EIGHTH GRADE

I'd just about forgotten eighth grade, but Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade is here to bring it all back. 

Eighth grade didn't have a major impact on me.  I can't recall the names of my teachers, or who sat next to me in homeroom. All I remember was that one year I'm fingerpainting and then the next I'm supposed to speak French while dismantling a Chevy. 

Burnham's sincere little movie  doesn't quite capture the culture shock of "middle school," or as it was known in my town, "junior high school," but he does a fair job recreating that uncomfortable time when you're too young to make your own decisions, but too old to be treated like a child. It's a time when going to the shopping mall seems like a very big deal.

Kayla (Elsie Fisher) is the sort of frumpy, pimply kid we all remember, except nowadays she can post YouTube videos of herself offering advice to other kids. Her topics include, "Getting Yourself Out There," and "Be Yourself," and "Growing Up." She tries hard, but no one is watching her videos.

She has no friends, and lives alone with her weird dad. Worse, she'll soon be entering high school, which seems ominous.

To add some drama, she has a little crush on a kid named Aiden. He's the sort of lanky goof who gets voted "Best Eyes" by the yearbook committee, but if the eyes are the mirror of the soul, this kid aint got one.

She eventually works up the nerve to talk to him. To show how times have changed, it's during a session where the kids are being trained on how to react when a school sniper  starts shooting (we used to have fire drills, but now they have sniper drills). Sadly, Aiden's an arrogant pig whose brain has already been rotted by porn and video games.

In short order, Kayla is soon practicing her oral sex skills on a banana, and researching the topic on the internet. Fortunately, this movie is too smart to send her down that route for too long. Eighth Grade isn't afraid of cheap jokes, but it has other, more enriching themes to explore.

It's also fortunate that the movie isn't drenched in period music. We see pictures of Justin Bieber, but, thankfully, we don't have to hear him. Burnham is tasteful, and doesn't go for excess. His talent is for keeping us slightly off balance - when it seems Kayla might be getting somewhere, things go awry. He allows himself only one heavy-handed moment, when Kayla cuts her thumb on her phone. We get it: today's kids are giving their blood to social media.

One of the clever touches of the movie is that the kids don't have much personality. They seem like real kids, not the wisecracking little jerks we usually see in movies. If Eighth Grade is accurate, and there's nothing to make me think it's not, the eighth graders of today are more or less the same nerds and cretins from previous generations. They just have more gadgets, which hasn't made them any smarter. They certainly aren't any kinder.

Ultimately, it's a movie that does encourage kids to be themselves, to not worry so much, and to avoid those weird older boys who try to get you to play truth or dare in the backseat of daddy's car. Kids, apparently, haven't changed all that much, and neither have the tips for survival.

As Kayla, Elsie Fisher is quite good. She goes from being a shrill, self-pitying teen to someone who earns our sympathy. Also deserving a mention is Jake Ryan as Gabe, a nervous boy who invites Kayla to his house for chicken McNuggets, and Josh Hamilton as Kayla's well-meaning father. 

Then there's Luke Prael as Aiden. I may not recall much of eighth grade but I remember what the shitheads were like, and Prael has it down pat.

SUMMER OF '84...

 

Quiz time: When is an '80s horror  knockoff not an '80s horror knockoff?

Answer: When it owes more to Hitchock's Rear Window than, say, My Bloody Valentine, which is the case with Summer of '84, a likeable but surprisingly lightweight feature currently enjoying limited screenings at select indy houses.

The horror films of the 1980s have an allure for certain people. Some of those films were pretty good, though even the most devoted of fans would admit there were more bad ones than good ones. The eleven producers, three directors and two screenwriters  responsible for Summer of 84 mined the usual tropes of the era; they came up with something resembling Stand By Me, if the boys were being stalked by John Wayne Gacy. 
 
