Ben Harper interviews Ringo Starr

Be Kind Rewind

Be Kind Rewind is the first film I’ve seen this year that I cannot wait to see again. The film revolves around a video, and we mean video not DVD, store that once housed Fats Waller. Now the building stands condemned unless proprietor Danny Glover can raise an impossible sum just to bring the roof up to code.
But Fats (his life and his music) is just the smoke that obscures the underlying storyline, a surreal narrative that unmasks the nature of the viewer’s very desire to watch movies. We watch because we see ourselves in the characters. It’s no surprise that director Michel Gondry has made a movie blossoming with visual inventiveness, this is the mind behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Science of Sleep not to mention his YouTube video solving a Rubik’s Cube with his nose that has garnered over 2 million views.
Be Kind Rewind store employee Mos Def is put in charge when Glover takes a week off for a Waller tribute in Kansas City with the explicit warning to not let junkyard neighbor Jack Black in the store. In the belief a nearby power station sends rays to control his mind Black tries to sabotage the transformers only to himself magnetized. Natch he comes into the store and erases every rental tape. Black and Def then start making ad hoc movies with a video camera to rent to loyal customers. Gondry pits old school technology against the cold progress of digital information. The customers don’t own DVD players so they rent VHS tapes, likewise they attach themselves to the Be Kind Rewind version of popular movies like Ghostbusters and Rush Hour 2 because they’re only 20 minutes and the effects aren’t generated with computers but with imagination. Or as Black tells the Feds when they confiscate the inventory: But we erased the part with the FBI warning.
Even as Be Kind Rewind glorifies and finds fetish worthy images of everything from King Kong to Robocop this is not a film for the I Am Legend crowd. (My laughter throughout the film was falling on deaf ears.) Gondry probably orbits on a sphere outside of Spike Jonze or Wes Anderson as far as regular filmgoers are concerned.



Sure Black gives one of his patented comic turns but really his snide yet persuasive charm ranks this turn among his top three performances (along with School of Rock and High Fidelity). Mos Def plays the perfect sane foil to Black’s outcast; Melonie Diaz and Mia Farrow steal scenes that aren’t bolted down by Black who at one point dons the bowler hat and starched shirt of a droogie from Clockwork Orange; while Glover provides the rock steady portrait of a man who can swallow rejection with pride, and find victory in defeat.
The Fats Waller angle seems tacked on at the beginning but his memory and influence determine the film’s ending in ways that become apparent as it unfolds. Gondry doesn’t just stage creative tableaux (the chain link fence gag is a classic) but plays with the depth of field in set ups inside the store. There is digital manipulation but in weird ways, like someone is rubbing a 30-foot magnet across the screen at times. Even though the movie-in-a-movie effects are inexpensive in a Ken Russell kind of way the film has a slick look when the recreation shots are being highlighted. Be Kind Rewind is more art house than mainstream comedy and that’s obviously okay with me.

Lunar Eclipse