Be Kind Rewind
When news first broke about the premise of this film, it seemed too good to be true -- Michel Gondry was making a movie about guys who remake classic movies. However, they wouldn't be just remakes; they would be "Sweded" classics because one of the guys had become magnetized and ruined a store full of VHS tapes. It sounded like a wacky dream come true, and it sounded like the perfect film fodder for Jack Black and Mos Def.

In reality, it was almost all there. The quirky bits were brilliant, but the save-the-store back story that Gondry was pressured to add could've been left out. But that didn't matter. Gondry's versions of flicks like Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy, and Rush Hour were perfect -- and worth dealing with any sappy-themed fare that followed. Honestly, it could've been a lot worse, and I still would've enjoyed their scheme to film night shots during the day. That bit was sheer brilliance.

Anyway, now you can get your own copy of Be Kind Rewind, one that should be safe from your magnetically laced friends. The DVD offers an extended train scene with Mr. Fletcher, but not too much in the way of other added fare. There's a regular featurette called "Passaic Mosaic," which features chats with cast, crew, and locals, and the theatrical trailer, which isn't much of a special feature at all. I would assume that another disc has to be on the way -- at the very least, to add in Gondry's own Sweded trailer for the film.

Check out James Rocchi's review | Buy the DVD

Jack Black, whose Kung Fu Panda opens this week, seemed to move awfully quickly from rising star to overexposed. His always-moving, rock 'n' roll persona seems to be everywhere, turning up in several movies a year, always pitched at the same high level. It's all too easy to concentrate on his most annoying performances, as lazy fast-talkers, or selfish schemers in films like Saving Silverman, Shallow Hal, Envy and The Holiday. But a closer look at his filmography shows more than a few samples of the Jack Black that we initially liked and elevated to stardom.

1. High Fidelity (2000)
This was the first time Black came onto my radar, although he had previously been in at least 30 other movies and TV shows. It's arguably the first time he tapped into the Jack Black persona for the length of an entire movie, and he was nicely fitted in the mix between cool, confused John Cusack and Todd Louiso (as the withdrawn music nerd). His was a supporting role, rather than a lead, which is the best place for a character actor of his caliber. Moreover, Black played a nerd with a wide-ranging knowledge of music, implying that he was at least using his brain for something (as opposed to many of his other films). As for his performance, he showed enough natural, unhinged exuberance (especially in his surprise rendition of "Let's Get It On") that, frankly, he deserved an Oscar nomination.

Among my favorite film books is Michael J. Weldon's two-volume "Psychotronic" film guide. The first was published in 1983 and the second in 1996 (Michael hopes to publish a third at some point). Unlike Leonard Maltin's annual book, Weldon doesn't update an existing guide; each new guide is an entirely new volume. If you want to read about Halloween, you need Vol. 1 and if you want to read about Halloween 4, you need Vol. 2. A "Psychotronic" movie can be fairly easy to define. It's basically any of the "lower" film genres, dealing with the more questionable elements of society: horror, sci-fi, bikers, strippers, superheroes, zombies, kung-fu, vampires, comic books, drugs, sex, action heroes, rock 'n' roll, midnight movies, monsters, witches, cults, serial killers, magic, time travel, robberies, heists, contract killers, gladiators, Spaghetti Westerns, mad scientists, murder mysteries, pimps, voyeurs, etc.

Not many people care to admit it, but Hollywood is run by fear. Fear is an emotion generated by things that are not known or understood, and in the movie business, no one ever knows what's going to happen. (William Goldman was right when he said, "Nobody Knows Anything.") All those accountants, producers, publicists, entertainment TV shows, ad campaigns, etc. are all an attempt to get a handle on the unknown, an attempt to control the uncontrollable. Anything can happen. The world's biggest movie star can jump up and down on a couch and suddenly become a weirdo outcast. Or the star of a dismal turkey like Showgirls can turn around and find herself cast in a Woody Allen film. This fear, in essence, is why so many movies are so bad. The more investors and business people try to control their investment, the more they clamp down on it, and the more it gets smothered.

See, movies can live and breathe like an organic life form, but they have to have a chance. If brave producers step back and let the movie come to life in the hands of a genuine artist, they could wind up with something extraordinary like Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men (229 screens), a film that somehow pleased critics both highbrow and middlebrow, won a handful of Oscars and has nearly grossed $75 million. This film has already entered the cultural canon as a classic of cinema. More or less the same can be said of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (224 screens), which, having lost the Oscar for Best Picture, is now in a position of being an underrated underdog. But those are exceptions to the rule. No one is immune to the fear: a few years back the Coen Brothers teamed up with sleazy producer Brian Grazer, of all people, and came up with their first dud, Intolerable Cruelty.

(The following review ran during the Sundance Film Festival, but we're re-posting it now to coincide with the film's theatrical release.)

