Muppets gone wild
It's cold, it's cruel, but when Scorsese meets the 'Street,' the parodies flow in endless streams.
SWEEPING through the debris field that makes up today's YouTube catalog, a few emerging schools of webcamography are evident: confessional videos by teenage girls, stolen footage of Jon Stewart and Asian game shows, caught-on-camera car accidents and faux pas, adorable pet moments and rampaging, ultra-violent, foul-mouthed Muppets.
Not surprisingly, it is that final genre that is attracting the great auteurs of the Internet today. Suddenly, everywhere you look across the Internet, Kermit and Miss Piggy, Ernie and Bert are cussing each other out like gangstas, battling to the death with armored weapons and restaging the edgiest films of our time..
The Muppet remix features the likes of "The Muppet Matrix" and "Murdah Muppets." The Web and its accompanying tools of low-budget editing have granted filmmakers the power to manipulate and reframe the great characters of entertainment to their hearts' desire. But with this freedom, an arms race has also begun, sending filmmakers in a competitive frenzy to place the Snuffleupagus in ever more compromising positions.
Among the recent entries to the unauthorized oeuvre: an animated shot-for-shot restaging of "The Matrix" trailer featuring Kermit in the Keanu Reeves role; a music video of rapping Muppets With Attitudes in which the N.W.A song "F*** tha Police" is cleverly dubbed into snippets of Muppet footage; and "C for Cookie," a spoof of "V for Vendetta" in which an underground hero played by Cookie Monster fights for citizens' rights to eat snacks all day long against an oppressive Big Brother-like dictator played by Oscar the Grouch. (Elmo tries his hand at the Natalie Portman role.)
Perhaps the most circulated recent entry into the genre is "Martin Scorsese's Sesame Streets," a series of respliced scenes from the Henson flagship show overdubbed with snippets of trademark dialogue from the director of "Taxi Driver" and "Goodfellas" canon. Panning over a scene of "Street's" Muppet and human cast singing atop their urban stoop, to jazzy theme music, a narrator intones, "In a world so familiar, some secrets just can't stay hidden." Soon we hear Joe Pesci's voice emanating from Grover, demanding of a little girl: "I make you laugh!?! I'm here to … amuse you!?!"; Big Bird confronting Snuffleupagus, "You talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here, so you must be talkin' to me"; and Ernie and Bert's quiet domestic life recast as a fraught scene of betrayal and mistrust. "One neighborhood where time stands still and nothing is what it seems," the narrator deadpans. "Sometimes the most dangerous place to go is back home."
"Sesame Streets" is the work of Jim Paul and Max Stinson, two Chicago advertising executives who cut the piece for a film festival thrown by their firm and then uploaded it onto YouTube so they could share it with their friends, little realizing that it would soon be colonized by the voracious Internet audience, copied, linked to, e-mailed and reposted around the Net for an audience that now surpasses half a million viewers. In a case of how the Web's power often leaps away from its creator's intention, the pair were so unsuspecting that the video would have an audience outside their immediate circle that they didn't even put their names on it, posting simply as "mscorsese."
"We both like the Muppets," Paul said by phone. "So this was an opportunity to take these two extreme worlds and put them together."
Accustomed to working in the medium at their day jobs, the pair wanted to demonstrate how "you can take different audio and video, and take situations that actually exist and make it feel like something very different than how it was meant," Stinson said.
Starting first by writing a "Mean Streets"-esque trailer script, they sifted through DVDs of "The Best of Grover" and "Follow That Bird" to find moments that would give new meaning to the words, and vice versa. One shot, for instance, of Bert looking through the window at a sleeping Ernie is as spine-tinglingly sinister as anything in "Cape Fear." "We were looking for a moment of betrayal," Stinson said, "and suddenly we saw that shot and it just changed the way you look at it."
As the Muppet remix race builds, an almost diametrically opposed sub-genre is clogging the Internet airwaves: human re-stagings of the classic "Máh-Ná-Mah-Ná" song from "Sesame Street." At a recent count, YouTube had more than 100 non-Muppet retellings of "Máh-Ná-Mah-Ná," including a trash can "Máh-Ná-Mah-Ná," several baby "Máh-Ná-Mah-Nás" and a "Drunk 'Máh-Ná-Mah-Ná.' "
Paul and Stinson cite as their inspiration an early giant of the genre, a widely forwarded trailer parody of "The Shining" that remixed scenes from the movie with upbeat music and narration to create an incredibly convincing romantic comedy trailer. However, the genre's roots go back even further, before the dawn of the digital age, to at least 1987 when a filmmaker dubbed dialogue from "Apocalypse Now" over Winnie the Pooh cartoons and created a haunting nine-minute film, "Apocalypse Pooh Now" — which in itself has found a new life today, widely forwarded and posted on the Internet.
In a parallel universe, a portal
AS soon as MySpace and YouTube made the passage from viral upstarts to new media establishment, the hunt for the next big thing went into hyperdrive. And it took tech writers and bloggers all of about seven minutes to crown an aspirant to the Online Hottie Throne. Second Life, the online virtual-world video game — tomorrow belongs to you!
Second Life, which you will no doubt soon be seeing as the subject of magazine cover stories, business analyses and cultural critiques, is a role-playing video game in which players create alternative reality characters (avatars) for themselves. They then go about living lives in a world that allows them to create, do, build or be anything they can imagine. They can construct mansions and furnish them, recruit an army and go to war, have relationships and bizarre group sex, attend AA meetings, sit in a coffee house and complain about their real lives — all are part of the experience. There is a Second Life currency, which people earn in an allowance, augment by taking on jobs (the illicit ones being the highest paid, shockingly) and trade in the open market for actual U.S. currency (as of this writing, the exchange rate of SL's Linden dollars to U.S. dollars was 284.50 to 1).
