Be Kind, Rewind

Be Kind, Rewind is a film with a fantastic one joke premise. Mos Def works in run down New Jersey video store that so run down it still rents videos, as opposed to DVDs. His bumbling best friend Jack Black (playing the bumbling best friend as only Jack Black can) gets electrocuted and manages to wipe all the tapes in the store. Thus, to stop the store going out of business, the two of them frantically remake whatever films are requested by their small, yet loyal, and most importantly naïve, clientele.

Now, as funny as Jack Black and Mos Def running around, remaking Ghostbusters and Robocop and The Lion King and Rush Hour 2 may be, it’s not really a film. It’s barely an episode of Saturday Night Live. However, Be Kind, Rewind is also the work of music video genius Michel Gondry.

Before making his feature breakthrough with the universally loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the French wunderkind excelled at making robots and mummies dance to Daft Punk and Lego build itself to The White Stripes, and he brings all of his visual inventiveness to the film parodies. Visually, at least, it’s a sister film to his underrated The Science of Sleep, which featured hallucinations and dreams made out of cardboard and string, giving the special effect a knowingness that nothing was real, and everything was ‘constructed’ in the protagonists head. This home made quality returns in Be kind Rewind, and is just as entertaining. Jack Black claims that when he told Gondry that he hadn’t seen Rush Hour 2, the director told him to merely act out what he imagined the film to be like, from what he’d seen in the trailer or on the DVD cover or on what Jackie Chan had said about the film in interviews. This sums it up perfectly. It’s about recreating your memories of films, as opposed to the films themselves. And if you’re at least vaguely cine-literate, the recreations are constantly hilarious and enjoyable.

The film does however descend, at points, into a game of guess which film we’re going to do now. And if you haven’t heard of the original, let alone seen it, the film drags. But the plot does actually go somewhere, as opposed to being just a collection of skits. The video store ends up becoming a corner-stone of the failing community, and eventually the whole area ends up helping out with the production of the films. While this is a tad too trite and schmaltz-y, it does become a genuinely heartfelt tribute to the collective act of filmmaking. It will definitely strike a cord with anyone who’s ever got together with a few mates on a boring summer afternoon, filmed a load of stuff, actually edited it and put it on YouTube, as it about the fun you had making it and the relationships you have with those you made it with, even if the end product was shit and no-one who wasn’t involved has ever bothered to watch it.

Ultimately, the film is very sentimental, and filled with artsy French whimsy. Yet the cast is excellent (with some very strong turns from Danny Glover and Mia Farrow), and Gondry pulls out some amazing low-fi visuals. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of French whimsy, especially if it has Jack Black remaking Ghostbusters.

Last edited: 28th May 2008