2018 Rental Roundup 4: Won’t you be my Neighbor?, Anna and the Apocalypse, Mary Poppins Returns

Won’t You be my Neighbor?

With the Tom Hanks biopic soon to hit theaters, I needed to catch up with last year’s straight-up documentary featuring archival interviews and behind-the scenes records of Fred Rogers himself.

The documentary covers the life of Fred Rogers through his work. It uses clips from the show with cutting-room-floor footage, recordings of public events, archival interviews with Mister Rodgers himself, and newly filmed interviews with Rogers’ family, coworkers and guests. There are occasional glimpses of Rogers’ childhood, but only in service to explaining his work.

Won’t you be my Neighbor?’s brisk running time is by far its greatest drawback. An hour and a half is far too little space to explore any particular part of the documentary with a satisfying amount of depth. Even so, you’ll probably learn quite a bit about the history of the show’s production and how it intertwined with the man. You may even feel a familiar sensation of affirmation before it’s all done.

Watching this documentary is a strange experience for someone who grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It is at once rose-tinted nostalgia and reopening an old wound.

While Mr. Rogers lived to see — and cover on television — a lot of horrors, from presidential assassinations to 9/11, I’m glad he didn’t live to see the way things are today. That all the progress the world appeared to make was little more than a facade. And that the ripping away of that facade was so sudden as to appear to be a surge backward to those of us who hadn’t really understood that this country and this world never really left anything in the past.

But all the same, what is truly missing from our current time is a person with a loud and far-reaching microphone who can state in terms so casually sincere and straightforward that a human life has value by no other virtue than existing. That fostering security, honesty, joy and loving fellowships is everyone’s job. That the highest possible calling is connecting with another person and letting them connect with you.

Verdict: Go for it (4/5).

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Anna and the Apocalypse

I know you’ve seen a British zombie comedy before. And while it strains credibility to think it is a genre consisting entirely of Shaun of the Dead, I think we’d all be hard-pressed to name a different one.

For an indie flick compete for attention with a well-known and well-established hit right in its gearhouse, it needs to bring something new to the table. As such, Anna and the Apocalypse doubles down. First, it’s a Christmas movie, giving it a chance to be an appointment movie alongside Die Hard and Hollywood smash hit Jingle all the Way. Second, it’s a full-on musical.

While the lyricist brought their A+++ game for their rhymes and meter, the vast majority of the music takes the from of overproduced, autotuned pop songs. As such, it’s sometimes hard to make out the writer’s efforts. Very little of the comedy comes from the music, but when a song is there to be funny it breaks out of the movie’s stock genre and works better.

In the end we have a concept for a movie that has tons of potential, but only occasionally delivers. It, sadly, falls into the “it’s worth seeing once” pile.

Verdict: Rental (3/5).

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Mary Poppins Returns

Here is a conundrum: Was the original Mary Poppins as good or as deep as I remember it having not seen it in 20 or more years? Or if I were to watch it anew today, would I find it to be every bit as manic and adult-unsafe as its sequel?

The first movie did enjoy the bonus of having first-in-its-class, groundbreaking new special effects techniques that took the competition decades to match. It also had a deeper story of Poppins, Bert, the constable and nearly everyone else teaching the Banks parents how to be more attentive parents and find joy in their family.

There’s a sooooooomewhat similar setup for the sequel. Here, we have Jane and Michael Banks, all grown up. While Poppins is nannying Michael’s children, she is in truth indirectly pushing the original children toward solutions to their pressing problems. Michael is dealing with the death of his wife and the imminent foreclosure on the Banks’ family house (he inherited when his parents passed on). Meanwhile, Jane’s issue is that she’s single. cough

While there’s a lot of flashy new sequences and a lot of the narrative material is adapted from the 7 later “Mary Poppins” books that neither you nor I have read, the whole movie reels like a massive retread of the original. Jack literally exists only because we can’t have Bert anymore. But unlike Bert — a character who is just as mysterious as Poppins — we know Jack’s origin story, which doesn’t seem to allow him to play the Bert role of being in on all of Poppins’ bits ahead of time.

And that’s the adult frustration of watching a movie clearly intended for children and nobody else. You can see that it’s just the first movie all over again with none of the first’s advantages. Not the showing-off of some first-to-market technology, not the generational performing talents that were Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews, and not the played-out scenes of futilely trying to make sense of what’s going on (in the new movie, everybody just rolls with everything after the first few minutes, which saves time but fails to sell the bit).

Despite similar running times, Returns feels like it’s in a horrid rush. If your kids have short attention spans, this will keep them occupied with plenty of motion if they can sit through the first 10 minutes of establishing scenes.

Verdict: Flat (2/5).