Movie Review: Be Kind Rewind
Writing by alwayspaula on Friday, 29 of February , 2008 at 7:54 am
Yeah, that’s right, I saw it, you didn’t.
For some reason, the new flick by Michel Gondry (director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep, which he also wrote) reached the Ritz Bourse here in Philadelphia before making it to the more mainstream places. I guess that makes me lucky — especially so, since I can be the first to tell you that… it… no, doesn’t suck, but was a bit of a letdown.
Ok, New Jerseyans, it takes place in Passaic (where I was born). My standard line is that they could have invited Kevin Smith in for dialogue help and maybe speech coaching — but realism was hardly the point (though slacker-style comedy might have been).
You probably know the story: the Jack Black character somehow becomes magnetized and accidentally erases the entire stock of VHS tapes that is the bread and butter of Mos Def’s store (owned by Danny Glover). (No, they don’t use their real names in this — I just have no memory.) So Jack and Mos, while the owner is away, are forced to remake nearly every film in the store to satisfy customers who might just let Danny know that Mos is incompetent. (Danny’s a bit slow himself… he had to take a walk across town to discover something called the DVD.)
Turns out the customers love these “Sweded” films, which include funny remakes of Ghostbusters and Rush Hour 2, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Driving Miss Daisy (with Mia Farrow and Danny Glover in the Tandy/Freedman roles, a really funny scene).
My problem with the movie is that I was waiting to see some of that Michel Gondry magic — the Georges Méliès-esque clever special effects that are usually the result of some extraordinary planning and discipline — that make his music videos and feature films worth watching over and over again. I was also hoping for a story with some interesting emotional twists, a dark underside that I saw in the Charlie Kaufman-penned Eternal Sunshine and even in his own Science of Sleep (Charlotte Gainsbourg, je t’aime.)
I think the point of this movie, though, was to make filmmaking, even that with special effects, more accessible to viewers. Gondry really seems to want his viewers to make their own films, and get out of the idea that only rich, connected, pampered people can do it. He “demystifies” a lot of the special effects we’ve been seeing for years — the zero-grav jogging-inside-a-donut sequence in 2001, for example — which, haha, is achieved just by turning, in synch, the camera and parts of the set slowly upside down. (Well, I knew that already, but I didn’t know you could do it in a junkyard!)
So, it’s a light film, mostly improvised it seems, very “feel good,” very community-oriented, and also with a largely African American and minority cast, which in itself is unusual for a mainstream film, especially by a French director.
Parts of the “Sweded” films appear on the website, which had made me think that this was an odd case of a feature film being an advertisement for a series of web flicks. The “Sweded” films in the movie are supposed to be about 20 minutes long, but the web flicks are really like alternate trailers — about 30 seconds, too short, really, to satisfy my jonesing for B-movie magic.
I mean, I liked the movie, really. Everybody knows that I want to make a film, and that I want everyone to make a film, a film with “magic” — sequences that make you scratch your head, that make the world of the “real” seem popping with surprises – especially people who feel outside of the Hollywood machine and never have their stories told. But I also can’t wait to see some of that Gondry goodness — the tinkerer meets mathemetician meets hapless romantic vibe that make his other films so remarkable.
Category: Movie Review, Columns
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