In Passaic, New Jersey, the thrift store and video rental emporium Be Kind Rewind offers customers their choice of films to rent, if by 'choice,' you mean 'VHS only.' But while owner Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) is away, his counterman and almost-son Mike (Mos Def) lets Jerry (Jack Black) into the store, against Mr. Fletcher's instructions not to. Jerry is normally a walking disaster -- a dreamer of a mechanic, obsessed with the belief that the power plant he lives near is flooding him with radiation. A failed attempt to sabotage the power plant leaves Jerry energized and magnetized to such a degree that his mere presence wipes all of Be Kind Rewind's inventory. When loyal customer Ms. Kimberly, tasked by Mr. Fletcher to check in on the store while he's away, comes in to rent Ghostbusters, Jerry and Mike's solution to the crisis is hardly logical, but certainly inspired: Produce and shoot a replacement version of the film within 24 hours so she'll be none the wiser about the store's ruined inventory.

But Ms. Kimberly shows the film to some of her foster children, who can recognize that Jerry is not quite Bill Murray, and that Mike is not quite Ivan Reitman, and that holding the right-hand side of Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" up to the camera is not quite a special-effects shot of a demon-haunted landscape. The foster kids -- thugs and toughs to a man -- come around Be Kind Rewind the next day. But they're not mad; they're curious: "That was pretty good. What else you got?" And other customers are curious about the store's new selections -- which, it's explained, come from Sweden, which is why they cost $20 and you have to request them 24 hours in advance. ...

Written and directed by Michel Gondry, Be Kind Rewind is as much a work of creativity and passion as the re-shot, cut-in-camcorder, home-brew "Swedish Import" re-made Hollywood blockbusters that it revolves around. And, much like Jerry and Mike's re-shot versions of Driving Miss Daisy or Rush Hour or The Lion King, Be Kind Rewind is a film where the plot is less important than panache, where the lack of elegance is made up for by an excess of enthusiasm. Jerry and Mike aren't just shooting day for night; they're shooting day for night, male for female, white for black, Jerry for Jackie (Chan, that is). Aided and abetted by Alma (Melonie Diaz), an early recruit to their shooting requirements (they need a girl for Rush Hour), the store's new offerings rapidly become a sensation, as customers line up to request new films they want to see the 'Sweded' versions of and rent the rest of Jerry and Mike's oeuvre as soon as other customers bring them back. This not only makes Jerry and Mike celebrities (or, more correctly, sub-lebrities) in Passaic, but also may raise the money that Mr. Fletcher's store needs to come up to the building code and avoid being shut down. ...

Do you need a good laugh today? I saw Taxi to the Dark Side on Friday night and when we came home, I was in desperate need of comedy. I found respite in the short films that are entered in the Kindly Rewind contest, another scheme from those crazy folks at Alamo Drafthouse. Nearly 150 shorts are entered in the competition, most of them running 5-6 minutes long, all of them "swedes" of movies as popularized in the trailer for Be Kind Rewind. You can watch all of them online and if you sign up, you can vote for your favorites this week. The shorts are also all playing at Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar this week if you live in Austin.

The sweded shorts include five different versions of Top Gun; six takes on Jurassic Park; four of The Karate Kid; two Back to the Futures (Marty wears a real life vest in one), one Back to the Future 2, and one Back to the Future trilogy; and one Be Kind Rewind -- the filmmakers must have been crushed when Michel Gondry did his own swede of the trailer. (But theirs contains a fabulous swede of The Big Lebowski.) Other choices for entries included a fully animated version of Bambi, Koyaaanisqatsi, An Inconvenient Truth (so funny we are developing household catch-phrases from it), Beastmaster with a seven-year-old in the title role, Run Lola Run with very dubious German, and March of the Penguins set in downtown Austin. I especially like the films where people are as low-tech as possible: humming or singing the movie's theme music, using pets as characters, and employing cut-out figures or plastic dinosaurs. (At the end of The Sound of Music, the characters walk up the street to a hand-drawn sign that says "Switzerland.")

A brand new trailer for Be Kind Rewind has arrived online, and I'm ashamed to say this may be one of my favorite trailers of all time. It has nothing to do with the actual movie, mind you, but I love it because Michel Gondry runs around like a loon. Yes, this is a "sweded" version of the actual trailer -- meaning Gondry messed up the film reel and had to re-create his own trailer using whatever props he had on him. Confused yet?

See, Be Kind Rewind stars Jack Black and Mos Def as two guys who run a video store and accidentally erase all the tapes. So, in order to save their business, the men need to re-create all of the classic movies using cheap props they collect themselves (this process is called "sweding"). So now imagine if the film's entire trailer was "sweded" by director Michel Gondry, and that's what you'll find above. Gondry plays all the roles, and he's an absolute riot (partly because we have no idea what he's saying half the time due to his pretty thick accent). When he sang the Ghostbusters theme to himself, I just about lost my sh*t. Gotta watch it now! Check out James' Sundance review of Be Kind Rewind and his interview with Gondry; Be Kind Rewind hits theaters on February 22.

