I wanted made-for-TV Christmas movie vibes without succumbing to the early Christmas fervor, because I adore autumn and Halloween. So I hunted around and found Autumn at Apple Hill, which checks so many boxes for this kind of movie:
✅ adorable small family business
✅ event planning
✅ charming small hometown
✅ workaholic Suit Man
✅ save the place!
✅ neighborhood holiday Halloween party
✅ developers hotel chain
✅ charming hotel
✅ guy she went to high school with
I watched the documentary, Jim Henson: Idea Man yesterday. I found it incredibly moving. I re-read Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist frequently and just before watching the documentary, I was listening to the audiobook. One of the sections in the book urges you to “climb your own family tree,” picking a creative whose work you admire and learning about the work that influenced them. I often struggle with this part of things, with choosing who has influenced me.
But watching the documentary, I distinctly saw the influence of Henson and his collaborators, especially writer Jerry Juhl and performer/director Frank Oz, on my own artistic and comedic sensibilities. Here’s an example:
This structure, wherein Fozzie gives Kermit instructions that Kermit then follows far too literally, with Kermit increasing in his manic energy and Fozzie increasing in his frustration, is the bedrock of at least 50% or maybe more of my bits as an improv performer. A parallel structure:
Both of these are Henson and Oz, both with Oz as the straight man and Henson as the manic player. I adore this dynamic.
So. Jim Henson. That’s the creative tree branch I’ll climb first.
The documentary itself is lovely. If you’re a Henson nerd (as I am), you’ll be delighted that there’s Sam and Friends and advertising footage that I don’t think you can find anywhere else. The narrative thrust is that Henson was a figure not unlike Lin Manuel Miranda’s interpretation of Alexander Hamilton, an artist with incredible drive and the sense that there would never be enough time to do everything he wanted to do, so he had to be doing work all the time.
It does a good job honoring the importance of Henson’s work while honestly portraying the cost this had to his family. His son Brian Henson talks about the very different experience of being his son at home versus being his colleague working on Labyrinth.
A lot of the time narratives about Henson talk about the critical failure of Labyrinth destroying his confidence, but this documentary did a great job emphasizing that even in the face of that failure, his work continued: in the years after Labyrinth he created Fraggle Rock, The Storyteller, and The Jim Henson Hour.
Overall, I think the documentary does a good job of showing that Henson was an ambitious artist with an incredible legacy and was, at the same time, just a human. I found it incredibly moving.
Here are a couple of fun links about Henson’s Kermit Car:
🍿 Watched UHF on the big screen today, when I’d only watched it at home before. Early on I seemed to be the only person laughing but maybe people were feeling shy or something because they laughed more as the movie went on. It’s a funny movie every time.
Can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. Surprised to find that Sean Penn was my favorite part of the film, but then, Jeff Spicoli is a spiritual big brother to Ted Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esquire, so it makes sense.
Another Nancy Meyers film. I really liked this. It made me cry. I think it was a little tricky because it seemed both to critique and support Anne Hathaway’s character’s intensity as an overnight CEO, but I guess that’s a good approach, not moralistic.
🍿 Watched It’s Complicated. Happy to have watched. It seemed to me mostly to be about how a manbaby doesn’t want to contribute to his new family and tries to get his ex-wife to take care of him now that she’s an empty nester and won’t need his help. Spoiler: it doesn’t work.
Kimberly Hirsh