Tag: Fred Rogers

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Film Features Film/TV

2018: The Year In Film

If there is a common theme among the best films of 2018, it’s wrenching order from chaos. From Regina Hall trying to hold both a restaurant and a marriage together to Lakeith Stanfield navigating the surreal moral minefields of late-stage capitalism, the best heroes positioned themselves as the last sane people in a world gone mad.

Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Freed

Worst Picture: Fifty Shades Freed

In her epic deconstruction of the final installment of everyone’s least favorite BDSM erotica trilogy, Eileen Townsend called Fifty Shades Freed a “sequence of intentionally crafted visual stimuli” that “bears coincidental aesthetic similarity to a movie … But I believe Fifty Shades Freed is nonetheless not a movie at all, but something far more pure — a pristine document of the market economy, a kind of visual after-image created as an incidental side effect of the exchange of large sums of capital…We literally cannot perceive the truest form of Fifty Shades Freed, because to do so, we would have to be money ourselves.”

Sunrise over the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Best Moviegoing Experience: 2001: A Space Odyssey in IMAX

The Malco Paradiso’s IMAX screen, which opened last December, has quickly earned the reputation as the best theater in the city. During the late-summer lull, a new digital transfer of 2001: A Space Odyssey got a week’s run to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Even if you’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s film a dozen times, seeing it the size it was intended to be seen is a revelation. Also, all lengthy blockbusters should come with an intermission.

Chuck, the canine star of Alpha

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Chuck, Alpha

Director Albert Hughes’ Alpha is a sleeper gem of 2018. The star of the story of how humans first domesticated dogs is a Czech Wolfhound named Chuck, who dominates the screen with a Lassie-level performance. Chuck and his co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee, spend large parts of the movie silently navigating the hazards of Paleolithic Eurasia, and the dog nails both stunts and the occasional comedy bits. Chuck is a movie star.

KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Best Scene: The Family Meeting, If Beale Street Could Talk

Most of Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel is an intimate, tragic love story between Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James). But for about 10 minutes, it becomes an ensemble dramedy, when Tish has to tell, first, her parents that she’s pregnant out of wedlock with a man who has just been arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, then his parents. If you pulled this scene out of the film, it would be the best short of 2018.

Rukus

Best Memphis Movie: Rukus

Brett Hanover’s documentary hybrid had been in production for more than a decade by the time it made its Mid South debut at Indie Memphis 2018. What started as a tribute to a friend who had committed suicide slowly evolved into a mystery story, an exploration into a secretive subculture, and a diary of growing up and accepting yourself.

Ethan Hawk stars as a priest in existential crisis in First Reformed.

Best Screenplay: First Reformed

Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader penned and directed this piercing drama about a small town priest, played by Ethan Hawk, who undergoes a crisis of faith when a man he is counseling commits suicide. 72-year-old Schrader is unafraid to ask the big questions: Why are we here? Is it all worth it? His elegantly constructed story ultimately looks to love for the answers, but the journey there is harrowing.

Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger in Black Panther

MVP: Michael B. Jordan

Michael B. Jordan played a book-burning fireman with a conscience in HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 adaptation and the heavyweight champion of the world in Creed II. But it was his turn as Killmonger in Black Panther that elevated the year’s biggest hit film to the realm of greatness. Director Ryan Coogler knew what he was doing when he put his frequent collaborator in the the villain slot opposite Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, making their personal rivalry into a battle for the soul of Wakanda.

Regina Hall in Support The Girls

Best Performance: (tie) Regina Hall, Support the Girls and Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade

In a year full of great performances, two really stood out. In Support the Girls, Regina Hall plays Lisa, a breastaurant manager having the worst day of her life, with a breathtaking combination of technique and empathy. We agonize with her over every difficult decision she has to make just to get through the day.

Elsie Fisher as Kayla in Eighth Grade

Elsie Fisher started work on Eighth Grade the week after the 13-year-old actually finished eighth grade. She carries the movie with one of the most raw, unaffected comic performances you will ever see.