Summer of '84 never feels fresh or vital, though it attempts some reverence for the old movies it wants to ape. There are references to Ronald Reagan, and Gremlins, and a moody synth score that is quite effective. However, something is missing. The horror movies of the 1980s were vapid and brutal, with scantily clad women running for their lives and knife wielding villains who popped up like Jack-in-the-box clowns. This movie, though aiming to be a tribute to that '80s style, feels  more like a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mystery. It is "horror light," as if the filmmakers feared an NC-17 rating.

As predictable as a Thanksgiving dinner, the movie ticks all the familiar boxes: a 15 year-old boy named Davey  (Grahem Verchere) suspects his neighbor of being a serial killer. Davey enlists his buddies (a fat one, a nerd, a hood from a broken home) into staking the guy out. That is, when they aren't too busy looking at pornographic magazines and complaining about their sad home lives. 

The story is set in suburban Oregon, where a dozen or more teen boys have disappeared. David thinks his neighbor, a loner cop who keeps odd hours and always seems to be digging ditches in his back yard, is "The Cape May Slayer." David also dreams of being "the next Spielberg," has a crush on the girl across the street, and is generally fascinated by aliens and government scandals.

The neighbor in question (Rich Sommer) is a bit oafish, but has the kind of open and ready smile that  usually means the body of a young boy is buried in his basement. Davey and his gang are soon going through the guy's trash and following him on his nightly jaunts.

They quartet of detective wannabes think they have enough evidence to bust the shady cop, but Davey's disapproving parents shut down the investigation. Davey is persistent, though. This neighbor is just too creepy to ignore. 

What can't be ignored is the movie's main flaw. It's just not scary. 

The movie tips its hand too early, lets us know who the killer is halfway through, and then snores the rest of the way. Sommers is fine as the mysterious cop, and during the movie's first half you're really not sure what he's all about. The kids are all convincing, and Caleb Emery is especially watchable as an insecure boy whose mother is drinking herself into oblivion. Yet, the constant cheap jokes about masturbation, sperm, and pregnancy, don't add up to one laugh. They weren't funny in the '80s; they aren't much good now.

The Summer of '84  even resorts to the old '80s style of ending on a down note, as if that will add some sort of gravitas after 90 minutes of boob jokes.

Being an homage to splatter films, you'd expect some splatter, or at least the threat of some. But there isn't enough blood here to satisfy even the most anorexic of vampires. That's a shame.

Watching this movie, you realize why the '80s movies were so fun. They didn't want your love or approval. They were just there to pummel you. Summer of '84 wants you to pat it on the head.

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

Satire isn't what it used to be. 

Sorry To Bother You,  the debut feature from Boots Riley, won't go down as classic satire, but in an era full of super heroes and giant sharks, we ought to appreciate any film that is remotely intelligent.

Granted, this one goes from satire, to weird, to silly, with maybe one too many story-lines. There's also an ending coda that feels shoved in at the last moment. 

Still, it all sort of works.

Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is a glum young man in Oakland. He has a nice, artsy girlfriend, and he just got a new job with a telemarketing company. Yet, he's a depressed sort. He worries about the sun blowing up, and how death and suffering is inevitable, and how no one will remember him; basically, the same existential gripes that bothered Woody Allen 40 years ago. These highfalutin concerns prevent Cassius from worrying about more concrete matters, like paying the rent on his garage apartment.

Then, quicker than you can say Putney Swope, success finds him. An older telemarketer (Danny Glover) suggests Cassius make his cold calls by using a "white" voice. Cassius balks at first, but eventually reveals a sick, nasal voice that charms his telephone customers out of their boots. (The white voice is provided by comic David Cross.)

Using the magic of his white voice, Cassius rises up the ranks. Even as his co-workers threaten to go on strike for better wages, he is bumped upstairs to be a "power caller," a semi-mythical position that requires him to wear a suit (even though he's just making calls). His promotion involves selling slave labor to international markets. From there, things get strange.

Though critics have  tried to describe the style and reach of Sorry To Bother You by recalling the works of Terry Gilliam, the comparison is weak. Gilliam's movies were, sometimes to their own detriment, truly dreamlike and huge in scope; Riley's  imagination is compact, coiled. He's leaner and meaner than Gilliam could ever be.

But don't think too hard during Sorry To Bother You. Even when logic is defied, just relax. It's not often that a director makes a dark comedy about the evils of corporate America,  and then churns up an apocalyptic ending worthy of The Island of Dr Moreau, so just go with it.

There are some nice touches along the way. I liked how Cassius' girlfriend wears earrings that say "Murder Murder Murder, Kill Kill Kill," and the way Cassius' old high school  buddies still wear their old football uniforms and spend their nights scrimmaging in parking lots. Time stands still for them, even if Cassius' new life is out of control.

There's also a stunning scene where Cassius attends a party thrown by a wealthy white CEO. He's coaxed into rapping, which isn't his strong suite. Frustrated, he starts spewing rhythmic racial slurs; the white guests merely repeat what he says, sing-song style. 

Appropriating someone else's culture? The white people in this movie are too rich and oblivious to care about such matters. A running theme in the movie is that the things held dear by African Americans - music, fashion, graffiti, street slang - is akin to playing in the sandbox while corporate (ie. white) America concocts increasingly sinister ways to keep workers oppressed. Beware of the wealthy, we're told, for they don't care about anything but money. To them, you're nothing but a dumb animal.

The script, also by Riley, is quite clever at times, though there are moments when it veers into the sophomoric. The villains here are too cartoonish to be taken seriously. What keeps it from being a film school trifle is a strong cast, some fine, inspired work by cinematographer Doug Emmett, and Riley's determination to tell the story he wants to tell. There are also a couple of scenes that are just plain funny.

The alternate Oakland created for the movie is a mix of dank, burned out edifices and glamorous high rises. Even the dive bars have VIP lounges. This is what makes the film's tone so unique. Though the tale grows strange, we're never too far removed from the sun-blasted, dirty sidewalks of the city. Perhaps Riley has invented a new genre: urban surrealism.

In Riley's world, violence is entertainment. Cassius' girlfriend allows people to throw water balloons at her as part of an art project, and Cassius acquires YouTube fame when someone pegs a soda can at his head. A popular TV show watched by Cassius and his friends involves guests being held and beaten in front of a live audience. "I like it," says Glover. "It makes me feel warm and fuzzy." 

There's nothing warm and fuzzy about Riley's movie, though. His message seems to be this: Mocking the way white people talk doesn't make up for the fact that slavery still exists. 

When was the last time a summer movie offered such a thorny idea?

THE MEG

Enough with sharks, already.  The Meg is the latest attempt to cash in on the Jaws craze that was lots of fun 40 years ago, but feels dead in the water by now.

The only thing that's amusing about this new movie is in the way it can be used as an example of American cinema's horrendous decay. Jaws was about three men on a little boat against a giant shark. The Meg has a cast of at least two dozen, without a single interesting character to choose from. Even the shark, though enormous, is a bit of a dullard.

The Meg isn't even fun to look at, since most of it takes place in the deepest parts of the ocean and in complete darkness. There's not a single glow-fish to break the monotony.

Still, big budget summer movies say something about our culture, so let's examine this one, eh?

Rainn Wilson plays a billionaire who has funded a kind of submarine/laboratory to study deep sea life off the coast of China. On the first mission, however, the gallant marine biologists are attacked by something big and nasty. They're stuck down there while the big fish circles. It's up to Jason Statham to save everybody. He's living in Thailand, having been declared unfit after a previous underwater experience where he claimed to see something big and ugly (and no one believed him).

Anyway, when Statham learns his ex-wife is one of the trapped scientists, he suits up. He does his bit, saves her, and we finally meet the prehistoric megalodon shark that has been causing so much trouble. 

Eventually, after what feels like three hours, Statham goes after this 90-foot beast armed with nothing but a knife and a spear gun. If Statham was more than a musclebound meathead, and the shark had any personality, we might care. But we don't.

"I want to make this thing bleed," Statham says at one point. He hisses his lines like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. That is, when he's not being all flirtatious with the women onboard, especially Bingbing Li, a 45 year-old Chinese actress who sounds like she's in pre-school.

