Today I wanted to talk about the last movie I saw in theaters, Be Kind Rewind.
Currently, this movie is earning a 67% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a pretty dismal 52/100 rating on Metacritic. Here's a sampling of the nonsense offered by three prominent critics:
Anthony Lane: "Most of Be Kind Rewind feels as silly and undisciplined as the mini-movies cooked up by its hapless heroes."
Todd McCarthy: "It's a quick trip from whimsy to silliness in Be Kind Rewind, a notably ephemeral work by Michel Gondry, whose flights of fancy can't overcome the egregious illogic of the premise."
Emanuel Levy: "If you didn't read the credits, you would think that Be Kind Rewind was made by a grad of film School or first-time director--it's that raw and amateurish."
If you couldn't tell already, I disagree. To me, Be Kind Rewind is a superb piece of entertainment. Michel Gondry's film felt like a 100-minute vacation from the worst aspects of my generation. A lot of critics want you to think the film is "slight" or "silly." I'll give them the second, but never the first. Be Kind Rewind tackles media conglomeration, cultural homogenization, fan fiction, do-it-yourself media culture, and the notion of folk art vs. corporate art.
I could go on and elaborate here, but I'd probably be doing little more than paraphrasing one of my favorite critics, Keith Phipps from the AV Club. Here's how he put it (read whole review herehttp://www.avclub.com/content/cinema/be_kind_rewind) :
"Hollywood films have become monoliths. They arrive market-tested and as carefully packaged as a new deodorant, made with bankable stars, safe directors, and scripts that had their edges shaved off long before the cameras started rolling. They're products padded for maximum safety and spoken of in careful talking points before being released to theaters. And then they take on lives of their own. What a film does—or fails to do—to a viewer is much more personal.
The question of who controls popular culture is at the heart of Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, and it's hard to imagine anyone else handling it with such a sure, light touch."Phipps hits it right on the head. Gondry may be a little heavy handed in how he visualizes his themes, but the film is so earnest that it never even borders on pretentious. Take the film's beginning, for example: After the Fats Waller opening, we get a hovering helicopter shot of a 20-lane highway with a line of skyscrapers behind it. I was immediately put off by this blah opening image. But Gondry's camera moves away from the big-city tableaux, and heads underneath a bridge, where we see Jack Black and Mos Def defacing city property with an image of Fats Waller. In one shot, Gondry moves form the impersonal/macro to the personal/micro. The image is reminiscent of Hitchcock's opening of Psycho, a crane shot through a large city into the lascivious affairs of one couple through their window. In both films, we move from the innocuous to the underground and the seedy -- to see things we don't usually see in Hollywood movies (in Psycho we see infidelity and black underwear; in Rewind we see two men who, again and again, challenge the law for the sake of community art).
It may immediately seem pompous to compare a Jack Black movie to Hitchcock, I know. But, I'd argue, that gets at Gondry's incredible skill here: he's made a film about tangible, socially-relevant issues that's goofy, fun, and crowd-pleasing.
Gondry's movie isn't just a utopian vacation away from the real world. Sure, the film makes no claim to realism, and few would argue that the film's plot could actually happen in the real world, but, more than anything, Be Kind Rewind is a fable meant to get you excited about the idea of folk art. And, to me, it succeeds resoundingly. Gondry uses silliness and music montages to mobilize viewers, to make them want to be a part of the do-it-yourself movement, to make them question why art has to be handed down from companies to citizens.
But, lastly, the film has enough nuance to avoid Hollywood-bashing. One scene, for example, shows Black and Def talking about The Lion King in a small restaurant. Workers and patrons overhear their conversation and chime in with their own stories and opinion on the film. It's an oddly beautiful moment that shows how Hollywood movies -- the same movies that grow more homogeneous and innocuous by the year -- also have the power to connect people in ways only mass media can.
This is the first (and most likely last) Jack Black movie that's made me weep.
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