Then after seeing the trailer I knew they could not have picked a better person! When I was younger I did watch some of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood but not a ton of it. It's really been when I joined facebook and all of the wonderful stored about Fred Rogers started to go viral and I got to see more of the show. I got to know more about him and his life. When I read up more about him and saw the videos all it did was make me wonder why a movie about this man has not yet been done before!
I am very pleased to say that this movie was excellent!
As great as the advertising was the this movie is really failed to mention what the movie was about. Yes, it's about Mister Rogers but not about his life or the work he did, or how he saved PBS. The story is really about Lloyd Vogel. Mr. Vogel was sent by the Magazine he works for, Esquire, to do a segment about heroes. One of the people that they wanted interviewed was Mister Rogers. Vogel got the job because Fred Rogers was the only one person willing to be interviewed by him. Vogel has a reputation for digging up some not great information on the people he was interviewing. He met his match when he met Fred Rogers.
One of the wonderful things that I have read about Mr. Rogers over the years was the fact that he was a hard man to interview. This was because Fred Rogers wanted to get to know the person who is doing the interviews himself so the interviewer became the interviewee. He really did have a heart for people. All people of all the shapes and colors that you can think of not just children.
It was because of this fact of Fred Rogers that the move rally focused on Lloyd Vogel. It was about his work, and family, and his friendship with Fred Rogers. Yes, we did get to learn more about Mr. Rogers but really we got to see how Fred Rogers' friendship changed one man's life during some big changes in his life. Lloyd Vogel just became a father, and he was loosing his father at the same time.
However, meeting Mr. Rogers really helped him to cope with his anger and confusion in a way he never knew how before. This is what Mr. Rogers' show was all about. Showing how we can express our feelings of sadness and anger without hurting those around us. Doing this really helped Lloyd Vogel cope with how to be a father he never really had and for trying to get to understand his father in a way he wanted before he dies.
I was really surprised about how well Tom Hanks did as being Mr. Rogers. It was amazing just how he acts and he really seems to become Mr. Rogers. One of the best scenes in the movie was when he asks Mr. Vogel to have one minute of silence. It really was a whole minute in the movie of where everything became silent. Not just in the movie but the whole theater that I was in with people they all got silent as well. I could not hear anyone take a breathe, no one ate their popcorn, no one talked, whispered or coughed. I have seen many a movie in the theater in my day and extremely few bring an audience into one single moment as a unit as that scene in this movie did. To make everyone pay attention to that moment to that silence was not deafening, it was not uncomfortable. It was warm and hopeful. It was how you would feel if Mr. Rogers was really with you in the moment. It was.... Beautiful.
I have to say that this is one of Tom Hanks' best performances. This is one of the best movies I have seen this year. I would be disappointed if neither the film or Hanks were no nominated for an Academy Award. I guess time will tell for that. I think though this is a film that everyone needs to see and enjoy. Even if you are not really familiar with Mr. Rogers it should still been seen.
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