For the first time during the fest, I spent a good part of my day on Main Street, watching teenage kids travel in packs, chanting every time a celebrity passed by. Who I saw: Jack Black being molested by a throng of teenage girls. Alan Rickman being chased by a group of teens shouting, "Alan!" and "Potter!" Rickman was heading into the party for Be Kind Rewind -- a party in which yours truly was not allowed into.

Granted, I wasn't on the list nor was I invited by our friends over at New Line (who are all great people, and it probably just slipped their mind to invite the kind folks from Cinematical), but when I calmly explained who I was and that I really wanted to write up the party, give the film a little more press -- the dude at the door was an as**ole and a half. So thank you Mr. F*ckwit for shoving me off as if I was a scrawny 15-year-old itching to have Jack Black sign my left ass cheek. Your party looked very nice, and it's unfortunate that I can't write really nice things about it. Next time I see Alan Rickman, I'll ask him how it was.

Oooh, and Kim just told me that Kirsten Dunst checked into our hotel a little while ago. Hmmm. We'll let you know if we spot her doing something Spidey-like. More photos, more reviews and more interviews heading your way soon. And I definitely have to tell you about this Slamdance doc I saw tonight called Dear Zachary. One of the most powerful and emotional docs I have ever seen. Let's just say I cried like a little girl throughout the entire film. I couldn't help myself. I was damaged tonight, folks. Hit by a force I wasn't expecting. Too bad I couldn't enjoy a few drinks with my friends (who did get into the Be Kind party) and drown my injured soul in a pint of something Utah-ish. Oh well. There's always tomorrow ....

Images from Main Street:

More after the jump ...

Sometimes I wish I had a large, waiting-to-be-used stash of money that would allow me to go to every film festival that caught my fancy. The other option would be to convince a patron of each fest to wear a mini camera on their lapel, but that would be, well, illegal, so let's stick with the other fantasy. Like many of the big fests, Berlinale is looking to be all sorts of tasty. We've already had some previous screening announcements, and now Reuters has added even more eagerly-anticipated films to the fest list.

In the realm of Berlin's competitive films, Kristin Scott Thomas' I've Loved You So Long has been added to the roster. In the "out of competition" offerings at Berlinale, filmgoers can delight in a who's who of big names. There's Fireflies in the Garden, the Julia Roberts-starring film about a town devastated by an unexpected tragedy. (It's also a film that co-stars the likes of Ryan Reynolds, Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hayden Panettiere, and Ioan Gruffudd.) Or, if you want to dip back into history, there's Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman's The Other Boleyn Girl. And, what could be better to wrap up the festival than a movie for fans of film? Berlinale will perfectly close with Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind. (Check out James' Sundance review!)

The festival will run from February 7 to 17.

Writer-director Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind follows two small-town friends, Jerry (Jack Black) and Mike (Mos Def) as disaster at a VHS-only video rental store forces them to try to replace the wiped tapes ... by re-shooting the films they once contained. When their ultra-low-budget, ultra-high-spirit remakes of films like Ghostbusters, King Kong and The Lion King become hits with customers (who are told the tapes are Swedish imports), Jerry and Mike's absurd yet logical attempt to save the store becomes an unexpected starting point for their own artistic journey -- and a celebration of movie making and movie watching. Gondry brings Jerry and Mike's collaborations to life with the mix of big-idea film making and intimate wonder he's demonstrated in all his work, including Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep and Dave Chappelle's Block Party. Be Kind Rewind will premiere at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival; Gondry spoke with Cinematical about everything from the joy of creation, racism in film and popular culture, and how Sundance feels different from other film festivals: " (At Sundance) ... I felt encouraged to continue; in Cannes, I felt really like people were asking me to stop doing my job."

(The audio file of this interview, like all of Cinematical's podcast offerings, is now available through iTunes; if you'd like, you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below: )



Cinematical: I guess the first, and easiest question is where did the idea behind Be Kind Rewind come from for you?

Michel Gondry: It comes from a utopia I had -- do you say 'having a utopia?' -- a belief I have that people can create their own entertainment. I always wanted to create this community that would come and tell their own story, shoot it -- and watch them. The idea is to not have one entity who creates the work, the project, and another entity who consumes it; the idea is people create their own work, like somebody cultivating his garden.

Cinematical: And in the film, we see the characters go from imitation to actual creation; that was always part of the idea?

Michel Gondry: Yes; it's very important to me that they go through this journey; I don't want to advocate imitation; I want to encourage creation. In this case, they start with imitation because their goal is not being creative; they don't realize they're being creative until they become successful and they are forced to be creative. And actually Alma (Melonie Diaz), who's sort of the smarter, the smartest guy of the band -- she's a girl -- tells them that they are much more creative than what they think they are. And then they realize that they don't have to copy movies; they can create their own. And I think it's very important that people not just make their own entertainment, but that they create it, that they really invent the story.