever she appears. Uneven in tone and fatally unfocused, in terms of its narrative drive, it surprisingly peters out with a whimper rather than a bang.
