(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. ...

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.

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.

We're already well aware at how nutty some studios are getting with regards to marketing certain movies. Seeing the Empire State Building lit up yellow in honor of The Simpsons Movie DVD release was just one example of where movie marketing is heading in 2008. Some might feel all the viral websites, phone numbers and staged events are a little too much, while others welcome the additional moviegoing experience with open arms. Personally, I'm somewhere in between: The viral sites and videos are good time wasters so long as they don't ruin the film, but I'm not crazy about plastering an entire city with posters and images in order to promote a film people were already well aware of. That said, New Line is currently right in the middle of a fun promotion for Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, and according to an article in the LA Times, the marketing for that film is about to get a lot cooler.

Be Kind Rewind stars Jack Black and Mos Def as a couple of guys who attempt to re-create a bunch of classic movies after the VHS tapes at the video store they run are destroyed. This process of re-creating a piece of work using whatever crap one has stored around the house has been given the name "Sweding." While explaining "Sweding," Gondry says: "I wanted a name that meant nothing. I had in mind, like, the suede shoes -- a fake velvet. A sort of ultra-suede? But I always get the word wrong because I'm French." Fans already have a chance to "Swede" a whole bunch of stuff over on the film's official website, but New Line is taking it one step further by transforming a New York City art gallery into a "Sweding" studio for roughly a month, beginning January 24 -- one day before the film hits theaters. Here's how it's explained in the LA Times:

"Groups of people walk in and will have access to a workshop," Gondry explained. "There is a very simple protocol: You shoot in camera, edit while you shoot -- which means you stop the camera when you want to go to the next scene, you don't edit. Story lines last five to 10 minutes. And most of the exhibition will be a mini back lot with 15 little sets."

That sounds like all kinds of awesome. Additionally, while at the Sundance Film Festival (where Be Kind Rewind is set to have its premiere), Gondry will be on hand to perform music from the movie along with Mos Def and Jean-Michel Bernard (both of whom wrote the film's score). The LA Times also says that New Line will open up a "Sweding suite" on Main Street where folks can stop by and "participate in Sweding, such as inserting themselves into photos from the film."

[via Slashfilm]

When it comes to Michel Gondry films, I guess the wackiness just never stops. Cinemablend is now hosting the first poster for the comedy fantasy Be Kind Rewind and it's everything you would expect from the director who seems to have 'whimsy' as a middle name. Starring Jack Black and Mos Def, the film centers on two local video store employees who have to re-create an entire video store worth of films when Black accidentally erases all the tapes after a bout of 'personal magnetization'. Rounding out the cast is Mia Farrow as one of the store's most dedicated customers and Danny Glover as the owner of the struggling shop.

The first trailer for the flick arrived in August, and so far most of the marketing for the film has been stressing that same message of a fantastical 'DIY culture'. I guess in the end that is what I've always thought Gondry's movies were about; if you aren't happy with the way things are then create your own reality until you are. The official site for the film even gives you the opportunity to cut and paste your own face into some famous movie art. Ever wanted to be on the cover of Die Hard? Well, here is your chance. There is even a pretty elaborate gag involving a "homemade Internet". The poster for the film seems to keep the same feel as the website and even looks like it was made on the cheap with markers and pencil crayons -- but as anyone in the design business knows, sometimes it's the 'cheap' look that costs you the most. Be Kind Rewind opens in theaters on January 25th, 2008.

Check out the full-sized poster after the jump ...

The official site for Michel Gondry's latest movie, Be Kind Rewind, has every trademark touch you would expect from the whimsical director. There is plenty of style and plenty of silly. Rather than just your typical site with trailers and downloads (and don't worry this site has plenty of them if that's your thing) the site presents us all with a truly frightening concept: what if someone wiped out the internet? I won't ruin if for you, but let's just say that it involves rebuilding Google with some string and a bunch of wood -- it's kind of hard to explain, but trust me, it's pretty darn cute.

Besides the usual offerings, the site gives you the chance to 'Swede' yourself into a few flicks. That's right; Gondry has even invented a new word for the movie. The word 'Swede' pops up a lot on the site, in fact, and a quick Wikipedia search provides this definition: "the practice of re-creating something from scratch using commonly available, everyday materials and technology. Items that are 'Sweded' look distinctively homemade, often bearing only the slightest resemblance to the original. While naively rendered, 'Sweded' items are usually charming and highly amusing".

