Be Kind Rewind directed by Michel Gondry, USA 2008. Review by James on 3/28/08.
Michel Gondry’s tribute to cheap special effects, camera tricks, and amateur filmmaking, Be Kind Rewind tells the story of two New Jersey misfits (Mos Def and Jack Black of all people) who must make their own low-budget remakes of blockbuster movies when Jack Black’s character, while magnetized, accidently erases all the video tapes at the store where Mos Def works. It makes slightly more sense in the movie. It’s a movie with some great moments and some problems, highlighting Gondry’s strength as a director and weakness as a writer.
First the strength. The film is filled with the kind of inventive special effects and camera tricks that Gondry used to great ends in his career as a music video director. But we also get to see behind the scenes, as the duo creates the effects in filming. It stuff like putting wires and a fan in front of a camera to simulate scratching, flickering film or using inverse colored photocopies of the actors’ faces as masks so that when they shoot a scene in inverse their faces appear normal but everything else is flipped. Techniques like that are what make the film worth it in the end, I think.
Now the weaknesses. Gondry is very inventive but he is not much of a writer. The plot is infected with the same kind of whimsy that makes the special effects so impressive, but the result is an absurd story that doesn’t have much at stake. The video store is threatened with closure by the city council because it is old and a copyright infringement suit (served by Sigourney Weaver for some reason), but because the film exists in a strange parallel whimsyverse, the threat never really registers. The plot is a clothesline for the effects. Gondry’s previous movie The Science of Sleep had a similar problem. It’s when he teams up with talented writers (Eternal Sunshine, Dave Chappele’s Block Party) that his films really shine.
The acting. Jack Black is Jack Black as usual. If you don’t like him, you won’t like him here. Mos Def gives another interesting performance. Danny Glover, as the video store owner, does his best, I guess. He is getting too old for this shit. Mia Farrow is in it too, in a very strange role. She’s a regular of the video store and there’s a very strange, unresolved relationship between her and Glover. It seems like they had a past together, but it’s never spelled out. It’s especially strange when Glover plays the driver to Farrow’s old southern lady when they remake Driving Miss Daisy.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 screens
