Be Kind Rewind Review
by sdo230@gmail.com (sdo230 AT gmail DOT com)February 26th, 2008
Be Kind Rewind
reviewed by Sam Osborn of TheMovieMammal.com
We all have a place to rent movies. Our place to rent movies. My place, The Video Station, is a two floor monolith of titles, where the browsing of films is discouraged by the sheer volume of shelves. You stand the chance of getting lost; and it's better just to ask. And so you approach the filmic lotuses crouching behind their counter, where they await any customer upon whom they can drop some prodigious film knowledge. Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry's follow-up to 2006's Science of Sleep, is the swan song of this dying tradition. In fact, Mr. Gondry laments the diminishment of many traditions here. His film is a ballad to the Video Station, to Jazz music, to independent filmmaking, DIY community artistry, and to the VCR. It seems ironic then, that in order to make such a loaded film, Gondry went through Hollywood for distribution, cast Jack Black and Mos Def instead of local actors from his New Jersey set, and will obviously capitulate to a DVD transfer and rental through Netflix and Blockbuster when Be Kind Rewind is released for home viewing.
But maybe Gondry isn't bothering to make a statement. In the way George A. Romero's loaded his recent Diary of the Dead with statements that fold and re-fold the film's meaning until it disappears into parody, Be Kind Rewind may simply be harking to a folk art culture of Gondry's own invention. His methods are, in the present age of filmmaking, especially unique to Hollywood directors. (And let's not be fooled, by working through Warner Brothers, Focus Features, and now New Line Cinema, Mr. Gondry is now a Hollywood director.) Largely ignoring CGI wizardry, he champions the arts & crafting of his set designers and prop masters; his special effects are nearly all achieved through in-camera trickery, and his sets are crazed and original enough to be displayed in their own Manhattan art gallery. Be Kind Rewind allows him to cut and paste and re-invent household objects to his heart's delight, as an entire scene is dedicated to showing off all the crew's cracked brilliance.
Paper Mache can't hold a film together, though, and it seems Gondry hasn't put his ingenuity towards storytelling. In an attempt to sabotage his local power plant, which he believes to be controlling his mind, Jerry (Jack Black), a deadbeat loner, manages to permanently magnetize his globular body. And so when he visits his friend Mike (Mos Def), the sole employee of Be Kind Rewind Video, he erases all the store's tapes. With the boss out of town and only four hours to obtain a copy of Ghostbusters for a nosy customer (Mia Farrow), the pair elect to remake the film themselves, employing the help of the town's auto mechanic and dry cleaner.
Their remakes, which work like lovingly cobbled YouTube creations, gain popularity in their Jersey village and soon are at high demand for $20 a rental. Thrown in for sentimentality's sake, Be Kind Rewind's owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), needs to raise $60,000 to avoid the building's demolition. If his business is put down, the Be Kind Rewind family and much of the community will be relocated to the projects to make way for luxury condo units.
Gondry first took a stab at feature-length scriptwork with Science of Sleep. He banked off the memory riffs laid out by Charlie Kauffman in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, echoing them with his own hero's dreams. Be Kind Rewind, Gondry's second full-length writing feat, departs entirely from these imaginative fancies for something more scattered and pockmarked. He's tangential as ever, wandering through mind-controlling power plants to the birthplace of Fats Waller, as though in an attempt to avoid the otherwise saccharine plotline.
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