Cynical Cinema

Be Kind Rewind is the kind of movie that could have gone one of two ways. Either very stupid and silly, like so much of Jack Black’s work, or a very clever and ingenious send-up of familiar movies. It turns out to be somewhere in the middle, but that’s a good thing. It comes out June 17th from Alliance Films, and it’s well worth a rental. Mos Def is a clerk at a video store owned by Danny Glover that still rents VHS tapes while the rest of the world has switched to DVD. Jack Black is his crazy friend who believes the government is spying on him. When Glover leaves Mos Def in charge of the video store for a week, Black recruits him to help sabotage the power plant in the area. Def (is that how you refer to rappers by their last name? Who knows.) Backs out at the last minute, but Black goes ahead with the sabotage, which is unsuccessful, but leaves him electrocuted and magnetized.

When the magnetized Jack Black enters the video store, he erases all the video tapes on the shelves, and the two friends decide to fix the problem by remaking all the movies in the place on their own, based on their suspect knowledge of the films themselves. Mia Farrow makes a terrific appearance as the store’s most loyal customer, wanting to rent Ghostbusters. This becomes the first movie redone by Black and Def, and after the 20-minute version becomes something of a hit in the neighbourhood, they start making others. Rush Hour 2, Robocop, The Lion King, Driving Miss Daisy, 2001: A Space Odyssey, When We Were Kings, King Kong, Carrie, Last Tango in Paris and Men In Black get “sweded”, a bizarre term dreamed up by the guys to explain the origin of these bizarre copies of familiar movies. Before long, the store is a neighbourhood sensation.

There is so much other stuff in the film that will be familiar to the hardcore film buff. Not just the hilarious versions of famous movies that are done by the two main characters, but also the land developers who want to condemn the store and tear it down, leading to the inevitable community protest and rally to save the building. The baddies from the copyright office who show up to destroy the tapes, since the movies have been made without permission. The references Farrow makes to horror movies and how she can’t handle them. And Danny Glover’s obsession with Fats Waller and how the store is actually Waller’s birthplace and as such an historical landmark that requires preserving. All of it taken in a sweet and respectful way that gives a tip of the hat to so many movies that have come before.

Be Kind Rewind is also so gleeful in making the type of movie it sends up that it shows a great spirit in disregarding the problems that would be obvious to most viewers. Even with the poor quality of the films these two make, they would need more money than they obviously have just to make their re-shoots. If Jack Black is still magnetized to the point where he would have erased every tape in the store, he would also be erasing the tapes they make in the video camera. And Danny Glover never seems to have any kind of plan on how to actually save his store. But all this is terrific, because the gaps in logic are merely a part of the experience of the movie itself, a movie that ends up being almost as good, and in some cases (Rush Hour 2) even better than the films to which it pays homage.

Jack Black is his usual comically insane self, and Mos Def is superb as his buddy, whose relationships with Black and Glover create a more complex character than we expect to see in a film such as this. Also terrific in supporting roles are Glover as the blindly stubborn and slightly deluded old man, Mia Farrow as the sweet older woman around the corner, and Melonie Diaz as Alma, the girl who joins the movie making process when they need someone to make out with Jack Black. (The scene where they recruit her to star in their films is one of the highlights of this movie.) Add all these components together, and you get a sweet, clever, and wonderful movie by Michel Gondry, a man who clearly loves movies the way so many of the rest of us do.