FILM: Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008)
There was a fascinating news item recently about a group of kids who began making a shot-for-shot camcorder remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark back in 1981 using whatever limited means were at their disposal. They finally completed their masterpiece after eight years of painstaking work and, following a high-profile magazine scoop, eventually got to present it to Steven Spielberg himself. The ensuing hoopla secured them not just a limited release in selected art theatres, but also an upcoming Hollywood biopic after a producer bought the rights to their story.
I’ve watched the first ten minutes of their efforts online - given the circumstances of its creation (no effects budget, non-professional actors, sets created in their garage), it’s absolutely astonishing. The exercise in itself though raises numerous teasing questions: at what point does an amateur labour of love assume the mantle of being a work of art unto itself? Why is their experiment, conducted outside of the realm of commercial interests and apparently fuelled solely by an intense love of the original film, more legitimate than, say, Gus Van Sant’s much-lambasted shot-for-shot ‘revisioning’ of Psycho?
Michel Gondry, a director who dwells in abstracts more than most, is someone I’ve always had a fairly ambivalent relationship with. His undeniable imagination and knack for innovative flights of visual fancy (anointing him as a not-too-distant cousin of the equally divisive Terry Gilliam) forever seem to detract from the emotional substance at the core of his subject matter. Working from an achingly melancholic script by Being John Malkovich scribe Charlie Kaufman, I always felt that Gondry somehow managed to derail the guttural impact of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by filling it with the kind of exhausting, overblown subconscious comic interludes which would later reach an excruciating nadir in David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees. Indeed, the director’s last effort - the execrable Science of Sleep - is one of the few movies I’ve ever felt compelled to turn off, such was the numbing experience of what felt like being bashed around the head with a child’s squeaky toy for 90 minutes.
His latest, though, represents something of an about-turn which might just prove to be the smartest meditation on audiences’ relationship with screen images to emerge fromHollywood
Jack Black and Mos Def play a pair of small-town losers inhabiting Be Kind Rewind, a derelict video rental store in a crumbling neighbourhood which offers the simple pleasure of ‘1 Tape, 1 Dollar, 1 Night’. Its owner (Danny Glover) is a mild-mannered relic apparently oblivious to the threat of DVD and reluctant to take steps to modernise his business on the grounds that it supposedly sits in the historical birthplace of jazz legend Fats Waller, and thus ought to be preserved in its current state. Threatened with closure within 60 days unless extensive repair work is completed, the beleaguered owner undergoes a pilgrimage to Waller’s final resting-place in a bid to drum up fresh inspiration; in his absence, Black’s attempts to sabotage the local power-plant (don’t ask) lead to him becoming magnetised and inadvertently erasing the entire store’s contents. Rather than admitting defeat, the pair begins to shoot its own amateur remakes of the damaged films using a handheld camera. Far from infuriating the rental community, their efforts – including uproarious renditions of Ghostbusters, 2001, Carrie, The Lion King and Robocop - prove a massive hit.
Like Gondry’s previous cinematic outings, Be Kind Rewind contains its fair share of scrabbling for wacky laughs (in particular a gratingly superfluous scene in which Black’s magnetised piss attracts fragments of scrap metal), but the ultimate strength of the film rests in its deployment of a multifaceted conceit capable of withstanding numerous interpretations. Aside from presenting a simple but effective metaphor for the twin worlds of independent DIY filmmaking and the lumbering corporate juggernaut which sanctions ‘legitimate’ (i.e. commercially-motivated) forms of cinema, Be Kind Rewind can be read as a treatise on art and commerce, together with the conflicting market forces driving a wedge between them. Indeed, it contains perhaps the best swipe at corporate rental chains since the clueless store clerk in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World mistook 8 ½ for 9 ½ Weeks, when Glover’s character creates a checklist of action-points while perusing the local rental behemoth: more copies, less choice, crushing market dominance and no specific knowledge of the product being offered.
The thin line between pastiche, parody, homage and all-out theft in creative endeavours comes in for passing analysis when, in a hugely enjoyable cameo, Sigourney Weaver pops up as the head of an anti-copyright organisation to threaten the pair with a multi-billion dollar fine or a total of 65,000 years in jail for their sins (the irony being that had the movies been recorded onto blank tapes rather than existing copies which remain “the property of the studio”, they probably could’ve gotten away with it under a legal technicality). Weaver, both key-master and gatekeeper to the store’s fortunes, ultimately orders the destruction of their labour under the auspices of protecting the studios’ commercial interests; “Oh, somehow we’re the bad guys now…”, she sighs wearily as her cronies literally steamroller the Be Kind Rewind team’s efforts beneath the wheels of corporate justice.
