Be Kind Rewind

Jack Black in Be Kind Rewind

Jerry and Mike are childhood friends living in Passaic, New Jersey, allegedly home of jazz legend Fats Waller. Jerry is a paranoid mechanic; Mike works at old-fashioned video shop Be Kind Rewind.

. When Jerry ( Jack Black )  becomes magnetized while sabotaging the local  power plant, he accidentally erases all the tapes in the shop.
Mike and Jerry decide to “remake” the films in Jerry’s junkyard using makeshift special effects.
Their versions, the so-called Sweded versions, are a hit!
But soon Hollywood solicitor Ms. Lawson accuses them of infringing copyright. All the films are destroyed and the shop must close.
So Mike, Jerry and shop owner Mr. Fletcher decide to retell the story of Fats Waller involving the whole neighbourhood in the shoot. It’s a triumph.

After playing around with psychology and metaphysics and with the faint borderline between dreams and reality, director Michel Gondry comes into the real world.
In fact we see the camera pulling down from the sky and dive into Passaic.
The director’s decision to focus on reality means he must put imagination on a leash and concentrate on storytelling - but that’s where the film fails.
The first part is weak and specious, and quirky touches like Jerry’s magnetized body attracting a wire fence seem leftovers of Gondry’s previous works.
What is truly original about Be Kind Rewind is its light-hearted take on meta-cinema, and it also works as a metaphor of Hollywood’s remake mania: Sigourney Weaver (starring in Ghostbusters, the first film to be Sweded) destroys Jerry and Mike’s films only because they infringe copyrights – had the guys asked for permission, putting loads of remakes on the market would be just fine.

The whole operation oozes nostalgia for VHS’s and for a simpler way of filmmaking, which is coherent with Gondry’s refusal of special effects and praise for creativity.
But how can you teach this lesson when you have made expensive videos for Björk and Kylie Minogue?
This proves that Michel Gondry has really little sense of reality, and is a better director when filming from the top of a cloud.

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