Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (PG)
I know Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, Gordon, Luis, Mr. Hooper and Maria but one name I didn’t know from the early days of Sesame Street was Joan Ganz Cooney. Cooney, one of the talking heads in this charming documentary, was one of the major forces in bringing Sesame Street to life with the goal of using the techniques that so successfully sold children candy and cereal and got everyone singing ad jingles to sell letters, numbers, reading and basic concepts. This documentary is heavy on the early years — how the show came together in 1969 and recruited its core cast and crew, the public’s reaction to the show and the show’s revolutionary approach to teaching and talking with children. We also get discussion of the real-life death of Will Lee in 1982 and how it was handled by working the death of his character Mr. Hooper into the show and the documentary touches on the 1990 death of Jim Henson. The discussion of the ruling principles for how the show reaches children is fascinating and, if you’ve watched the show in more recent seasons, you can see how the child-respecting approach and concept-teaching ideas continue to direct the show even decades later. I always love the story of people making something; Street Gang offers a smart, affectionate look at the creation of something so fundamental to the childhoods of Gen-Xers and beyond. B+
The Courier (PG-13)
Benedict Cumberbatch, Rachel Brosnahan.
And Merab Ninidze as Oleg Penkovsky, a Russian who passes secrets to the British and Americans in the early 1960s. Because Penkovsky is a high-profile official, the British send in an “amateur,” businessman Greville Wynne (Cumberbatch), who has already done some business in Eastern Europe. An ordinary salesman, looking to open a market in the Soviet Union, Greville ferries documents in and out of the Soviet Union until, of course, the Russians get suspicious.
The movie has a Bridge of Spies vibe but peppier, with Greville and Oleg forming a friendship even as they’re mostly just play-acting at “doing business” as cover for a passing of documents. Their work touches the Cuban Missile Crisis and is, apparently, based on a true story. It’s a suspenseful spy tale and Cumberbatch sells his “regular guy, extraordinary circumstances” situation. B Available for rent.
Golden Arm
Mary Holland, Betsy Sodaro.
Longtime best friends Melanie (Holland) and Danny (Sodaro) hit the road so Melanie can train for and compete in an arm wrestling competition in this lightweight but sweet movie that feels like a good Galentine’s Day watch. Melanie is a baker whose business could use an infusion of cash and who seems a little uncertain about the direction of her life after a recent divorce. Danny is an arm wrestling champ who loses her shot at that year’s national title after a fight with Brenda (Olivia Stambouliah), a take-no-prisoners competitor. This movie is part road-trip movie, part sports competition movie (complete with training montages) and part friendship movie that reminded me a bit of Bridesmaids with Holland’s Kristen Wiig energy and the way that female friendship is shown as a strong and resilient thing. B Available for purchase or rent.
Chadwick Boseman: Portrait of an Artist (TV-MA)
This 21-minute documentary looks at the work of Chadwick Boseman primarily through the lens of his Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom performance (which everybody assumed was going to win him a posthumous Oscar right up until the final moments of the award ceremony). Spike Lee, Danai Gurira, George C. Wolfe, Glynn Turman and other actors and directors who have worked with Boseman talk about his style and approach to a part. Perhaps most illuminating are the sequences with Viola Davis, Boseman’s Ma Rainey co-star and a fellow Oscar nominee for the film, who gives a window into not just how Boseman thought about his part but how all actors work to build a character, reading in part from his notes about the screenplay. It’s a short celebration of Boseman’s craft and it’s only available through, I think, this Saturday. B+ Available on Netflix.
Monster (R)
Kelvin Harrison Jr., Jeffrey Wright.
Also Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Ehle, Tim Blake Nelson, Nas, Rakim Mayers (known in his music career as A$AP Rocky) and a very young-looking John David Washington. According to Wikipedia, this movie, which
hit Netflix on May 7, premiered at the 2018 Sundance, and from a read of Washington’s Wikipedia page and late 2017 previews of the festival I get the sense that this movie was shot a good while ago. (Also credited on this film: Radha Blank, writer/director/star of the recent The 40-Year-Old Version, is listed as one of the screenwriters.) .
While not as strong as some of the cast’s subsequent work, this movie has some solid performances. Harrison plays Steve, a 16-year-old aspiring filmmaker who gets tangled up in charges related to a robbery in a neighborhood store that ends in the murder of the clerk. Steve is held in jail awaiting and throughout his trial and we see his shock and fear at being in this situation. Largely through flashbacks, we learn about Steve’s strong relationship with his parents (Hudson, Wright) and supportive teacher (Nelson) and his budding romance with a fellow student at his prestigious magnet school. Steve also has what he later calls an acquaintance but might be better described as a fascination with James King (Mayers), a guy from the neighborhood who eventually ends up as a co-defendant at Steve’s trial.
While Monster has good performances and an interesting story it also has a not-always-successful structural element in the form of a voiceover narration by Steve that frequently puts the setting in screenplay terms. The idea that the frightened, traumatized Steve might put his ordeal at the remove of watching it as though he were watching or shooting a movie makes sense (might even make more sense in a book, where we are more naturally in his head) but it frequently gets in the way and does an amount of “telling” when “showing” would have let the emotion of the story come through more. B- Available on Netflix.
WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
Way back before the pandemic, if you can remember that far, financial news was obsessed with the saga of WeWork in late 2019 and its failed IPO. This Hulu documentary offers a (frequently gleeful) history of WeWork’s rise and fall, packed full of more Silicon Valley nonsense than, well, Silicon Valley or any other industry parody. Stories of extraordinary excess and mission statements about changing the way people live that sound, as several people observe, like a cult are juxtaposed with people reminding us that “for God’s sake, they’re renting [bleeping] desks.” B Available on Hulu
NH Jewish Film Festival
The New Hampshire Jewish Film Festival kicks off (virtually) Wednesday, May 19, featuring 11 films and a short film presentation.
The short film program, which will be viewable for free, is available anytime between Wednesday, May 19, and Thursday, June 10 (the closing day of the festival), and will explore food themes such as “the secrets of cooking artisan pastrami, the origins of chocolate soda ‘egg creams,’ and the reason why cheeseburgers are forbidden by Jewish dietary laws,” according to an event press release. The movie available on the first day is When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a movie in German that is getting its U.S. release on May 21. This movie and all other festival movies are available for 72 hours after their festival date, starting at noon on that day. Buy a ticket for $12 to see one movie or get a $43 four-film pass or a $110 all-access pass. The festival will also feature post-film discussions with directors for five of the films and there will be a closing day event featuring a water cooler discussion in Red River Theatres’ virtual lobby.
See a schedule of the films and events and find more on purchasing tickets at nhjewishfilmfestival.com.