I’ve watched the first ten minutes of their efforts online - given the circumstances of its creation (no effects budget, non-professional actors, sets created in their garage), it’s absolutely astonishing. The exercise in itself though raises numerous teasing questions: at what point does an amateur labour of love assume the mantle of being a work of art unto itself? Why is their experiment, conducted outside of the realm of commercial interests and apparently fuelled solely by an intense love of the original film, more legitimate than, say, Gus Van Sant’s much-lambasted shot-for-shot ‘revisioning’ of Psycho?
Michel Gondry, a director who dwells in abstracts more than most, is someone I’ve always had a fairly ambivalent relationship with. His undeniable imagination and knack for innovative flights of visual fancy (anointing him as a not-too-distant cousin of the equally divisive Terry Gilliam) forever seem to detract from the emotional substance at the core of his subject matter. Working from an achingly melancholic script by Being John Malkovich scribe Charlie Kaufman, I always felt that Gondry somehow managed to derail the guttural impact of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by filling it with the kind of exhausting, overblown subconscious comic interludes which would later reach an excruciating nadir in David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees. Indeed, the director’s last effort - the execrable Science of Sleep - is one of the few movies I’ve ever felt compelled to turn off, such was the numbing experience of what felt like being bashed around the head with a child’s squeaky toy for 90 minutes.
His latest, though, represents something of an about-turn which might just prove to be the smartest meditation on audiences’ relationship with screen images to emerge from
Jack Black and Mos Def play a pair of small-town losers inhabiting Be Kind Rewind, a derelict video rental store in a crumbling neighbourhood which offers the simple pleasure of ‘1 Tape, 1 Dollar, 1 Night’. Its owner (Danny Glover) is a mild-mannered relic apparently oblivious to the threat of DVD and reluctant to take steps to modernise his business on the grounds that it supposedly sits in the historical birthplace of jazz legend Fats Waller, and thus ought to be preserved in its current state. Threatened with closure within 60 days unless extensive repair work is completed, the beleaguered owner undergoes a pilgrimage to Waller’s final resting-place in a bid to drum up fresh inspiration; in his absence, Black’s attempts to sabotage the local power-plant (don’t ask) lead to him becoming magnetised and inadvertently erasing the entire store’s contents. Rather than admitting defeat, the pair begins to shoot its own amateur remakes of the damaged films using a handheld camera. Far from infuriating the rental community, their efforts – including uproarious renditions of Ghostbusters, 2001, Carrie, The Lion King and Robocop - prove a massive hit.
Like Gondry’s previous cinematic outings, Be Kind Rewind contains its fair share of scrabbling for wacky laughs (in particular a gratingly superfluous scene in which Black’s magnetised piss attracts fragments of scrap metal), but the ultimate strength of the film rests in its deployment of a multifaceted conceit capable of withstanding numerous interpretations. Aside from presenting a simple but effective metaphor for the twin worlds of independent DIY filmmaking and the lumbering corporate juggernaut which sanctions ‘legitimate’ (i.e. commercially-motivated) forms of cinema, Be Kind Rewind can be read as a treatise on art and commerce, together with the conflicting market forces driving a wedge between them. Indeed, it contains perhaps the best swipe at corporate rental chains since the clueless store clerk in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World mistook 8 ½ for 9 ½ Weeks, when Glover’s character creates a checklist of action-points while perusing the local rental behemoth: more copies, less choice, crushing market dominance and no specific knowledge of the product being offered.
The thin line between pastiche, parody, homage and all-out theft in creative endeavours comes in for passing analysis when, in a hugely enjoyable cameo, Sigourney Weaver pops up as the head of an anti-copyright organisation to threaten the pair with a multi-billion dollar fine or a total of 65,000 years in jail for their sins (the irony being that had the movies been recorded onto blank tapes rather than existing copies which remain “the property of the studio”, they probably could’ve gotten away with it under a legal technicality). Weaver, both key-master and gatekeeper to the store’s fortunes, ultimately orders the destruction of their labour under the auspices of protecting the studios’ commercial interests; “Oh, somehow we’re the bad guys now…”, she sighs wearily as her cronies literally steamroller the Be Kind Rewind team’s efforts beneath the wheels of corporate justice.
Turning in another aggressive comic performance guaranteed to amuse and irritate in equal measure, Jack Black’s character acts as a sort of Shakespearean Fool throughout, commenting on the process from the sidelines with numerous asides and symbolic interjections (in one particularly enjoyable episode which I will admit had me screaming with laughter, he blacks up to audition for the part of Fats Waller and seems baffled to discover that the townsfolk find it even partway inappropriate). To this end, Be Kind Rewind reveals a Brechtian artifice at every turn, from Mos Def’s blank performance in the lead to the fact that even its basic emotional foundations (the fabricated tale of the store’s origins) are a lie.