Web die-hards complain that Second Life is merely a watered-down version of the already established virtual game World of Warcraft. To which cultural savants respond, the tiny difference of not being in a Tolkien-inspired realm of orcs and jousting is likely what will make SL, shall we say, welcoming to a broader community. Non-techies ask: Why would I want to play a game where I have to get a job? Because, you'll be told, this is more than just a game — Second Life, the prognosticators wax — is how you'll communicate, make friends and navigate your world in the future. YouTube plus MySpace times Google, more or less.
Time will tell, but the recent explosion of interest was sparked Oct. 18 when Second Life gained its millionth member. The same week the United States gained its 300 millionth citizen — but SL is growing, they will tell you, much, much faster. Already Reuters has assigned a full-time reporter to the virtual kingdom. Symposiums cannot be far behind.
Mark McKinney, Corner Gas winners at comedy awards
The television series Corner Gas and Mark McKinney were double winners at the seventh annual Canadian Comedy Awards.
The series, featuring Saskatchewan comedian Brent Butt, captured prizes for best direction and top female performer for Janet Wright.
Former Kid in the Hall McKinney grabbed best male performance on television for Slings and Arrows and shared the best scripting award for the series along with Susan Coyne and Bob Martin.
The awards were handed out Friday night in London, Ont., as part of the yearly Canadian Comedy Festival.
Mike MacDonald was honoured with the inaugural Dave Broadfoot Award for comic genius. As well, special awards were given to Don Ferguson and Roger Abbott of the Royal Canadian Air Farce for their achievements in comedy at home and abroad.
Pete Zedlacher and Laurie Elliot were named best male and female stand-up comics and Jon Dore was top newcomer.
Other winners included:
Best sketch troupe: The Second City Reloaded.
Best TV direction: The Frantics Reunion Special.
Best film direction: Donnie Mills for Chasing Aces.
Best male performer, film: Sean Cullen in Phil the Alien.
Best female performer, film: Jennifer Robertson in Twitches.
Comedic play: SARSical the Musical.
Improv troupe: Die-Nasty! Improvised Soap Opera Troupe.
'Saw III' takes $34.3M cut at box office
LOS ANGELES - Halloween came early at movie theaters as "Saw III" sliced up the competition with a $34.3 million debut, the best opening yet for the gory horror franchise. Lionsgate's "Saw III" easily took over as No. 1 at the box office, bumping off Disney's dueling-magicians saga "The Prestige," which slipped to third place with $9.6 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. "The Prestige" raised its 10-day total to $28.8 million.
Martin Scorsese's mob tale "The Departed" held strongly again, taking in $9.8 million to place second for the third-straight weekend. The Warner Bros. film lifted its total to $91.1 million.
Revenues for "The Departed" were down just 27 percent from the previous weekend, compared to 35 percent for "The Prestige" and 38 percent for Clint Eastwood's World War II epic "Flags of Our Fathers," which was No. 4 with $6.35 million.
Paramount's "Flags of Our Fathers," which cost $90 million to produce, has gotten off to a slow start, raising its 10-day total to $19.9 million. The acclaimed film still could follow the pattern of Eastwood's last two movies, "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby," which became hits on the strength of Academy Awards buzz.
Focus Features' South African drama "Catch a Fire" premiered weakly with $2 million in 1,306 theaters, averaging $1,541, compared to $10,830 in 3,167 cinemas for "Saw III."
"Catch a Fire" stars Derek Luke and Tim Robbins in the story of a black family man driven to rebel against South Africa's apartheid system in the 1980s.
The far-flung drama "Babel," whose ensemble cast includes Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, had a huge opening in limited release, grossing $365,801 in seven theaters. The film traces the consequences of a tragedy in the desert on families in Africa, Mexico and Japan.
Distributor Paramount Vantage plans to open "Babel" nationwide on Nov. 10.
The Dixie Chicks documentary "Shut Up & Sing" debuted solidly in limited release, taking in $50,798 in four theaters. Released by the Weinstein Co., the film explores the furor after lead singer, Natalie Maines, told a London concert crowd on the eve of the Iraq war in 2003 that the music trio was ashamed President Bush was from Texas, their home state.
Hollywood remained on a box-office roll, with business up for the fifth straight weekend. The top 12 movies took in $89.1 million, up 2.4 percent from the same weekend last year, when "Saw II" opened at No. 1 with $31.7 million.
Since the low-budget "Saw" debuted with $18.3 million over the same weekend two years ago, Lionsgate has turned the franchise into an annual ritual with quickly produced sequels each Halloween.
The movies follow the diabolical schemes of psycho killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), who stages elaborate, bloody games to test the moral fiber of his victims. Lionsgate plans to have "Saw IV" in theaters over Halloween weekend next year.
"It's the biggest no-brainer of the century to put these movies out on Halloween weekend and wait for the money to roll in," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.
Here are the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "Saw III," $34.3 million.
2. "The Departed," $9.8 million.
3. "The Prestige," $9.6 million.
4. "Flags of Our Fathers," $6.35 million.
5. "Open Season," $6.1 million.
6. "Flicka," $5 million.
7. "Man of the Year," $4.7 million.
8. "The Grudge 2," $3.3 million.
9. "Marie Antoinette," $2.85 million.
10. "Running With Scissors," $2.55 million.