Statham looks like you could break bottles over his head all day and he wouldn't blink. At one point Wilson says of Statham, "He looks heroic, and he walks fast, but he seems to have a negative attitude." This, I imagine, was in the script's description of the character. 

The script, by the way, was written by three people. How it took three adult humans to come up with some of the dumbest dialog this side of Who's the Boss? is a real mystery.

I did like the sleek, undersea gliders that are used to battle the shark; as Statham and Bingbing strap in and speed along, the movie, for a brief moment, has a bit of a Buck Rogers feel. And I like how the megalodon's fin seems old and weathered, as if the creature is as old as the sea itself. But these minor touches aren't enough to save The Meg from being a total disaster. 

Director Jon Turteltaub is an old hand in the business, having made his name in the 1990s with a series of romantic comedies. He might've been better off if the shark had fallen into a coma, and was nursed back to health by Sandra Bullock.

Warner Bros distributed this bore, but the The Meg is a Chinese co-production aimed squarely at the highly coveted Asian market. This explains the presence of  Bingbing Li, and why the only trailer shown before The Meg was for a new rom-com called Crazy Rich Asians. Apparently, The Meg is based on a novel, has been 20 years in the making, and it cost 150-million bucks. Still, for all of the time and money that went into it, and with two powerful countries working on it, The Meg is the sort of movie where you can predict what each character will say five minutes before he says it. This moronic style, I guess, is to make sub-titles easier for international audiences. 

Most grating is that The Meg feels like a movie assembled by a committee. We can almost envision the board meeting where it was decided that the cast would have a certain number of Americans, a certain number of Asians, at least one character who would seem vaguely lesbian, one easily frightened black dude, and plenty of cuddly Chinese children. And the women would be as tough and determined as the men, and before anyone goes into the sea to face the shark, there's a mandatory five minute scene where they hug a loved one. And if The Rock wasn't available to fight the shark, get the next guy in line. This is connect-the-dots, color-by-numbers moviemaking at its most cynical.

However, before signing off on this piece of expensive junk, I have to say that the audience I was in seemed to have a good time. Most of the customers were little girls with their mothers. They laughed at the cornball jokes, and seemed mildly intimidated by the megalodon. They liked Rainn Wilson, but their real favorite was a little dog named Pippin who managed to escape the jaws of doom. 

I was happy for these kids. The Meg is nothing memorable, but these kids had a nice summer afternoon in an air conditioned theater, watching a monster try to eat some people. I remember when that was all anybody needed. 

THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS

In 1980 a young New York man enrolls at a community college. On his first day, he's met by people who seem to know him. But despite a lot of hugs, he doesn't know them.

That's the beginning of Three Identical Strangers, an excellent documentary from director Tim Wardle. The feeling is, as many in the movie will suggest, like a Disney tale  where long lost siblings meet.

The young man, Robert Shafron, eventually learns that he's an exact lookalike for another young man, Eddie Galland, who had been at the school a year earlier. A meeting is quickly arranged. They realize they are identical twins, put up for adoption years earlier by the same agency. One landed in an upper class family. The other in a middle class family. They are thrilled to meet each other. The story makes the local newspapers.

But wait, there's more.

A third young man, David Kellman, living nearby, reads the story. He also resembles  Shafron and Galland. Kellman arranges a meeting. Triplets! All put up for adoption and now reunited!

The story blows up nationwide. The trio achieve a cheesy kind of celebrity, the sort that gets them in PEOPLE magazine. Then they're on the Phil Donahue show, and other TV programs long since forgotten. They even get a cameo in a Madonna movie. They begin to dress alike, and get an apartment in Soho. They open a restaurant called "Triplets,"  and, as far as we can tell, spend the next several years getting drunk, partying, and smoking Marlboro cigs. They all find nice women and settle down. It's gearing up for a glorious ending.