Rewind stars Jack Black as a video store employee who accidentally magnetizes himself and when he comes to work the next day, manages to wipe out the store's entire collection. Trying to save their jobs, Black and his friend (and co-worker) Mos Def, set out to recreate the movies that were lost. OK, so the story might seem a little wacky for an entire movie, but Gondry is the master of leaps of movie logic so I still have faith. Be Kind Rewind is set for release on January 25th, 2008.

As if five projects wasn't enough for Mos Def's docket, Variety is reporting that he's got a sixth on the way -- Bobby Zero, which he will star in and executive produce. Def plays the lead, "a down-on-his-luck social satirist who gives up his artistic aspirations to work at an advertising agency." He's also the romantic lead, but there's no word on who his character is itching to get groinal with. The script was written by Markus and Mason Canter, who are apparently known as "The Flying Canter Brothers." They've only got a sports doc, and short film on their resume, so I've really no idea what this means for the film. But Mos Def usually picks some good material, so it should be decent, at the very least.

In the meantime, we've got to wait until December to check out Be Kind Rewind, the flick that has him and Jack Black acting out classic movies after accidentally destroying an entire video store's worth. (By the way, Film Ick put up the most recent leak the other day -- the pair doing Driving Miss Daisy.) After that, we've got the six films he needs to shoot, and it's a pretty decent collection -- Stringbean and Marcus, a film about broken romance between Black Panther members that teams him with Sophie Okonedo, a part in Toussaint, the biographical drama about the man who led the slave rebellion that sparked the Haitian revolution, the William H. Macy-helmed Keep Coming Back, about a kid with a heart condition who enters AA to stalk the stripper he has a crush on, Little Scarlet, the Walter Mosley adaptation that has Def co-starring with Jeffrey Wright and finally, The Brazilian Job, the follow-up to The Italian Job.

What hasn't Michel Gondry done, except for plain, mainstream fare like action movies and typical romcoms? There have been split-screen studies of going forward and backward in time, men carrying cars, dancing people skeletons, civilizing a man raised in the wild, another who tried to wipe his love from his memory and yet another guy whose hands can grow really big. He'd done everything except, of course, a magnetic brain, which he's now got covered with Be Kind, Rewind. Cinematical has been telling you about this film for ages, and if you haven't been paying attention yet -- you really should because if there was ever a Gondry film for everyone, I'd say it's this one.

The peeps over at Twitch have posted a photo from the film, which has Mos Def and Jack Black wrapped in tin foil stuck together with silver duct tape, with black straps to a backpack or something running under their armpits. Any guesses on the movie? Obviously, that isn't their normal attire, but their costumes for one of the films they re-create. If you haven't heard Rewind's premise yet -- it's about this guy named Jerry (Black) who becomes magnetized while trying to sabotage a power plant he thinks is melting his brain. When he accidentally erases all the tapes at the video store his friend Mike (Def) works at, to keep Mike's job and the sole regular, old lady customer, they decide to recreate every movie she decides to rent. (Because in Gondry's world, that's easy than buying the flick elsewhere.)

Part of me wishes they'd been releasing pics from each of the pair's adaptations are promo material, but at the same time, I'm sure that could spoil the funny shock of seeing what they come up with on the big screen. Hunting around to see if there were any others, I found some other photos lurking, which you might have missed if you don't haunt Jack Black fan sites or Filmwad. Both those links have a slew of pictures up with Black in period garb, farting around on a large, black and yellow train. Man, Mike and Jerry have a great production budget!

There aren't too many movies that necessitate sequels. Unless a movie is part of a pre-proposed series or is an adaptation of a series of books, it should probably be able to stand alone. But a lot of sequels come from movies that are perfect by themselves -- sometimes the sequels compliment nicely; sometimes they are easily ignored; occasionally they actually take away from the previously regarded original.

It isn't often that a movie screams out for a sequel, but I think I've come up with seven that at least whisper a request for one. Two actually have source sequels that they would be adapted from. One has a lot of history to mine material from. Three of them have been discussed at length at different points in time by makers of the original(s). The problem is that none of these sequels is likely to ever grace your DVD player let alone your local theater. For whatever reason, they simply have too much against them in the minds of studio execs. For now, though, we can dream.

1. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Even with the incredible cast and the surprisingly faithful-enough script, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was not the epic that I was hoping for. It also wasn't the blockbuster that Disney was hoping for. The filmmakers, Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith (aka Hammer and Tongs) and the necessary actors had signed on for the sequel, to be adapted from Adam's follow-up, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but it appears to be dead in the water. Despite my few reservations with the first film, I would love to see the sequel, as well as the rest of the series (they could end before The Salmon of Doubt, I guess). I remember being bored with some of the prehistoric Earth sequences in Restaurant, but I think they'd make for great cinema. In any event, I think Martin Freeman and Mos Def were a great duo in the original, and they alone should have been propelled to stardom following its release. Maybe they can appear in something else together.

Though I never put together a top ten list for 2006, if I had Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep would have slid into the number one or two spot. Combined with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the man is responsible for two of my favorite films from the past few years -- and, needless to say, I'm now eagerly anticipating his next film Be Kind, Rewind. Since it's pretty standard these days for early test screening reviews to eventually make their way over to AICN, one of their beloved readers sent in the scoop on Gondry's latest following a recent test screening in Pasadena. And is it any good?

Well, according to the scooper (who goes by the name Plant! Plant!) it seems Rewind is a bit more commercial than Gondry's previous films, though his trademark quirkiness is certainly apparent throughout. In the pic, Jack Black and Mos Def play two guys who run a tiny video rental store and, when all their vhs tapes accidentally get ruined after being exposed to magnetism, the boys attempt to recreate some of our favorite classic films (Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, etc ...) in order to keep the store's one loyal customer happy. Plant! Plant! says the meat of the film rests in the relationship between Black and Def, saying it is "reminiscent of the best on screen duos we've seen in the past." Another interesting aspect (which leads more toward the commercial front) is the heavy dose of physical comedy included within.

Plant! says it reminded him (or her?) of those old Laurel & Hardy shorts, and I'm not sure yet whether that's good or bad. Regardless, it's a risk for Gondry and one I sincerely hope pays off. The review itself is fairly free of spoilers, so head on over to AICN for the rest of it. Plant! notes the film looked pretty complete, and so I expect the film to be released at some point over the summer (possibly August?).

I admit I follow the news about actor William H. Macy a lot more closely than, say, Justin Timberlake. I'm very fond of many of Macy's films (The Cooler is fabulous), although I won't go so far as to watch certain movies just because he's in them (I'm probably going to skip Wild Hogs). So I was pleased to learn from Variety that Macy is planning his feature-film directorial debut this year. The actor will work behind the camera on the film Keep Coming Back, which will start shooting in July. Macy previously directed a made-for-HBO movie in 1988, Lip Service, and was an executive producer for Transamerica, which starred his wife, Felicity Huffman.

Keep Coming Back has a cast of familiar faces -- besides Macy, the current lineup includes Salma Hayek, Steve Buscemi and Mos Def. The film is about an inexperienced teen boy who crushes hard on an ex-stripper. It's a coming-of-age film and sounds pretty standard from the description, but perhaps it'll include some intriguing characters and plot twists. It's an indie film, in case you didn't guess from the cast, and ContentFilm (Thank You for Smoking, Party Monster) has agreed to handle international sales. I expect we'll see Keep Coming Back on the festival circuit sometime next year.

I've noticed that the big splashy film festivals, like Sundance or Cannes, always have an eclectic mix of members on their award juries. For example, the feature film jury at Cannes in 2006 included Samuel L. Jackson, Wong Kar-Wai and Helena Bonham Carter (wouldn't you love to see those three involved in a film together?). This year's Sundance juries, which have just been announced, are no exception. Jurors for the dramatic competition include actor/musician Mos Def, actress Sarah Polley (whose feature directorial debut Away from Her is the festival's Gala opener), director Catherine Hardwicke (The Nativity Story and Thirteen), editor Pamela Martin (Little Miss Sunshine and Slums of Beverly Hills) and Dawn Hudson, executive director of Film Independent/LAFF. I'm pleased to see the high percentage of women on this jury, too.

Other Sundance 2007 juries don't have quite so many high-profile names but are still interesting: the documentary jury consists mainly of doc filmmakers, many of whom have had movies premiere at Sundance themselves: Julia Reichart, Alan Berliner (Wide Awake), Lauren Greenfield (Thin), editor Lewis Erskine and playwright Carlos Sandoval. The jury for the Alfred E. Sloane prize for indie films related to science and technology contains professors and science consultants ... and director Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain). And the short film competition jury includes Jared Hess, who directed a past Sundance hit, Napoleon Dynamite. Hess based Napoleon Dynamite on a previous short film he made, but I've never thought of him as someone with a background in short filmmaking. Still, his name will help generate popular interest in the short-film category, which always seems to need more attention than it gets.

