“BEING ELMO: A PUPPETEER’S JOURNEY” My rating: B (Opening Jan. 6 at the Tivoli)
80 minutes | MPAA rating: PG
Documentaries can be many things, but sweet is not usually one of them.
“Being Elmo,” though, is just that. Sweet.
Kevin Clash, Elmo and friend
Sweet in the same way that a child bestowing a kiss upon a beloved grownup friend is disarmingly, heart-grippingly sweet.
The “Elmo” of the title isn’t a person. Not technically, anyway.
Elmo is a puppet of shaggy red felt, one of the Muppet characters who inhabit “Sesame Street” on the PBS network.
Physically he reminds a lot of Grover or Cookie Monster. His personality, though, is uniquely his own. This is due entirely to the man who performs Elmo, Kevin Clash.
Clash is a black man, raised in borderline poverty in a not-so-good Baltimore neighborhood. But as a child he fell in love with puppets he saw on TV, began making his own (probably not the coolest pastime for a young man in the ‘hood) and by the time he was a teenager was a fixture on the Baltimore television scene.
Butler's Cinema Scene 