Joey’s Home Movies For the Week of July 5th – ‘Street Gang’ is a Loving Look at ‘Sesame Street’

Welcome back to my Home Movies! Today, we don’t have a big slate hitting shelves, but one title very much stands out. This week, that’s the documentary Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street. There’s also two new Criterion Collection releases, including Bringing Up Baby, but it’s a top-heavy lineup, to be sure. Read on for more…

Joey’s Top Pick

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street

I loved Sesame Street as a young boy and I love The Muppets. So, this documentary was right up my alley. Still, Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street is a superior doc. Entertaining, emotional, and an overall moving experience, it’s truly something not to miss. Some of the behind the scenes clips from the show are worth the price of admission alone. Here is a bit from my rave review out of the Sundance Film Festival:

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street is going to strike a chord for Sesame Street fans. What the doc showcases so well is why someone would love the show. Not only do we see some of the classic moments from the broadcasts, but we see behind the scenes. That’s one of the spots where it shines, too, as the Muppets truly were magic, from the puppets to the puppeteers on down.

Also Available This Week

007: For Our Eyes Only

Defending Jacob: The Complete First Season (TV)

The Magic School Bus Rides Again: Season One (TV)

Space Jam (4K)

Criterion Corner

Bringing Up Baby

From The Criterion Collection: “Screwball sparks fly when Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn let loose in one of the fastest and funniest films ever made—a high-wire act of invention that took American screen comedy to new heights of absurdity. Hoping to procure a million-dollar endowment from a wealthy society matron for his museum, a hapless paleontologist (Grant) finds himself entangled with a dizzy heiress (Hepburn) as the manic misadventures pile up—a missing dinosaur bone, a leopard on the loose, and plenty of gender-bending mayhem among them. Bringing Up Baby’s sophisticated dialogue, spontaneous performances, and giddy innuendo come together in a whirlwind of comic chaos captured with lightning-in-a-bottle brio by director Howard Hawks.”

Mirror

From The Criterion Collection: “A subtly ravishing passage through the halls of time and memory, this sublime reflection on twentieth-century Russian history by Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker) is as much a poem composed in images, or a hypnagogic hallucination, as it is a work of cinema. In a richly textured collage of varying film stocks and newsreel footage, the recollections of a dying poet flash before our eyes, his dreams mingling with scenes of childhood, wartime, and marriage, all imbued with the mystical power of a trance. Largely dismissed by Soviet critics on its release because of its elusive narrative structure, Mirror has since taken its place as one of the director’s most renowned and influential works, a stunning personal statement from an artist transmitting his innermost thoughts and feelings directly from psyche to screen.”

Stay tuned for more next week…