The struggle to bring John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces to the screen began over 25 years ago. Scott Kramer picked up the rights to the novel in 1980, and he has been trying to get a film made ever since. Toole's novel (published 11 years after the author had committed suicide) about an overweight and socially maladjusted philosopher on the streets of New Orleans won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

In 2005, Steven Soderbergh had been working on an adaptation with Will Ferrell as the lead of an all-star cast including Lily Tomlin, Mos Def, and Olympia Dukakis, but it all fell apart. How that happened depends on which story you believe: problems with publishing rights, no one in Hollywood was willing to finance it, or maybe the whole production was cursed -- those rumors were fueled not only by the author's suicide, but by the deaths of so many of the actors associated with the part in the past (John Belushi, Chris Farley, and John Candy had each been attached at one point). Not to mention the murder of Louisiana's Film Commissioner and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina ground pre-production to a halt.

A recent article in Slate reports that the cast and crew are still willing to go ahead with the project, pay cuts and all. Paramount has yet to officially commit, so when it comes to this movie, I'll believe it when I see it.

On this edition of Movie Pics, Jim Carrey goes crazy, Michel Gondry takes a trip to Passaic, New Jersey and -- wait, there's another Iwo Jima film from Clint Eastwood? Oh, you bet your ass there is. Check it out:

• Some of the first images from Clint Eastwood's second Iwo Jima-related film, Letters from Iwo Jima, have hit the net. While Flags of our Fathers (in theaters now) recalls the Battle of Iwo Jima from the American perspective (ya know, the whole famous flag raising photo thing), Letters focuses on the Japanese perspective. Ken Watanabe stars in the pic, and it's currently scheduled for a February 7 release. [via JoBlo]
• It's not much, but the New York Times ran a story recently covering Michel Gondry's decision to shoot his new film, Be Kind Rewind, in Passaic, New Jersey. One of the pics show a bunch of kids hanging around outside what appears to be the actual video store in which folks like Jack Black and Mos Def try to save (by re-creating a bunch of classic movies after they're accidentally ruined) in order to satisfy the store's one loyal customer -- an old woman with signs of dementia. The other photo features Gondry on set. Flick is due out in theaters next year.
• Though the trailer for The Number 23 was supposed to run before prints of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, that didn't happen (we think). However, JoBlo snagged a bunch of screencaps from the trailer and, well, Jim Carrey looks pretty messed up in this one. Directed by Joel Schumacher, pic seems to go the Stranger Than Fiction route in that it revolves around a guy (Carrey) who becomes obsessed with a book he thinks is based on his life -- a book that ends with a murder that hasn't happened yet. Spooky. Unlike Fiction, The Number 23 is going the dark route, as you can probably detect from the assortment of stills available. Yep, dark and bloody. I dig it.

Man, I am so totally stoked about Be Kind Rewind. Everything about the movie -- yes, including the fact that Kirsten "I'm Adorable Even Though the Internets Hate Me" Dunst might be in it -- sounds completely fantastic, and I refuse to let my customary pessimism harsh my buzz about this one. For those of you who have somehow overlooked our previous posts on the subject, the movie is about a guy with a Magnetic Brain (of course he'll be played by Jack Black) who accidentally erases all the tapes in the video store at which his best friend (Mos Freaking Def) works. You know, with his big ol' head. So, in order to not disappoint the store's only regular customer -- an old lady whose mind is going -- the friends do the logical thing, and set out to recreate the movies she liked to rent. Yes, that's right: Jack Black and Mos Def shoot their own versions of Rush Hour, Lion King, and Robocop. And the movie was written and will be directed by Michel Gondry. Have you wet yourselves with joy yet?

The latest update on the film* is that, in addition to Danny Glover (who we already knew would appear), Melonie Diaz and Mia Farrow have also joined the cast, with Diaz as Mos Def's coworker, and Farrow, one assumes/hopes, as the shop's customer. Honestly. The only way this movie can get better is if Tommy Lee Jones joins the cast. If he does, the fact that shooting doesn't being until next month will not stop me from camping out for tickets. Like, now.

*Disturbingly, Dunst's name is not mentioned in the most recent Variety article, so make of that what you will. For the moment, I'm choosing to believe it was an oversight, rather than evidence that her talks to appear didn't work out.