Emma Stone takes aim in The Favourite.

Best Director: Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous efforts has been bracing, self-written satires, but he really came into his own with this kinda true story written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Everything clicks neatly into place in The Favourite. The central troika of Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as backstabbing cousins vying for her favor are all stunning. The editing, sound mix, and costume design are superb, and I’ve been thinking about the meaning of a particular lens choice for weeks.

Daniel Tiger (left) and Fred Rogers, star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

Best Documentary: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Once in a while, a movie comes along that fills a hole in your heart you didn’t know you had. Morgan Neville’s biography of Fred Rogers appears as effortlessly pure as the man himself. Mr. Rogers’ radical compassion is the exact opposite of Donald Trump’s performative cruelty, and Neville frames his subject as a kind of national surrogate father figure, urging us to remember the better angels of our nature.

Sorry To Bother You

Best Picture: Sorry to Bother You

Boots Riley’s debut film is something of a bookend to my best picture choice from last year, Jordan Peele’s Get Out. They’re both absurdist social satires aimed at American racism set in a slightly skewed version of the real word. But where Get Out is a finely tuned scare machine, Sorry to Bother You is a street riot of ideas and images. When his vision occasionally outruns his reach, Riley pulls it off through sheer audacity. No one better captured the Kafkaesque chaos, anger, and confusion of living in 2018.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Waiting on Judgment Day

CREDIT: The Squirrel Hill Cafe | Facebook

I lived in Pittsburgh for nine years. I know Squirrel Hill well. It’s a storied neighborhood of big sycamores, winding streets, and lovely old houses. It’s near Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, where I used to spend a couple evenings a week teaching writing to eager and not-so-eager freshmen. It’s close to WQED, where I used to work, editing Pittsburgh, the city’s magazine. Fred Rogers worked in the same building and lived nearby. I used to drink and eat at the Squirrel Hill Cafe, aka the “Squirrel Cage,” a great old neighborhood bar.

So when the news of a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue appeared on my laptop last Saturday morning, I didn’t have to imagine the scene; I could easily visualize it. The latest episode of the American Horror Story was playing out in one of my old haunts — just as it’s played out in Las Vegas, Charleston, Parkland, Sutherland, Texas, and 151 other American hometowns since 2016. Just as it also played out in Kentucky, last week, and in Florida, where a would-be assassin attempted to kill two former presidents and a host of other notable Democratic politicians with pipe bombs.

The Squirrel Hill Cafe | Facebook

America is infected with hate and violence, and the disease is spreading. Most presidents, when they have seen a divide in the country, have sought to heal it. This president sees the divide and seeks to exploit it. Polarization and rage have become the new normal, and it’s coming from the top down.

Can we change course? Yes, but it’s going to take dedication and commitment and time and unrelenting activism — the kind of citizen involvement that drove the civil rights movement and stopped the Vietnam War — the kind of activism that jams the gears of power and changes the country’s direction. As Patti Smith sang, “the people have the power.” We just have to tap it.

It’s easy to be cynical, but if you doubt the power of activism, I point you to Memphis, Tennessee, where in just the past couple of years, activists have stopped the city council from letting the Memphis Zoo take over Overton Park’s Greensward for parking; brought down Confederate statues in city parks; stopped the TVA from drilling wells that would tap our precious aquifer; joined with ACLU to stop the Memphis Police Department from surveilling citizen activists; and halted (as I write this) the city council from using tax-payer funds to promote three self-serving ordinances.

That doesn’t include the women’s marches, the Black Lives Matter march on the I-40 bridge, the marches against this administration’s inhumane immigration policies, and numerous other citizen-led movements. The pot has been stirred. The people are woke. And we are a week away from judgment day — or, better said, the first judgment day, for this will not be a quick change.

