Concessions

I missed the first half of the Children’s Film Festival at
Northwest Film Forum because I had some sort of walking-pneumonia
situation, the most alarming but least painful symptom of which was a
weird swollen-gland lump on my neck, which installed that antismoking
commercial from the ’90s on a permanent loop in my head. (“Now I have
emphysema, which left me with this fat face and a HUMP on my NECK.”)
Anyway, now that my neck hump has receded, it’s time to get to
the kids’ stuff.

JUMP! (Wed Jan 28 at 7 pm, Sat Jan 31 at 3:30
pm)

It is so fucking crazy when a person will just, like, do a
flip. Oh, you were just standing there and now you are doing a flip?
WHILST JUMP-ROPING? Why don’t you just do a normal thing,
like sit in a chair? Or walk around? Must you make the rest of us feel
like sedentary hippos? JUMP! is a documentary about children
involved in competitive jump-rope, which means all kinds of crazy shit.
Though lacking in dramatic tension—you’re not rooting for any
particular team, and they all like and support each other so much it’s
hardly a competition—spazzy kids and feats of physical
impossibility are never not entertaining.

The Red Jacket (Thurs Jan 29 at 7 pm, Sat Jan 31 at
5:30 pm)

The Red Jacket—a 2006 film about Chinese villagers,
unconditional love, and moaning until you get what you want—would
be a quiet, lovely thing, if it weren’t for the goddamn moaning. And I
cannot imagine a child watching it for one single toasty hot
second. I mean, not a modern child. Maybe a Victorian child
who has never seen such witchery as the miniature Chinamen who move and
talk inside this curious box of wonders. The film takes place in a
foggy mountain village: saggy clouds, craggy paths, crumbling stone
walls, a bunch of balloons tied to a bicycle—every shot is
beautiful. A cute little girl really, really wants a red jacket. She
runs around. She sings a song. She whines. It’s almost too slow for
me to pay attention to, and foggy mountain villages in faraway
lands are probably my number-three favorite thing of all things.

Speedy Delivery (Sun Feb 1 at 3:30 pm)

This documentary chronicles the life of one David Newell, aka Mr.
McFeely, Fred “Mister” Rogers’s lifelong friend, sidekick, and
on-air mailman. Through interviews with Newell, his family, his tailor,
and the cast of characters left orbiting the gaping Rogers-shaped
void (following his death from stomach cancer in 2003), Speedy
Delivery portrays Newell as a sweet, generous, slightly awkward
man—playing with his dogs, feeding the fish, eating quiche, and
touring the country in his Speedy Delivery uniform to deliver Rogers’s
message of acceptance. “[Mister Rogers] never talked to anybody. He
talked with people. He cared about everyone. Every day.” Oops,
here they come. Here come the emotions.