I didn’t grow up with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood<\/em>\u00a0(or Sesame Street<\/em>, for that matter). We didn’t have cable yet when I was that age, and our TV antenna didn’t pick up the local PBS affiliate. Yet even without a personal connection or a sense of nostalgia, I had a lump in my throat for most of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?<\/em>, a lovely documentary about Fred Rogers and his gentle, monumental creation. Turns out the story of a fundamentally decent man who dedicated his life to helping children feel loved has universal appeal, whether you ever saw his show or not.<\/p>\n Director Morgan Neville, who’s mostly made music documentaries before (including the Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom<\/em>), has interviews with Rogers’ widow and sons, and with cast and crew members who worked with him for years. Besides clips from the show itself, there’s ample behind-the-scenes footage that shows Rogers being as kind and unflappable off the air as he was on. I love the anecdote shared by a prank-loving crew member who used to take pictures of his own bare butt when nobody was looking, as a surprise for whoever developed the film. On the man’s birthday, Rogers — who kept things G-rated himself but wasn’t too prudish to appreciate bawdier expressions of camaraderie — presented him with a poster-size blow-up of one of those moon shots.<\/p>\n Neville’s focus is on Mister Rogers the TV personality, so we don’t get a lot of insight into his childhood. Whatever made him the way he was (his own parents must have played a significant role), it’s not explored. But we see plenty of evidence of his consistent humility and goodness, his “abiding interest in children,” and his life’s philosophy: “You don’t have to do anything sensational for people to love you.” The film briefly addresses the urban legends — no, he wasn’t a military sniper; no, he wasn’t secretly gay; no, he wasn’t offended by parodies unless they mocked his philosophy — but it’s more interested in showing examples of the goodwill he engendered.<\/p>\n It also reveals the origins of many elements of the TV show (some of which might already be common knowledge, I suppose). It’s interesting to me that while Fred Rogers provided the voices for most of the characters in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Mister Rogers only ever appeared in the “real” neighborhood — he didn’t want young viewers to be confused about whether he was “make-believe.” By all accounts he was not. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?<\/em>\u00a0offers a chance to sit in a cool, dark room for 90 minutes and smile and weep over a man who inspires us to be better, and to be reminded of the goodness in the world. By the end, everyone onscreen is crying, too.<\/p>\n I didn’t grow up with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood\u00a0(or Sesame Street, for that matter). We didn’t have cable yet when I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":9718,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340,1381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: B+<\/span><\/h3>\n
1 hr., 34 min.; rated PG-13 for\u00a0some thematic elements and language<\/em><\/h5>\n
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