But then, as happens with most documentaries, the story turned grim. The triplets eventually learn they were part of an  experiment where a behavioral psychologist with a distinctly German name was in cahoots with the adoption agency. The idea was to split up a number of twins and triplets, just to see how growing up under different circumstances would impact them. "It was Nazi stuff," says Shafron. "We were lab rats," says Kellman.

The trio  tracked down their birth mother but were disappointed. She was, as Kellman says, "a prom night knock up." Kellman reveals she had a drinking problem, and ads, rather vaguely, that she has dealt with "major mental health issues."

It turns out the brothers also had issues with depression and excessive drinking. As infants they used to bang their heads against walls. As  teens, they were troubled, and sometimes under psychiatric care. Was it separation anxiety? Or was it a genetic link to their troubled biological mother?

The questions posed by this film may leave you slightly perplexed, especially if you're a believer in free will. The boys, though they grew up in different economic environs, enjoyed similar high school careers and have many of the same mannerisms. Shafron, who grew up in an affluent neighborhood with a busy doctor dad is not much different on the surface than Kellman, whose father was a working class, cigar smoking bubula. That two of them attended the same community college is telling, too.

Genes, the movie suggests, dictate your future whether you like it or not. You might make some of your own decisions along the way, but your personality, and possibly your destiny, is mostly tied into your genes. In Three Identical Strangers, the old argument about nature versus nurture ends in a close but unanimous decision: Nature wins.

Nurturing gets a nod, too. When one of the triplets comes to a bad end, a friend says it was because he wasn't nurtured. Had the triplets been together all through their childhood, the friend says, they might have nurtured each other, or something. All I know is, the movie started out like a Disney flick, and ended up like an old Ira Levin novel. All that was missing was a Hitler clone in Brazil.

Wardle  even tracks down the German secretary of the psychologist behind the experiment. She's a funny old trooper, describing her old boss as sexy and charming. But damn if she doesn't seem to be smirking about the whole thing. Oh vell, ve live and ve learn. Eh?

The fellow who  organized the twin separation project is long dead, but his papers are at Yale, under lock and key until 2066. The secretary tells us that her boss  thought he was doing a good thing, answering an important question about nature versus nurture. So why all the secrecy, Herr Doktor?

SPOTLIGHT ON: PRE-CODE CLASSICS

"Pre-Code Hollywood" refers to a five year stretch in the American film industry between the advent of sound pictures in 1929 and the arrival of the Motion Picture Production Code, popularly known as the "Hays Code," in mid-1934. With these new and rigid censorship guidelines in place,  the so-called "adult" material previously enjoyed by viewers - anything from a sexual innuendo to outright violence - was promptly banned. Hey, the censors meant well. They didn't want our impressionable minds corrupted by the evils of moviedom.

This month The Film Detective presents a special "Pre-Code Playlist" with 16 titles from the 1929-1934 period. You may watch these features - many are new to the app - and wonder what the fuss was all about. 

You'll also be delightfully entertained. The list includes: 

The Great Gabbo (1929)

 Ventriloquists and their dummies have provided screenwriters with an unending source of drama since the beginning of the movie business. Perhaps the earliest example was The Great Gabbo, a strange melodrama starring Erich von Stroheim. Disowned by MGM after several of his directorial features had gone over budget, von Stroheim found himself hired out as an actor for poverty row studios. Director James Cruze, whose own career was soon to crash, was the first to use von Stroheim during this period. The result is an old fashioned show business fable, where an arrogant star mistreats those around him only to end up alone and destitute. The premise sounds dusty, but it's worth watching for von Stroheim's paranoid rages and some truly bizarre musical numbers. (Von Stroheim is also alleged to have directed a few of his own scenes here.)

As Gabbo, an eccentric stage performer who best communicates through a wooden dummy named Otto, von Stroheim created the archetype for all nutty ventriloquists to come. If you can look beyond the cheap appearance of this feature, and can endure a few too many dance sequences, you'll see that it's a showcase for one of von Stroheim's most poignant performances. The story - written by noted playwright Ben Hecht - actually mirrors what was going in von Stroheim's life at the time.

