Michel Gondry's fourth feature -- his second without cowriter Charlie Kaufman (HUMAN NATURE, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND) -- dares to imagine a world momentarily freed from copyright laws and intellectual property protections, where the movies we watch can become the stories we retell to one another and function in much the same way folktales once served troubadours, work songs and jazz musicians. Gondry's commitment to these artistic ideals is no doubt sincere -- the whole film has a rag-tag, purposefully shambolic feel -- but this communal commitment to a DIY aesthetic is also his undoing, particularly when he allows an irritatingly manic Jack Black to run wild and virtually hijack the movie.
Set on a run-down corner in a shabby section of Passaic, New Jersey, the Be Kind Rewind Video and Thrift Shop is a crumbling anachronism from the long-gone days of independently owned video stores, and is now a prime target for the wrecking ball. The shop, owned by Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) and operated by his surrogate son, Mike (Mos Def), stocks only old VHS cassettes, which Fletcher rents to his neighbors for a token sum -- one tape, one day, one buck -- and the selection isn't even all that good; POISON IVY 2 and FREQUENCY jostle for space with the standard Hollywood blockbusters. But the establishment is something of a local landmark -- Mr. Fletcher claims jazz great Fats Waller was born upstairs (he wasn't) -- and if Mr. Fletcher doesn't get the building up to code within the next 60 days, it will become part of the city's fast-receding past. To help plan for the store's future, Mr. Fletcher sets off on a days-long recon mission to scout out the competition, leaving Mike in charge with one warning: Keep Jerry (Black), Mike's paranoid friend who runs the auto salvage yard across the street, out of the store. Mike should have listened: The morning after his attempt to sabotage a nearby power-plant ends in his accidental magnetization, Jerry forces his way into Be Kind Rewind and unwittingly erases all the tapes. When dotty neighborhood regular Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow) threatens to tell Mr. Fletcher unless Mike produces a working copy of GHOSTBUSTERS by the end of the day, he has a brainstorm: Mike and Jerry will recreate the movie using an old videotape camera, tin foil, tinsel, marshmallows and a few local librarians -- if they're lucky, Miss Falewicz will be fooled. They somehow pull it off -- no matter that their GHOSTBUSTERS is only 20 minutes long and looks like crap -- and when they manage to shoot a version of RUSH HOUR 2 with the help of local dry cleaner's assistant Alma (Melonie Diaz), Mike and Jerry realize their customers actually prefer their own homegrown -- what Jerry calls "sweded" -- and increasingly communal bootlegs to the originals. With a line stretching out the door, Mike and Jerry suddenly find themselves filmmakers and community heroes -- until a lawyer representing the studios (Sigourney Weaver) shows up on their doorstep for a crash course in copyright infringement.
Filmmaking as a community activity with revolutionary, fight-the-power potential: It's a fine fantasy, and amid all the cutesy effects, goofy improv and fatal, postmodern self-indulgence, Gondry is saying something interesting about the power and importance of storytelling in general and movies in particular, and there's something undeniably charming in the belief that the glossy, generic product a cynical Hollywood continues to churn out couldn't compete with Mike and Jerry's eccentric, homegrown fan films. Gondry has deliberately made just such a movie -- those glitches on the "tape" we're watching when a freshly magnetized Jerry first enters Be Kind Rewind are surely there to remind us of the fact lest we fall too far into the fiction. But even a basement-quality bootleg needs a director, and after nearly two hours of an out-of-control Black mugging and posturing for the camera, one yearns for a cheaper, 20-minute version of the real thing. leave a comment --Ken Fox
