Be Kind Rewind (**)

Michel Gondrey’s kooky comedy has a funny premise that, as executed, seemed too silly for me to accept. Mos Def plays Mike, a video store clerk in Passaic, New Jersey, who has to improvise when his friend Jerry (Jack Black) accidentally erases all of the tapes. See, Jerry’s become magnetized, and the store is still dealing strictly in VHS. A dollar a day is the price, which helps explain why the store’s owner, played by Danny Glover, is about to lose the store. So the solution to the erased tapes is that Mike and Jerry will team up, with some help from the locals, to re-film all of the movies that customers want to rent. Oh, and there’s a whole thread running throughout the story about how the store was once the home of early jazz great Fats Waller, which gives you some idea of why the movie didn’t make it to the multiplexes.

This is mostly cute and charming, like Gondrey’s last movie, The Science of Sleep, and there is some visual whimsy, though not quite as much as in that film. Black’s personality keeps it from becoming too precious, and I liked Melonie Diaz as the third partner in the cinematic enterprise. But the main thing for me was, even if I believe that Mike and Jerry could make these movies in a few hours, that not for a moment could I suspend my disbelief that these short versions of Hollywood hits would be something people would want to watch, though the ultra-low-budget filming techniques do provoke some laughter. But even though I sort of liked the story’s community/power-of-cinema-affirming ending, it seemed too unreal. You can go to the movie’s web site to judge the results for yourself; the feature merely shows short bits. Maybe Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenenbaums) or somebody could have made the whole thing work. But the combination of absurdism and small-city charm here didn’t mesh for me.

IMDB link

viewed and reviewed 3/19/08