Be Kind Rewind is a veritable prism of ideas. It can be taken as a critique ofHollywood remakes, which are inevitably sloppier and inferior to the original but invariably more popular. It can be seen as an insight into the authorship process of movies’ conception and execution, specifically the extent to which audiences’ own individual hopes, dreams, ambitions and aspirations are reflected through our relationship with (and investment in) the material onscreen. Through the group’s creation of a fictional Fats Waller biopic, it also offers a window onto the ways in which we’re willing to allow cinema to reconfigure our own history for posterity, even if that means sentimentalising, fictionalising or ultimately constructing it from scratch.
Those who’d prefer to gloss over such conjecture can revel in some deliciously absurd parodies of Hollywood excess through Black’s growing megalomania and conviction that he’s more than just a star - he’s an artist (one fleeting, hilarious gag sees him photocopying his mugshot numerous times with the words ‘For Your Consideration’ scrawled underneath). Mia Farrow has an enjoyable bit-part as a daffy middle-aged sap blithely consuming the manufactured sentiments of films like Driving Miss Daisy as proof of her own compassion and humanity. Indeed, by parodying the inanity of both prestige and throwaway mainstream projects with such razor-sharp precision, Gondry breaks down the mystique of Hollywood lore - the oft-stated myth of “movie magic” - by demonstrating the extent to which apparent feats of technical brilliance can be replicated using primitive means, and meticulously deconstructs Hollywood conventions throughout (most notably when he sabotages a romantic moment beyond Mos Def and Melonie Diaz by reducing it to an awkward discussion of her lip hair).
Ultimately though the galvanising power of the medium is affirmed in the film’s closing shot, in which the town unites behind the group’s efforts at the premiere of their own fictional history. Beyond the final frames of the movie, the world progresses with its grim agenda of destruction regardless: the store is still going to be demolished, rendering its inhabitants homeless and customers destitute. Yet for one glorious moment they become heroes of the community, capable of uniting all races, genders, ages and classes in a moment of shared experience. Perhaps this is why the protagonists’ bumbling remakes ultimately fail to bring about the necessary financial turnaround to save their store: when their endeavours become part of a cynical upward trajectory and just another means to generate capital, they lose the element of creative spark which ignited them in the first instance. The triumph of Fats Waller: Our History – and, indeed, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation – can thus be seen in simple terms: by virtue of their inherently hopeless acknowledgement that art and its potential affects can perhaps never be fully reconciled in any commercial system, they are invested with more heart, love and personality than a comparable big-budget enterprise could ever hope to be.
Be Kind Rewind is a veritable prism of ideas. It can be taken as a critique of
Those who’d prefer to gloss over such conjecture can revel in some deliciously absurd parodies of Hollywood excess through Black’s growing megalomania and conviction that he’s more than just a star - he’s an artist (one fleeting, hilarious gag sees him photocopying his mugshot numerous times with the words ‘For Your Consideration’ scrawled underneath). Mia Farrow has an enjoyable bit-part as a daffy middle-aged sap blithely consuming the manufactured sentiments of films like Driving Miss Daisy as proof of her own compassion and humanity. Indeed, by parodying the inanity of both prestige and throwaway mainstream projects with such razor-sharp precision, Gondry breaks down the mystique of Hollywood lore - the oft-stated myth of “movie magic” - by demonstrating the extent to which apparent feats of technical brilliance can be replicated using primitive means, and meticulously deconstructs Hollywood conventions throughout (most notably when he sabotages a romantic moment beyond Mos Def and Melonie Diaz by reducing it to an awkward discussion of her lip hair).
Ultimately though the galvanising power of the medium is affirmed in the film’s closing shot, in which the town unites behind the group’s efforts at the premiere of their own fictional history. Beyond the final frames of the movie, the world progresses with its grim agenda of destruction regardless: the store is still going to be demolished, rendering its inhabitants homeless and customers destitute. Yet for one glorious moment they become heroes of the community, capable of uniting all races, genders, ages and classes in a moment of shared experience. Perhaps this is why the protagonists’ bumbling remakes ultimately fail to bring about the necessary financial turnaround to save their store: when their endeavours become part of a cynical upward trajectory and just another means to generate capital, they lose the element of creative spark which ignited them in the first instance. The triumph of Fats Waller: Our History – and, indeed, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation – can thus be seen in simple terms: by virtue of their inherently hopeless acknowledgement that art and its potential affects can perhaps never be fully reconciled in any commercial system, they are invested with more heart, love and personality than a comparable big-budget enterprise could ever hope to be.
posted by Chris Carter at 8:03 AM
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