There’s a lot of good, and surprisingly, a lot of heart in Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind; the end result, however, is simply a lovable mess. Mike (Mos Def) and Jerry (Jack Black) work at Be Kind Rewind, a last-of-its-kind VHS rental store owned by Elroy Fletcher (Danny Glover).
When a botched siege on a power plant leaves Jerry magnetized, he accidentally erases all of the videotapes in the store. So what do they do when the store’s only customer Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow) wants to rent Ghostbusters? Re-film it themselves.
Their ‘sweded’ version of the movie, shot in a day and edited as they go, runs about 20 minutes and removes all the unnecessary junk.
Unfortunately, the duo does too good a job, and more requests for sweded videos; soon they’re neighborhood stars but Mr. Fletcher doesn’t seem to care for what they’ve done, nor do some government agents who hit them with copyright infringement charges.
While this is likely the director’s most mainstream film – it is, mostly, your standard goofball comedy – the patchwork plot is about as strange as it gets. The movie jumps from one idea to the next with reckless abandon: there are strands of romance, depressing inner-city realism, backstory on the video store and nostalgic remembrances of an obscure jazz artist.
While this is a relatively short film, things tend to get boring without much in the way of plot to follow. And it can get quite depressing, too. Still, I liked a lot of the film and have some amount of admiration for what Gondry has done here. This will (deservedly) become a cult item for years.
Search YouTube for Mike and Jerry’s sweded videos from the film, and a seemingly limitless amount of sweded videos inspired by them; you’ll likely get more out of these than the actual movie.
