be kind rewind Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I thought it would be an easy task to write about this year's best examples of on-screen chemistry. It's my favorite part of the cinematic experience, and one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. Without chemistry, any film is destined to fall quickly and be forgotten. Remember The Mexican? Brad and Julia might have been stars, but it takes a lot more than a big name to make a movie.

But who to choose? While I loathed the big-screen adaptation of Sex and the City, Carrie and Big have always held that certain something. Happy-Go-Lucky contained a wonderful romance, but it wasn't the thing of legend. I could certainly cite Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight, and how she was a refreshing breath of charismatic air after the bland coupling of Christian Bale and Katie Holmes. (Heck, I can't even add in female ensembles, because the ladies from Sex and the City were too busy with romantic drama, and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 could have been called Sisterhood of the We're too Old for This Crap.)

But none of these, nor the many other couples that graced our screens in 2008, came close to the halls of bromance. The only duos that contained palpable, memorable chemistry over the last year have been men. (Funny for a nation where Proposition 8 can get passed, but I digress...) Bromance isn't usually the theme to lead chemistry lists, but when a year brings us awesome blockbusters, but barely a whiff of spine-tingling sexual tension, we have to take what we can get.

One might chalk up a reluctance to cry at the movies to having sat through roughly four hundred of them a year and grown numb to the more melodramatic efforts. And yet I can't say that I've ever been given much cause to shed tears in the theater or at home, even from the earliest years of my moviegoing. I'd be willing to admit it -- heck, I believe that I'm just about to -- but I've just never been one to end up wiping at my cheeks when the lights come up, and yet more and more often, I find myself wondering: Why not?

Are the filmmakers to blame for failing in other respects to elicit tears for these characters and the fates they face? Sometimes. Am I to blame for coming in on guard, waiting for a film to get at me and maybe throwing up some hurdles along the way if there's no lack of trying? Perhaps. Isn't it acceptable to feel something without showing it, and to do so without being labeled a callous bastard? You better believe it.

Here's one of my dirty little secrets: I love lists and I keep track of my year's ten best movies all year long. Most other critics hastily assemble their lists at the last second, which is partly why so many December movies dominate; critics can't remember what they've seen earlier in the year. My list shows that 2008 has had a pretty poor first half, but I do have some contenders for listhood. Two movies are currently competing for the top spot, though I need to see them both again to be sure. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (6 screens) is one; it has a lovely, laid-back, observant quality and feels less severe than some of Hou's other recent films. But I haven't yet decided if the film is a comedy or a tragedy. It all feels pretty light and insignificant, except for the saddest thing: no one seems to notice the red balloon of the title, drifting around Paris, unable to find a boy like Pascal to love it. The film also contains the year's most vibrant performance: Juliette Binoche playing a frenzied single mom working with a puppet troupe.

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.