April of 2008 - RAG Magazine

FILM
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.
Be Kind Rewind
By Sam Osborn (www.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.
46| DEC RAG MAGAZINE
Their remakes, which work like lovingly cobbled YouTube
creations, gain popularity in their Jersey village and soon are at
high demand
for $20 a
r e n t a l .
Thrown in for
sentimentality’s
sake, Be Kind
Rewind’s
owner, Mr.
Fletcher
( D a n n y
Glover),
needs to raise
$60,000 to
avoid the
building’s
demolition. If
his business
is put down,
the Be Kind
R e w i n d
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 mindcontrolling
power plants to the birthplace of Fats Waller, as
though in an attempt to avoid the otherwise saccharine plotline.