The film also stars Betty Compson as Gabbo's assistant. At one time a very popular performer, Compson was married  to director Cruze. His career downfall left her in a financial mess that took years to resolve. Here, she is quite touching as Mary, the well-meaning girl who tries to see the best in Gabbo despite his madness.

According to von Stroheim biographer Richard Koszarski, von Stroheim enjoyed the role of Gabbo so much that he would bring Otto the dummy home with him after shooting. Years later, von Stroheim hoped to do a remake, only to learn that the story rights had been purchased by famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. 

East of Borneo (1931) 

The jungle was a favorite location for movies during the Pre-Code era. Where else could people enact the savage behavior that the censors would find so objectionable? In this quickie from Universal, Rose Hobart is searching for her missing husband, a doctor who mysteriously vanished years earlier. She finds him in the secluded village of Maradu, drunk as a skunk but administering to a creepy character called Prince Hashim (It's actually  Georges Revenant, dressed up like Chandu the magician and yammering about his Aryan ancestors). As the jungle fates would have it, the prince finds Hobart quite enticing. This weird triangle plays out amidst the usual assortment of exotic critters, including tigers, a giant snake, and an armada of crocodiles. There's also a menacing volcano not far from Hashim's castle. Can Hobart get her husband back before Maradu is buried under lava?

This feature was produced by Carl Laemmle Jr, son of Universal Studio chief Carl Laemmle. By the way, much of the East of Borneo crew had worked on Universal's Spanish version of Dracula, including the saucy Lupita Tovar.)

Jungle Bride (1933) 

Here's another Pre-Code adventure with a jungle setting. This one is about a young woman (Anita Page) who journeys to South America  to help clear her brother of a murder charge. She and her two friends end up stranded on an island where they run into more trouble, most of it involving naughty chimpanzees.

There are plenty of scenes where Page's dress slips down to reveal some healthy 1930s flesh; she also swoons convincingly in the arms of hunky co-star Charles Starrett. Thankfully, the censors would soon be on the lookout for such filth!

The script is by Leah Baird, who had been a popular actress during the early days of silent movies. Meanwhile, co-director Harry O. Hoyt was behind the camera for one of the great silent epics, The Lost World (1925). 

A Shriek in the Night (1933) 

Lyle Talbot and Ginger Rogers star as rival newspaper reporters trying to solve a series of murders in a luxury apartment building. This is the sort of romantic thriller that was quite common during the Pre-Code years, with plenty of shadowy figures creeping along the walls, bodies plummeting  from penthouse windows, and wisecracking newsroom dialog. The screenplay is by Francis Hyland, known as the first female comedy writer ever hired by Universal Studios.

Ginger Rogers was only 22 when she appeared in this feature  for Allied Pictures, but was already a veteran of more than 20 movies. 

The Kennel Murder Case (1933) 

"A beautiful debutante trapped in a house of hate...A glamorous stage star keeping a tryst with a "dead" man...A corpse walking upstairs to commit suicide...A wounded dog that knew the solution to the most baffling mystery ever tackled by the most fascinating sleuth since Sherlock Holmes! It's Guess-Proof!"

From Warner Bros comes a whimsical murder mystery starring William Powell  as debonair detective Philo Vance.  Though it was the last time Powell would portray Vance, many consider this the best of the series. And why not? Starring along with Powell is Mary Astor, who less than a decade later would appear memorably in The Maltese Falcon and win an Oscar for her supporting role in The Great Lie. The screenplay was by Oscar winner Robert N. Lee (Little Caesar) and the direction was by Michael Curtiz, already an old hand in the business, having directed his first short in 1914. He'd go on to direct such iconic films as The Adventures of Robin Hood,  Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca, and Mildred Pierce. In other words, this is one Pre-Code entry that comes with an impeccable pedigree. 

