Anssi Vartiainen
Jack Black and Mos Def play the two main leads in this bizarre comedy that is definitely heaping piles of quantity over any kind of quality.So the story goes that Mike (Def) is a worker in a little VHS rental corner store, owned by Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover). After Mr. Fletcher leaves the store in Mike's hands for the duration of his trip to a memorial, Mike's friend Jerry (Black) wanders in and promptly erases all the tapes due to having become magnetized in a power plant accident. Because why not. And now they're in a jam because people still have to be able to rent the tapes, the store being in financial troubles as it is. The solution? Film your own zero-budget replicas of course.Okay, that doesn't sound that bad. It could work. The problem I have with this film is that it doesn't know how to focus on few key things. Instead it tries to throw everything and the kitchen sink at us and hopes that something sticks. First we have the buddy comedy between two friends, then we have the weird magnet parahuman ability Jerry acquires (which is barely addressed after the first scene), the financial troubles of the store, the circumstances of the poor New Jersey neighbourhood, the state of the VHS versus DVD, and last but not least this weird fixation the film has with this dead real- life jazz musician Fats Wallers, which ends up stealing the whole film towards the end with no explanation given for the weird shift in focus nor mood.And sure, there are comedies that have no focus, wandering around freely, while still managing to work quite well. Monty Python comes to mind. But with those you usually have something of an overarching plot, which is then littered with bizarre details. The story of King Arthur. The story of not-Jesus. This movie could be said to be about saving the store through bizarre events, but it's not immediately apparent from the start and the ending would argue that it's about quite something else. Plus with Monty Python the details are so far out of the left field that you don't even try to make any kind of sense out of them. Here the movie teeters just on the edge of almost having internal logic, but simply failing at it. Which is much more frustrating.In the end Be Kind Rewind didn't leave much of an impression with me. Black and Def had some funny moments, but the overall structure was too chaotic for my tastes and the story wasn't all that interesting. Worth a watch if you're a die-hard fan of Black, otherwise there are better movies out there.
tieman64
Directed by Michael Gondry, "Be Kind Rewind" stars Danny Glover as the owner of a run-down video shop. As he is temporarily leaving town, Glover entrusts his business to two clueless assistants (Jack Black, Mos Def). Bad move. The duo unwittingly erase all the videos in Glover's store and, in an attempt to make up for their mistake, decide to shoot their own low-rent versions of popular hits. These low-budget hatchet jobs prove a great success with customers, but will the scheme prove profitable enough to save Glover's store from bankruptcy?Modelled on the works of Frank Capra, Gondry's "Rewind" says one thing but does the other. It positions the world of VHS, BETAMAX and cosy cinema on one hand, and big business, intellectual property laws, copyrights and DVDs on the other. Glover's shop itself represents a dilapidated past which we fear is disappearing into a haze of radioactivity, static and time, but which Gondry hopes will be preserved by the communal, cut-copy-pasting of generation 21C. We own film history, Godry says, and we can be entrusted to guard and nurture it.But the postmodern hatchet jobs of Mos Def and Jack Black aren't the saviours of cinema, but its replacement. Today, the subject/object dichotomy of cinema has long given way to the participatory media of the internet generation, in which bodies, profiles and the audience itself become the new canvas, in which content and context give way to thin surfaces, references, pastiche and homages, in which cinematic signs refer only to other cinematic sign, and in which the author and previous concepts of ownership have been bulldozed. Gondry then falsely offers big studios, who increasingly seek to commodify and privatise all aspects of "experience", be they analogue or digital, as that which stands in the way of this blissful future."Be Kind Rewind" would introduce the term "sweding" into popular culture. It's a fictional word used to describe works self-consciously or playfully derived from other texts (think most Youtube videos). "Rewind's" aesthetic is itself comprised of a series of little segments, each a reference to a previous film. This echoes Gondry's work on "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and Gondry's own pre-cinema career, in which he cut his teeth making short advertisements, commercials and music videos for corporate brands. His is the schizoid aesthetic of Generation Youtube.Fittingly, "Rewind" homages Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life", a film about a guy who embraces the concept of "community" when he realises that, without him, the small town of Bedford Falls would be sucked into the abyss of urbanisation. In "Rewind", Glover's store is offered as the last bulwark against gentrification, and several symbolic shots frame the building as a peripheral urban space on the verge of being eclipsed or engulfed by "the global". The film then offers an interesting subplot in which Glover propagates a very specific myth: his shop, he says, was the birthplace of Fats Waller, the man he claims invented jazz. This is not true, but that's Gondry's point. The myths, the stories we tell, and indeed the act of "sweding" itself, become means of collectively fighting for urban identity and preserving cultural memory.Themes of identity and memory were of course at the heart of Gondry's previous film, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". In that film, characters had their memories wiped and then inserted prosthetic memories as a means of forgetting painful pasts. In "Rewind", we see the opposite, the inhabitants of a small urban space wishing to resist both memory wipes - gentrification involves literal physical erasure - and the implementation of "new memories". In this regard they cling to Glover's myths, and thereby foster a sense of shared identity. Both films are about nebulous questions of memory and forgetting, but "Sunshine" shows how technologies pull people further apart, whilst "Rewind" shows how the possibility of erasure and cultural-wiping can bring people closer, together and create bonds where previously there existed only separation. In this regard, "Rewind's" endlessly fascinating, but also a pipe-dream. Digital technologies don't democratise production, capitalism tends to homogenise, endlessly bulldozes or repackages past "cultures" into kitsch, and as we see in the film, issues of "culture", "identity" and "memory" never rise above the level of nostalgia for a specific DVD collection.As a comedy, "Be Kind Rewind" is weak. Gondry's low-budget segments can't compete with the more raw, energetic fare found on the internet, Jack Black's comedic talents aren't used properly, and the film's broader tale is overly familiar. Like Gondry's "Dave Chappelle's Block Party", the film celebrates community and is irrepressibly optimistic.7.9/10 – See John Sayles' "Sunshine State" and "Limbo", two similarly themed films. Worth two viewings.
g-bodyl
Be Kind Rewind is another quirky film directed by Michel Gondry, who directed the offbeat comedy, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This is a film that lacks big special effects, but I would call this is a visual treat anyhow. The way the town of Passaic was depicted and how the fake films were made were a good treat for the eyes. The story itself isn't all that bad and is really interesting.Gondry's film is about a struggling VHS rental business whose building is about to get demolished, After a freak accident which involves the tapes being erased, one of the workers and his oddball friend come up with the scheme to make their own versions of each tape and make good money off it.The acting may have been somewhat weak. I normally like Jack Black, but he was mostly annoying. He did have some amusing moments though. Mos Def was pretty good, nothing special. I always liked Danny Glover as an actor and he gives another fine performance here.Overall, this is a good, visual film that has a very interesting concept. All the films that were being remade in this film were the best because I have actually seen all those films. A tighter screenplay and better acting could have made this film even better, but it's still a good film to enjoy. I rate this film 8/10.
