Be Kind Rewind

“I’m thinkin’ cardboard,” says Jerry, one of the strange creatures that frequent Be Kind Rewind, a ramshackle mom-and-pop videostore in Passaic, New Jersey. And the film Be Kind Rewind is loaded with cardboard, as in the cheap casings of those relics of the 1980s—VHS tapes. Yes, before DVDs, Netflix, and the HD-Blue Ray wars, there was VHS. But time and technology waits for no worn-out copy of The Karate Kid , and so Be Kind Rewind is on the verge of succumbing to urban renewal unless its owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), can come up with the $60K to perform much needed repairs.

Jerry, played by Jack Black and his trademark “Wanna make something of it?” frenetic, fanatic, there-are-men-in-my-head delirium, is convinced that the power planet just yards from the videostore is taking control of his life, care of the FBI, the CIA—name your government agency. But an attempt to sabotage the plant results only in Jerry becoming completely magnetized. And when Mr. Fletcher goes away, leaving the store in the feeble hands of his adopted son, Mike (played with an engaging earnestness by Mos Def), Jerry accidentally erases every last video in the place.

How do Jerry and Mike save the shop, and their feeble way of life, when customers come in asking for their favorite movies, all of which are as blank as the income column of the store’s ledger? They decide to shoot knock-off versions starring themselves and pawn them off as the Hollywood originals.

Their first production? Ghostbusters . It was just about here that I began to think of all the ways I could have spent $8.50 without having to watch Jack Black dressed up in aluminum foil running around a library to the tune of “Who ya gonna call?” In other words, the premise of Be Kind Rewind seemed to be nothing more than that—a premise, a goofy idea that a film-school sophomore would come up with but that someone actually bankrolled. Implausible to the point of being ludicrous—but then . . . I realized there was more going on here.

Yes, Be Kind Rewind is about cardboard—not just the ratty VHS boxes but also the cardboard cutouts that the film’s director, Michel Gondry, often employs in his own films, a throwback to the early days of make-shift special effects and the films of George Méiliès . It’s Gondry’s poke in the eye at how digitalization and CGI have ruined the charms of moviemaking, robbing it of its human connection, making it little more than a product of big business and big science.

Among the many charms that slowly reveal themselves in this film are the inventive, low-rent means by which these Jersey-ites reproduce iconic scenes from classic (and not so classic) films—everything from junkyard refuse to sports and fishing gear to xeroxes of their own faces to produce the right skin tone for “night-vision” shooting. Even their own bodies become instruments of the surreal re-imagining of cinematic fantasy. This community of working-class stragglers enter into their own favorite films and for a few brief hours become stars, artists, and moguls.

Well, Jerry and Mike not only manage to foist these cheapie replicas of action-adventure films like RoboCop and Rush Hour II on their initially unsuspecting customers, they manage actually to create a brand new market. Lines circle the block for the latest dumbed-down but personal vision of these two accidental artists.

Just as it looks as if a return to the early days of cinema will save Be Kind Rewind from demolition by raising the money needed to fix its decrepit frame, Hollywood intervenes—in the person of Ghostbuster star Sigourney Weaver. Playing a big-studio legal eagle, she informs the crew at Be Kind Rewind that they have violated copyright laws by using the studios’ own tapes to remake their home-spun tales, and therefore owe about $60 billion in fines. Weaver is determined to stamp out the great evil that is video piracy, which supposedly threatens to destroy the motion-picture business.

What are our heroes to do? Mr. Fletcher had hoped to save his store by learning from the chain-store West Coast Video, a rival that has managed to keep up with the market. But when he sees the life that Jerry and Mike’s creativity has pumped back into the community, he has second thoughts. Even if the crew at Be Kind can’t legally rip off other people’s ideas, they can certainly come up with their own. One of the prevailing myths of the store—and what Mr. Fletcher hoped would invest his it with an aura that would transcend the depredations of market forces and government interventions—is that it was once home to jazz great Fats Waller. The problem is, this is more myth than fact. Well, if they can’t preserve their own history, if “progress” is determined to literally steamroller them into oblivion, if myth is all they have left, then they will shape it to their own ends. They will counter the harsh reality of technocratic society with play.

By film’s end, I was completely beguiled by this goofy love story to old-fashioned movie making, Gondry own apologetic for his surreal style. In such wild productions as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep , he refuses to be constrained by the authoritarian dictates of Hollywood narrative—as well as the tyranny of overblown special effects. His vision is a return to the days of the zoetrope and the child’s playhouse. (Even the love story, between Mike and one of his “stars,” discovered in a local dry cleaners, never advances beyond the adolescent crush stage.)

Which is not to say that the film doesn’t have problems. It’s too often silly when it’s trying to be funny, the strain on one’s suspension of disbelief are occasionally painful, and there is a subplot about the owner of that local West Coast Video, presumably fallen on hard times himself, that is never fully explicated, leaving a large hole in the story.

But when all is said and done, add Be Kind Rewind to that lovable subgenre of movie-loving movies (along with Singin’ in the Rain and Cinema Paradiso ). I don’t imagine it will make much money in release, and many who do give it a chance may never make it past the eye-rolling stage. But it will most definitely have a long life on VHS—er, DVD, that is, HD-DVD. Oh, what am I saying, excuse me: Blue-Ray disc. (God help us all . . . )

P.S. As for the Oscars . . .

Utterly predictable, right down to Tilda Swinton over Amy Ryan (they had to give Michael Clayton something ) and Marion Cotillard over Julie Christie. (Christie simply had too much going for her: long time Academy favorite playing an Alzheimer’s victim . . . it simply wasn’t fair. So they went the other way, and picked the truly astounding performance.)