Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #251: Be Kind Rewind (2008).

 

In Passaic, New Jersey, Mike (Mos Def) holds the fort at the struggling video rental store "Be Kind Rewind," while his employer Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) is on leave. Fletcher has given Mike a message to not let the clumsy and unhinged Jerry (Jack Black) into the store, but Mike misinterpreted that message. After then trying to deactivate a nearby power substation because he thinks it's melting his brain, Jerry receives an electrical shock which renders him magnetised before he enters the store and inadvertently erases all its tapes. Now, of course, the customers (including Mia Farrow as one) start to complain about the tapes they've hired, so Mike and Jerry hatch a plan: with no budget or additional help, they will reshoot every single movie in the store and hope nobody notices. Well, the customers do notice, but these homemade remakes prove unexpectedly popular, if not exactly legal.

After making the Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and music videos for everybody from Paul McCartney to Kraftwerk, Michel Gondry definitely has a reputation for nonconformity and variety and both those qualities are overflowing in the delightful Be Kind Rewind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the store houses literally hundreds of titles, the films referenced and recreated here go from everything to Driving Miss Daisy to RoboCop to The Lion King and, in my favourite recreation (or "swedes" as they're called in the film), 2001: A Space Odyssey. But there's more to enjoy than just the laughs from those re-shoots. Be Kind Rewind also makes a lucid statement on film industry changes that remain unfolding now, and on where and how creativity and inspiration start.

This was evidently Gondry's attempt to salute cinema and some of its most iconic and influential modern entries while also turning them all on their heads. His enthusiastic, indeed almost anarchic insistence on doing that proved contagious for me, and he realised it with a fabulous dadaist vibe and appropriately easy-going performances. Above all, though, it's a celebration of filmmaking itself. Be Kind Rewind is (almost) too good to return.