Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind is a more main­stream effort than the per­sonal and heart­felt The Sci­ence of Sleep, but still imbued with his sig­na­ture hand­made style and many of his par­tic­u­lar (some might say pecu­liar) obsessions.

The premise is bril­liant in its sim­plic­ity: a pair of mis­fit doo­fuses acci­den­tally erase every tape in their retro video rental store, and decide to remake an eclec­tic selec­tion of them from scratch. The con­sid­er­able humor comes not just in how Mike (Mos Def) and Jerry (Jack Black) recre­ate shots, cos­tumes, cast­ing, and spe­cial effects, but also in how they must recon­struct entire plots and scenes from mem­ory alone. If you had to con­dense a movie you hadn’t seen since child­hood (say, for exam­ple, Ghost­busters) down to 20 min­utes, equipped only with a cam­corder and a bud­get of approx­i­mately $0, how would you do it? Jerry ran­domly coins the word “sweded” to describe their work, a puz­zling term that isn’t even a pun, but spon­ta­neous absur­dity is a virtue in Gondry’s world.

Mos Def has mos’ def’ had enough of Tranny Jack

Des­per­a­tion inspires them to find a means of artis­tic expres­sion, some­thing many peo­ple spend life­times day­dream­ing about but never seize for them­selves. Much as how Tim Bur­ton char­ac­ter­ized Ed Wood in the epony­mous biopic, Mike and Jerry have true ama­teurs’ supreme con­fi­dence in their total film­mak­ing abil­i­ties. Their own inge­nu­ity and the power of moviemak­ing inspires them with the real­iza­tion that they can do any­thing and the trust that peo­ple will like what they do. Also like Wood, each obsta­cle they encounter merely increases their creativity.

Even before the incit­ing inci­dent of mass era­sure, Jerry was already some­thing of an out­sider artist. He oper­ated an auto shop with very cre­ative notions of “repair­ing” cars into souped-up rocket-powered Bat­Mo­biles. His char­ac­ter is ini­tially very unlik­able, and evi­dently some­thing of a misog­y­nist. We see him taunt and nearly phys­i­cally threaten a woman in the video store. Later, he reveals a long­ing for cutie Alma (Mel­onie Diaz) work­ing in the local laun­dry, but when moviemak­ing pro­vides him with the oppor­tu­nity to inter­act with her, he treats her as would a lit­tle boy with a “No Girls Allowed” tree­house. But that’s not to imply there’s some­thing cute about his atti­tude towards women; there appears to be a barely sup­pressed con­tempt and threat of violence.

How long until they get around to remak­ing Gummo and Amer­i­can Psycho?

An obvi­ous para­dox is that Be Kind Rewind is a film from a major motion pic­ture stu­dio that cel­e­brates the indie spirit (not to men­tion fair use of copy­righted mate­ri­als) and vil­i­fies the venal movie biz exec­u­tives that inevitably mate­ri­al­ize with cease-and-decist orders. Speak­ing of venal movie execs, the movie’s home at New Line Cin­ema no doubt intro­duced sev­eral hardly canon­i­cal films like the New Line prop­erty Rush Hour 2 into Gondry’s script. The over­abun­dance of New Line posters and VHS tapes in the set design bric-à-brac is some­thing of a joke. While it’s funny that a run-down video store might still have ratty old Blast From the Past posters hang­ing around, would a com­pet­ing main­stream neon-lit DVD store (Block­buster in all but name) really shill for the long-forgotten Woo?

Be Kind Rewind is at its most bril­liant when recre­at­ing clas­sic (and some not-so-classic) moments from cin­ema his­tory, so much so that every­thing else in the film feels like a dis­trac­tion from the true delights. But the pow­er­fully mov­ing cli­max is the pre­mière screen­ing of Mike and Jerry’s mas­ter­piece, made in col­lab­o­ra­tion with their entire com­mu­nity. Their matu­rity as auteurs is marked by their first truly orig­i­nal work; their film within a film is a fic­tion­al­ized musi­cal biopic of Fats Waller. If only all actual musi­cal biopics could be so wonderful!

Full dis­clo­sure: I first saw an advance screen­ing of Be Kind Rewind on Feb­ru­ary 22, but as I was then employed by the movie com­pany dis­trib­ut­ing the film, I decided not to post my thoughts. Regard­less, I had noth­ing to do with mak­ing or mar­ket­ing the film, and any opin­ions expressed above are mine alone.

Must Read: Director-File.com’s Be Kind Rewind archive

Offi­cial movie site: www.bekindmovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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