Foreman grilled: Jack Black spoofs boxer George Foreman in Be Kind Rewind.
Danny Glover plays Mr. Fletcher,
operator of the run-down Be Kind Rewind Video and Thrift Store in
Passaic, N.J. Times are changing for the hurting mom-and-pop shop
devoted to VHS rentals, and a developer wants to relocate the joint and
build condos in the spot. Fletcher takes a weeklong retreat, both to
commemorate the long-ago passing of jazz great Fats Waller, whom
Fletcher claims was born in the same building, as well as contemplate
his next business move, such as taking note of how big-time video-store
chains handle their inventory. (“Less choice, more copies, same
movies,” he jots down.) But Fletcher has his unpaid associate Mike
(rapper Mos Def, an adept straight man) in charge, and Mike’s pal,
energetic nitwit Jerry (Jack Black), has an uncanny ability to royally
screw things up.
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So Jerry gets magnetized during an act
of industrial sabotage (don’t ask) and he winds up inadvertently
bulk-erasing Be Kind Rewind’s videotapes. And since Fletcher is sending
nosy neighbor Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow) to spy on the boys while he’s
away, Mike and Jerry hatch a desperate solution: take a videocamera,
some costumes and a little imagination and create abridged versions of
well-known titles such as the sports documentary When We Were Kings (with Jerry as George Foreman to Mike’s Muhammad Ali) to Rush Hour 2
(with Jerry as an inscrutable Jackie Chan playing against Mike’s
jive-talking Chris Tucker). The homemade versions become inexplicable
hits with the community (Jerry says the videos are “sweded,” meaning
they were made in Sweden), but there’s a reason why those prerecorded
videocassettes have FBI warnings that precede the movies, as Mike and
Jerry soon discover.
As with all Jack Black movies, a little
of this tubby eye-roller goes a long way, and Gondry gives him ample
room to roam. In one early gag Black’s Jerry comments about Fletcher’s
mistaken illiteracy with, “That would be racist,” albeit while wearing
blackface camouflage. Yet Gondry repeats the joke in a later scene when
Jerry dons dark makeup in his thwarted bid to portray Waller, almost as
if Gondry is rewinding his own Rewind.
The low-rent recreations of once-popular
movies are always inventive, however, kind of like a crash course in
the moviemaking style of budget-conscious auteur Roger Corman, with
laugh-out-loud moments aplenty in the sweded versions of Ghostbusters (the not-so-special effects are priceless) and Driving Miss Daisy
(Black’s Jerry hams it up as Jessica Tandy), and more movie references
littered on the fringes. (The characters of Jerry and Mike may
correspond with the same-named kids who are trapped in the giant
ant-infested Los Angeles sewer system during the climax of 1954’s Them!)
Be Kind Rewind’s final reels
somehow morph Corman’s brand of penny-pinching improvs with director
John Ford’s “print the legend” mantra from the revisionist history
lessons of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), as the
Passaic community joins forces for a Fats Waller biopic. Things get a
tad sentimental at this point, a surprise considering that the rest of
Gondry’s movie boasts a loose Altman-esque flavor that is in sync with
its own offbeat funkiness. Still, viewers should be smiling from start
to finish while watching Gondry and his talented ensemble get seduced
by the primal pull of cinema.
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New Line Home Entertainment’s DVD offers
both widescreen (2.35:1 ratio) and full-screen options; the letterboxed
version shows Gondry’s easy command of the rectangular canvas, although
the full-screen image does allow for closer scrutiny of the sight gags
that get diminished during the widescreen process. Not many extras
here, just a 2½-minute trailer and an 11-minute behind-the-scenes
vignette, “Passaic Mosaic,” that thankfully is not a puff piece, as
Passaic residents and the movie crew join forces for an entertaining
profile. Another neat plus is the DVD box’s packaging, with its
cardboard spine embossed with a faux handwritten rendering of the
title, a creative touch that was also employed in the Criterion
Collection’s DVD release of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome.
—Bill DeLapp
