Starring Jack Black, Mos Def. Written and directed by Michel Gondry. (PG) 90 min. Opens Feb 22. See Interview page 20.
Naïveté and lo-fi ingenuity are fused to recreate iconic movie moments: that’s not only the plot of Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, it’s also a description of the writer-director’s M.O. The self-styled man-child behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind aligns himself so closely with his protagonists this time out that the film — starring Jack Black and Mos Def as a pair of borderline-simpletons in Passaic, New Jersey who produce a series of hare-brained micro-budget remakes after the entire VHS catalogue of their neighbourhood video store is accidentally erased — plays as fascinatingly naked.
It also plays like a sequel of sorts to Gondry’s ebullient documentary/concert film Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, from which it cribs its rundown urban milieu and its sweetly communal vibe. The question of why a French hipster has positioned himself as a purveyor of American inner-city experience is worth asking, as is whether we really need a sentimental death knell for VHS — a compromised format that, whatever its nostalgia value, must on some level offend a meticulous perfectionist like Gondry. The thematic implications of Be Kind Rewind are half-baked: the message that “the best movies are the ones we make ourselves” curdles when you realize that we’re watching characters recycle a lot of Hollywood crap for a film-illiterate constituency. But the process of watching them recycle said crap is frequently very funny, and the attrition of visual and subtextual cleverness (like the casting of the ostensible villainess) makes the experience pleasurable even as it doesn’t quite jibe.