Be Kind Rewind takes a stand against gentrification, copyright laws, Hollywood, and 
urban renewal. It's in favor of community, locally-owned business, amateurism, and Fats Waller. Who can argue with that? No one, that's who, without seeming a spoil sport. But the film wears its artificial heart a little too much on its sleeve. Most of the goings on strain credulity, to say the least, and the characters at times exhibit a striking lack of common sense. These elements render the whole enterprise fablesque, which is another way of saying that while the Michael Gondry's production has its moments, it doesn’t really score any direct hits against or for the above-mentioned targets.
Here's the plot: Mos Def plays a clerk in a moribund Passaic, New Jersey video store, which the city has slated for demolition and which is being slowly bled by competition from a Blockbuster-like DVD store anyway. Jack Black, playing an off-the-wall curmudgeonly type (surprise!) , becomes magnetized when he tries to sabotage the local power plant and then somehow demagnetizes all the VHS tapes in the store (owned by Danny Glover.) Black and Mos Def then come up with a plan to re-shoot all the movies using ingenious homemade innovations in place of the films' big budget special effects. Sort of like the plays produced by the precocious impresario Max in Rushmore, but not as good. The ersatz films become so popular, the movie industry sends hatchet woman Sigourney Weaver to put the kibosh on the whole thing and confiscate the moviemakers' entire oeuvre. If one wanted to, one could interpret the film as an homage to all those YouTube do–it-yourselfers, nascent auteurs shooting movies on cell phones and editing them on iBooks, and as a slap at the vacuous big budget junk projected onto screens at a multi-plex near you.
But for a movie whose credo is “movies with heart and soul” (this voiced by Mia Farrow, whose presence graces any project), the home-made films themselves, re-makes of Robo-Cop, Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy, and others, are curiously uninteresting. They're clever enough in execution, but that's all. They don't have any particular take on the source material, and an opportunity for some prime satire is wasted. Again, I think of the movie-based plays in Rushmore -- deadly earnest affairs made even more absurd by the presence of teenagers playing cops, soldiers, and other familiar action genre figures.
To me, movies like Robo-Cop and Ghostbusters -- they're pretty good to begin with. Do I want to see a grade-Z version of these grade-B guilty pleasures? Even if people I vaguely know are in them? Storywise, it would have made more sense to re-make some real crud, but then nobody would have any frame of reference for the spoofs. The film wants us to see movie-making as a labor-of-love and conducive to community involvement. But anyone who’s shot even a 5-minute class project knows the most conventional cinematic idea can’t be just dashed off in presentable form in a single afternoon, like they are here. And forget about scheduling and organizing your amateur talent working for a couple of free pizza slices at lunchtime. It's just not that easy, and the eagerness of the residents of Passaic to participate in these productions seemed more like a a sign of community-wide despair than a take charge bit of civil disobedience. For me, the atmosphere of depression and decay easily suction off the film's mawkish high spirits that are intended as remedies.
Performance-wise, for once Jack Black, an actor with the most defined comic persona since perhaps Billy Murray, doesn't help. He pretty much phones in his usual imploding maniac bit. A mumbly Mos Def is a lot more interesting as the clerk in search of a father figure in Danny Glover.
I’ll tell ya, the web site is sort of more interesting than the film. Check it out.
Linkateria:
Too bad. Adam & I just saw the "Be Kind" preview (which seemed appealing) before watching "The King of Kong," which I can't recommend enough. Maybe we'll cross "Be Kind" off our list.
Posted by: kcb | March 29, 2008 at 08:44 PM