MasterChugs Theater: ‘Be Kind Rewind’

In its sweet, lackadaisical way, Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind illuminates the pleasures and paradoxes of movie love. Its two main characters, a pair of Passaic, N.J., loafers named Mike and Jerry, are devotees of the Hollywood mainstream, paying tribute to well-worn classics like Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy, Rush Hour 2 and The Lion King. The way they express this affection lands Mike and Jerry in a spot of copyright trouble, but they (and Gondry) provide a welcome reminder that even the slickest blockbuster is also a piece of handicraft, an artifact of somebody’s nutty, unbounded ingenuity and the potential object of somebody else’s innocent, childlike fascination.

Mos Def stars as Mike, a sweet, shy guy who has worked all his life at Be Kind Rewind, the video and junk store owned by his surrogate father Mr. Fletcher. He reluctantly pals around with Jerry, who works at the junkyard down the street and holds a strange vendetta against a nearby electrical plant. On the weekend when Mr. Fletcher leaves town to research other video stores in nearby New York that have switched to DVD, Jerry becomes accidentally magnetized when an attempt to sabotage the electrical plant goes wrong. As soon as Jerry steps into Be Kind Rewind, he accidentally erases all the tapes in the store.

Batty neighbor Miss Falewicz is taking calls from Mr. Fletcher each night to keep him up to date on the store, so when she asks Mike and Jerry for a copy of Ghostbusters, they panic. Unable to get another copy, they decide to reshoot it themselves—“I’m Bill Murray, you’re everybody else,” Jerry tells Mike—figuring she’s never seen the original anyway. Their version takes place entirely in the local library and is 20 minutes long, but when some of the thuggish guys in the neighborhood get a look at it, they want more.

Jerry makes up the term “sweding” for what they do to films like Rush Hour, King Kong and even 2001: A Space Odyssey, establishing a miniature local film industry with the help of a dry cleaner employee (Melonie Diaz) and neighborhood residents. The fun is interrupted, though, by the classic bigwigs in suits, who want to tear down Be Kind Rewind and build a cleaned-up downtown area. Mike decides that, to save the neighborhood, they will band together to make a movie about Fats Waller, the jazz musician who is Mike’s hero.

On paper, it sounds eccentric, but this is all part of Gondry’s vision. He presents us with a film whose simple structure could have tripped from the tongue of any vacuous pony-tailed studio exec (a community coming together to save a dilapidated video shop? It could only have come from the ’80s!). But Gondry uses this premise to flip open the ribcage of cinema and allow us to peruse its blood, bones and sinew, and really see how they flow, fit and flex into a glorious whole.

The magnitude of Gondry’s visual ingenuity is consistently jaw-dropping: with the aid of some washing machine innards and a white jump suit, he manages to reduce the iconic rotating space station scene from 2001 to a kind of cinematic primordial ooze, at once presenting the infinite potential of the camera to create, subvert and renew reality while also screaming, ‘Yes, you can do this too!’

It goes without saying that this is a naïve, utopian point of view. The travestied films in Be Kind Rewind are the intellectual property of large corporations, and you can be sure that teams of lawyers were consulted and paid before the Sweding went very far. But the movie hardly pretends otherwise. Instead it treats movies as found objects, as material to be messed around with, explored and reimagined. It connects the do-it-yourself aesthetic of YouTube and other digital diversions with the older, predigital impulse to put on a show in the backyard or play your favorite band’s hits with your buddies in the garage.

And the deep charm of the film is that it allows the audience to experience it with the same kind of casual fondness. It is propelled by neither the psychology of its characters nor the machinery of its plot, but rather by a leisurely desire to pass the time, to see what happens next, to find out what would happen if you tried to re-enact Ghostbusters in your neighbor’s kitchen. It’s inviting, undemanding and altogether wonderful. Be Kind Rewind is one of many movies out there that display just why I love film and movies so much. There’s a charm that just makes you feel good. You’ll want to see it again, or at least Swede it yourself.