Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
2/24/08
While the Nightly News worries
about stolen credit card numbers and kiddie porn, the great mass of Internet
users are aware of something far more positive and sublime that has come
from their connection to the World Wide Web: the knowledge that They
Are Not Alone. Think about it: in the time they've bounced
from one hyperlink to another, who hasn't at least once been shocked to
discover a large and thriving community of people doing or talking about
doing something they thought that only they did. Some might find
this discouraging: we are all a little less unique than we may have
imagined. But I have found much comfort and inspiration in the knowledge
that the people filling the cars and houses around me are bursting at the
seams to express their own idiosyncrasies and to find others who share
them. Michael Gondry's fanciful Be Kind Rewind is a movie
about a community that discovers a shared desire to express itself through
DIY filmmaking. The oft-delayed film is a bit of a mess, but it's
chock full of laughs, good spirits and creativity. It should resonate
with anyone who's ever felt the joy of sharing their creativity with the
world at large, be it your songs, your movies, or your own movie review
website.
Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover)
owns a video store, Be Kind Rewind, that has seen better days. One
reason for this is that he's stubbornly clung to VHS at a time when the
rest of the world has gone to DVD. Another is a horrible location
in a slum that's scheduled to be torn down to make room for condominiums.
He leaves town on a mysterious trip and puts employee/relative Mike (Mos
Def) in charge of the store, with instructions to keep Mike's crazy best
friend Jerry (Jack Black) out. It might have something to do with
Jerry's conviction that the power transformer down the street needs to
be destroyed to save everyone from its' evil effects. Jerry does
make an assault on the transformer and gets magnetized for his troubles:
the moment he steps foot into the store, all the tapes inside are erased.
In a desperate attempt to avoid being ratted out by Mr. Fletcher's friend
Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow), Mike enlists his friend in a hare-brained scheme
to re-shoot the movie she wants to rent: Ghostbusters.
The resulting effort, all of 20 minutes long, is insanely cheesy and only
vaguely resembles the source material, but there's no time to worry about
that when another customer comes in looking to rent Rush Hour 2.
Soon enough, word of mouth begins to spread for their unique creations
and the guys need a lot of help to keep churning out new titles.
First comes Alma (Melonie Diaz), who they find at the local dry cleaner's
shop, and soon just about everybody in the neighborhood is acting in the
very “movies” they're renting. But trouble looms, because Mr. Fletcher
has only six weeks to make repairs to his condemned store before it's demolished...
and there's the little matter of that FBI warning at the beginning of all
the movies Be Kind Rewind is remaking.
First, let me state the obvious:
our world and the world in which Be Kind Rewind is set share little
other than a whole lot of the same movies. This works when the movie
is wacky, particularly in the early business involving Jerry's attack on
the power transformer and his resulting magnetism. But it's a little
harder to wrap one's brain around the insanely positive reaction to the
guys' work by people who, after all, thought they were renting something
else entirely. The movie has something very heartfelt to say (that
we'd all be better off creating our own art than simply being passive consumers
of someone else's), but can't discipline itself enough to make the narrative
leaps necessary to get to the point where the whole town in making movies
together in a way that's even remotely believable (or even lucid).
It's peculiar the way the film can't bring itself to have a single customer
utter any variation on “Hey, this isn't Ghostbusters!” There's
really a lot going on in the story that Gondry can't wrestle down, including
Mike's obsession with the inaccurate notion that jazz legend Fats Waller
was born in the same building where he works and the way that the community
is a sad, dying place livened by its' moviemaking adventures. Bits
and pieces of themes are lying all over the place, but they all struggle
to jell.
But there's much to like
about the movie, starting with the performances of Black, Def and Diaz,
all of whom are wonderfully light on their feet and have an infectious
enthusiasm for their filmmaking business. The movies themselves aren't
so much spoofs of the originals as simple triumphs of backyard ingenuity
in their recreation, particularly as they begin to deploy more and more
advanced “special effects” to redo the likes of 2001: A Space
Odyssey and King Kong. The story's call for people to
take “an active role in their own happiness” is both sincere and heartfelt,
and the whole package is so sweet and gentle it's difficult to dislike.
One thing that's a bit odd
is the ending Gondry has settled on: Be Kind Rewind is pure
YouTube age Capra Corn but it's unwilling to follow its' own optimism through
to the end. That adds a certain melancholy to the whole exercise,
a movie that believes in people but not in society. Perhaps that's
the whole point: to find one's own artistic muse to balance the disappointments
life will inevitably hurl your way, but like so much else in the film,
it's hard to say exactly what we're to take from its' final open-ended
moments.
In the end, Be Kind Rewind
is an easier movie to like the less thought you put into it. It's
got a lot of laughs, and a fun group of characters to spend 100 minutes
with. Plus, it might send you into the back yard with your own video
camera ready for the sequel. Try to tighten up those themes. |
