REVIEW: Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street [2021]

We simply show it. You always wonder about the behind-the-scenes dynamics on projects in any medium that prove themselves profoundly revolutionary because you hope such great work wasn’t created on the backs of under-appreciated laborers for a totalitarian figure hording all the praise. You don’t want to find out about emotional and psychological warfare masked by smiling faces or a need to toe the company line so as not to get blacklisted from the industry—especially when the topic of discussion is as groundbreakingly inclusive as “Sesame Street” was (it first…

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REVIEW: Panique au village [A Town Called Panic] [2009]

“Your car is completely broken” Based on the animated series of the same name, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar‘s feature length Panique au village [A Town Called Panic] is a far cry from short five-minute skits. With that said, it’s easy to see how it was born from such a format considering the irreverent humor running rampant through its comedy of errors connected by the thinnest layer of glue. This is how they travel from a celebratory night of birthday festivities for Horse (Patar) to the undersea theft of brick…

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TIFF13 REVIEW: 2013 Short Cuts Canada Programmes

Programme 1 A far cry from the documentary short Joda—a visual letter to Jafar Panahi—that was included in the TIFF Short Cuts Canada Programme last year, graphic designer turned filmmaker Theodore Ushev’s Gloria Victoria is all about the visceral and aural capabilities of film without something as unnecessary as words. Full of sumptuous textured layers formed by sketch drawings, Russian Constructivist elements, what I believe were faces from Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and more, the rising crescendo of Shostakovich’s “Invasion” from Symphony No. 7 helps spur on an emotive war in…

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REVIEW: Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey [2011]

“Kevin comes alive through Elmo” I was a Jim Henson kid growing up in the 80s. The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and “The Jim Henson Hour” were staples in my household and I even made my parents take me to see The Witches theatrically at eight. But where I enjoyed the stories and fantastical places his characters took me, Kevin Clash took a shine to the full theatricality of this genius. As a high school kid in Baltimore he hand-sewed his own puppets after watching Henson explain how on TV, performed…

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