"Be Kind Rewind" (2008) - Movie Review

Michel Gondry can make most of the films made in “Be Kind Rewind” in the similar style and manner the characters Jerry (Jack Black) and Mike (Mos Def) with fancy craft work which not only appeals as comedy but a weird creativity. This does not save the film which has very many flaws and becomes a saga of sympathetic appreciation for a run down store in a small town to have a chance to succeed.

Gondry creates Kansas City with couple of small boxes and mashed potato to enact a scene and recycles the waste materials from electronics, utensils and garbage to innovate a 20 minutes film version of “Ghostbusters”, “Rush Hour 2”, “’Driving Miss Daisy”, “Robocop” and many other movies. It is smartly funny in the creation of it but we never get to see a complete 5 minute scene of a 20 minute movie to accept that the people really like the version of theirs. The making is fun but is the viewing the same experience? We never get to see one major chunk of the short films they make and that test the credibility.

Jerry, Mike and their accomplices in this film making idea turn dumb and smart as and when they needed. And Mike not getting the mirror written version of what his owner Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) says is a little unbelievable for some one who can come up with such creativity. To make things clearer, Mike works in a run down video store around an old corner building in the city of Passaic, New Jersey. They are still in the age of VHS and clearly the building needs renovation which the city hall people suggest. Jerry is a mechanic who does not do much of automotive work rather he hangs out with Mike and believes the old outcast philosophy of everything is manipulated biologically by the government.

To get the long story short, a sabotage gone wrong to leave Jerry “magnetized” which should obviously destroy the tapes is the premise. This part of the story is clearly unnecessary as it not removes the reality from the picture but also the logic. So does the magnetization forms a sub plot? Nope and it conveniently goes when the plot no longer needs it any more at all. The meat of the story is the home made low cost movie making and to make that happen you need the tapes destroyed. To have Jerry go through the fantasy process pinches us. A simple water damage or robbery is good enough to get those tapes out of the picture and draw in the plot. And the plot is that Jerry and Mike start shooting their version of the made movies.

To have a VHS rental store initially appeared unreal but later it felt not a surprise for an old neighbourhood town to have old people refusing to move ahead and not to get tangled in the media technology advancement. As always for Gondry, his sets are fragile, dusty and some times even creepy. His vision is something unique and that’s the reason his films even bad reaches and has that characteristic to sit in the viewers long after the movie is over. Out here I loved how “Rush Hour 2” was made especially the hanging scene and how they fall. That scene can only be contrived from a person who has the multidimensional image factory running in his brain.

I really wanted to love and like “Be Kind Rewind” but the feel good saga in the end only made it bad. Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is one of my favourite movies and I always sit and hope for the best from him. To get disappointed twice in the same week from him (I watched “The Science of Sleep” in DVD this week) is disheartening. But Gondry’s creative work has the sustaining capability for very many coming years. There are certain directors even with minimal success are in the list to be expected a lovely film time after time. For me Michel Gondry is one of them for his immense visuals out of the discarded every day product in material and in films. Who would have thought there can be a funny interesting making of the recreation of “Robocop”?