I do not for a minute allow myself to believe there will be a magical “blue wave” that will transform the country’s zeitgeist next Tuesday. I do believe there will be gratifying and surprising victories, just as I believe there will also be depressing and frustrating defeats. But I am hopeful the pendulum has swung as far as it can toward “nationalism” and the open promotion of ethnic hatred and divisiveness. And I am hopeful the plague of angry male white supremacists wreaking havoc and terror on innocent Americans on a weekly basis can be stopped, or at least forced back into the sewers from whence it came.

After the attack on the Tree of Life, the Pittsburgh Muslim community immediately offered aid and comfort to their Jewish brothers and sisters. That is America at its best, and it’s who we can be if we resist seeing each other as “globalists” or “nationalists” or “bad hombres” or “Fake News” purveyors or “Pocahontas” or whatever other hate-boxes the president seeks to put us into. I believe Americans are better than the president thinks we are. We just have to show it. Starting next week.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

I’ve started to become suspicious when someone points and says “This is what America is all about” or “this is not America.” America is many things. Americans wrote: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Americans also owned slaves — and later, freed slaves. America is a nation of immigrants that erected a statue welcoming the tired, poor, and hungry masses yearning to breathe free. Americans have also looked down on, at various times, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Cuban, and Hispanic immigrants. America is, as the bad term paper cliche goes, a land of contrasts. Because America is made up of humans, who are themselves a mixture of good and bad, the American identity is always a tug of war between extremes.

From 1968 to 2002, one of our perpetual tug of war’s strongest pullers for good was Fred Rogers. He was a Presbyterian minister from Pennsylvania who fell in love with television, and saw in it a potential to do good on a vast scale. His TV show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, started on a Pittsburgh area educational television station in 1968 and became PBS’ first hit. As one producer puts it early in the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Mr. Rogers’ show was the exact opposite of everything conventional wisdom held was “good TV.” The sets were cheap, the puppets nowhere near Muppet levels of sophistication, and there were often long stretches of silence. And yet it became a cultural touchstone, thanks to the steady magnetism and stalwart humanity of its host.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is helmed by Morgan Neville, one of the finest documentary directors working today. He won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2013 with his film about backup singers, 20 Feet From Stardom, and last year he shared an Emmy with Memphian Robert Gordon for Best of Enemies, the story of the epic political debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 election season. (Neville’s new film also boasts a Memphis connection: composer Jonathan Kirkscey provides the score.)

Daniel Tiger (left) and Fred Rogers, star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

Documentaries are always judged first by their subject, and Neville has a knack for choosing exactly the right ones. A master of documentary structure, he makes the case for Rogers’ continued relevance right out of the gate. Launched in 1968, during the most violent period of the Vietnam War and the rash of political assassinations in America, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood never shied away from wrestling with tough questions. During its very first week, there was a storyline where King Friday XIII wanted to build a wall around the Neighborhood of Make Believe because he was frightened of change. After Robert Kennedy was killed, Rogers did a week of shows teaching children how to deal with death.

The most electrifying moment in the film comes when Rogers is asked to testify before a Congressional committee hearing debating the future of PBS. His unpretentious eloquence brings everyone in the room to tears, including the senator who is there to grill him for wasting $20 million of taxpayer money on kid’s shows. Through it all, Rogers’ uncanny talent for connecting onscreen shines through as he makes friends with everyone from cellist Yo Yo Ma to KoKo the gorilla, who signs “friend” and “love” at the TV host.

You can tell a lot about a person by the quality of his enemies. Rogers was a lifelong Republican who advocated for an “open, accepting Christianity.” During the early years of Fox News, Rogers was routinely attacked as a decadent influence whose doctrine of radical compassion had raised a generation of soft liberals. When he died, his funeral was picketed by the notorious hate group Westboro Baptist Church. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is what you would call a warts and all documentary — or at least, you would call it that if its subject had any real warts to expose. At various points during the film, the people who knew and worked with Rogers say that he was exactly the same person offscreen as onscreen, thoroughly kind and empathetic to a fault. The worst thing Neville can come up with in the interest of balance is that, toward the end of his TV career, he started to identify more with the grumpy King Friday XIII than with the meek Daniel Tiger. I guess power really does get to everyone eventually.