Speaking of pedigrees, Asta the dog does his share of scene stealing in The Kennel Murder Case. This same wire-haired terrier would star with Powell  and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man series for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 

***

Other titles in our Pre-Code Playlist include: Woman to Woman (1929), Reaching for the Moon (1930), Kept Husbands (1931) Vampire Bat (1933), and Palooka (1934), plus the following features never before shown on our app: Dixiana (1930),  High Gear (1933), Big News (1929), Millie (1931), The Big Chance (1933),  and Glorifying the American Girl (1929).

Learn more about The Film Detective and our sensational classic movie app by visiting  thefilmdetective.tv 

It's where classic entertainment is reborn!

WON'T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?

I'll admit it. Won't You Be My Neighbor? left me in a puddle.

Of course, I'd never say anything bad about a film honoring the great Fred Rogers, a fellow who took on the world with nothing but a few puppets and a cozy sweater

But why did it affect me in such a profound way?

Part of it had to do with the ridiculous trailers shown in the theater before the feature. It was almost unbearable - endless noise from the screen, whirling visual effects - as one bad ass after another strutted and primped and flexed and destroyed the enemy. There was Tom Cruise, and Denzel Washington, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and various others, all mugging for the camera, hanging from skyscrapers, speeding along on motorcycles, cracking sitcom jokes as they stomped their enemies into mulch.

How stupid and empty they all seemed compared to Mr. Rogers, a man whose yearly budget at PBS wouldn't have paid for the unearthly shine on Tom Cruise's front teeth.

Mr Rogers' Neighborhood ran in one form or another from 1963 to 2001, though Rogers had been working in children's television since the antediluvian days of 1953. While others were smashing each other with pies, he kept children spellbound with simple truths and the sort of kindness that can't be faked. For his efforts, he was lampooned by comics and even chastised by critics who blamed him for a generation of spoiled brats.

Though Rogers  appeared to be an educational TV juggernaut, he often worried that the public wasn't absorbing his ideas. Kids, he feared, would simply grow up to be mindless consumers like their parents. A registered Republican and ordained minister, he sometimes felt out of step with his  times. Still, he forged ahead. Love was the answer to most problems, he proclaimed, and you don't have to do anything spectacular in order to be loved. That was his platform, and on that he was unshakeable.

At times he was groundbreaking. When Rogers heard that African Americans weren't being allowed to swim in public pools, he promptly hired a black actor to take part in a scene where they sat together and dipped their feet in a plastic kids' pool. 

At the end of the segment, Rogers even helped his new friend dry his feet with a towel. It looked odd, but it was probably a reference to the bible, where there happens to be an awful lot of foot washing.

This documentary by Morgan Neville - a filmmaker who gets better every year - soars like a balloon on a sunny morning. Most memorable are the scenes that show Rogers working his special magic on people. And it wasn't just children. There's  powerful footage of Rogers speaking before a committee of grouchy politicians who don't want to grant PBS another year of grant money. After Rogers recites the lyrics to one of his songs, a visibly moved senator says quietly, "That's wonderful. I think you just got your money."

It's also interesting to see the reaction of late night TV host Tom Snyder when Rogers gets in close with his tiger puppet. In a gentle voice, Rogers reminds the unctuous Snyder that the part of him that existed as a little boy is still living somewhere inside him. Snyder fidgets; we can't tell if he's about to cry or reach for a drink.

Along the way we meet Rogers' wife, his grown sons, and various people who worked with him. They all appear grateful to have known him, and share stories of his genius, his intuition, his determination. How did the sons of Fred Rogers turn out? They seem like fine gentlemen.

Naturally, many of us remember the way comedians used Rogers as a target. After learning of Rogers' dedication to his cause, we wince at the old routines by Eddie Murphy and Martin Short. We almost wish they hadn't happened.

It's not a total hagiography, though. Neville suggests that Rogers grew a trifle bombastic in his older years, and we also learn of Rogers' one rousing failure: an ill-advised attempt to create a show for adults.

The film's strangest scene - and proof that Rogers neither knew nor cared how he looked on camera - involves his meeting with Koko, the gorilla who learned sign language. It's startling to see the enormous Koko cradling Rogers like a baby.

Even gorillas loved this guy.