![]() ![]() Then there’s That Thing You Loved When You Were a Kid Had an Underbelly That Should Have Been Obvious Even Back Then - docs that cast light into the darkness of half-remembered ephemera like Beanie Babies or Menudo. In that category, I’ve reviewed documentaries on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow in the last five years. On one hand, there’s That Thing You Loved When You Were a Kid Is Still Special and Sacred. I Love You, You Hate Me is trying to occupy space in two of documentary’s most ubiquitous nostalgia-driven genres. At the same time, it generated an aggressive backlash, was targeted for mockery and abuse and spawned urban legends of a so-called Barney Curse that are pretty clearly bunk, though the Leach’s family experienced disproportionate tragedy. Barney & Friends ran 14 seasons and became almost instantly iconic thanks to its diverse cast, catchy songs and aggressively repetitious positive messaging. It will be up to viewers to decide whether the failure to thoroughly explore its biggest contentions makes I Love You, You Hate Me borderline offensive - once you’re paralleling Barney haters with the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, that line is really blurry - or just flawed, on top of a clumsy structure and major sourcing problems, in a documentary that probably won’t inspire either extreme in its title.Īs a reminder, Sheryl Leach came up with the idea for the universally loving (not to be confused with universally loved) Barney back in 1988, and the character became a global sensation when PBS affiliates took the series wide in 1992. ![]() I Love You, You Hate Me doesn’t want to be simply a hollow celebration of ’90s nostalgia, which I truly respect, but it doesn’t quite have the intellectual ammunition to make its more ambitious points convincingly. It’s a contestable but also provocative point made in contradictory and ultimately under-defended terms, and that means that it’s probably a perfect encapsulation of Tommy Avallone’s documentary. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |