Be Kind Rewind

***

Written and Directed by Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry certainly has a unique visual style. The music-video director turned filmmaker uses an array of clever (and dare I say quirky) camera tricks that create realistic worlds in the spirit of the French New Wave filtered through Lynchian peculiarity. This style worked perfectly in Charlie Kaufman’s masterpiece Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, depicting suburbia, memories, literally, in the brain, and the power of love in the same aesthetic. Perhaps the previous sentence epitomizes the problems with Gondry as well: Eternal Sunshine cannot be considered his movie. Gondry has yet to develop an intellectual or thematic framework (at least a mature or complex one) for his visionary moving picture shows. This holds true for his latest film Be Kind Rewind, a pleasant comedy in the truest sense. Gondry is playing with the camera and asking the audience to have as much fun watching the film as he did making it.

Jerry (Jack Black)—the resident eccentric of a New York suburb—lives in a junkyard and is convinced that the neighboring power plant is causing his headaches. His body is magnetized during a sabotage mission of said power plant, and wanders into the Be Kind Rewind video store run by his friend Mike (Mos Def, excellent). Mike is entrusted in the care of the store by his father figure and storeowner Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), who is on vacation trying to figure out why his video store could possibly be failing financially in the world of DVDs. Mike lives only to make Mr. Fletcher proud and is obviously distraught when the magnetized Jerry erases all of the store’s videotapes. The pair goes on to direct, “write”, and star in dozens of homemade recreations of the deleted video tapes which become a neighborhood sensation.

Gondry has his most fun during Jerry and Mike’s creation of the films. The duo’s dependence on everyday items for props, sets, and characters allows Gondry to create terrific illusions with these items; a superb recreation of when Bowman jogs in the spaceship in 2001; the use of doormat with a bird’s eye view of a neighborhood depicted on it as a backdrop for the fight on top of a building in Rush Hour; or even the white and black people’s fingers (still attached) as keys on a keyboard. These gags are fun, but by themselves don’t do much or really attract the audience (except for the obviously high kids two rows up).

Where the film (surprisingly) works is in the honestly formulated characters. Mike and Mr. Fletcher share a slight lisp, which I thought was an obvious foreshadowing to a biological connection, but turns out to be Gondry just nudging us in that direction. Mos Def doesn’t simply make Mike a dimwit or fool, but someone who just doesn’t happen to be smart. The audience can relate to Mike’s normalcy in this otherwise abnormal environment, creating an emotional centre to the film. Jack Black plays Jerry like he does all of his characters…crazy, out of touch, charming, and hilarious, but like all of Black’s characters, it works brilliantly. Black brings tons of energy to every scene he’s in, but manages to not chew up the scenery, creating an impression of chaos and simultaneous joy. Mike and Jerry work best when both are in frame, for contrast and complement, accentuating the other’s personality.

When Be Kind Rewind ended I was not struck by its profoundness, thematic complexity, moral ambiguity, or astonishing filmmaking, because none of these qualities are in the film. I felt happy. Not the end-of-a-Spielberg-film-happy, where you don’t have to earn the happiness and are manipulated into feeling that way, but genuinely honestly happy. We don’t know if the Be Kind Rewind video store succeeds, or if Mike, Jerry, and Mr. Fletcher live happily ever after, but we have faith that they do. If Gondry’s lack of intellectual depth is not going to change, I can live with this optimism.

The Best Biopic/Best Film Moments of 2007

My contemporary argues that I'm Not There--certainly one of the best films of 2007--is the best biopic. I beg to differ.

Martin Scorsese's vastly underrated The Aviator and David Lean's classic Lawrence of Arabia are both better biopics than the admittedly awesome I'm Not There. What sets I'm Not There apart from other run-of-the-mill bullshit like Ray, Walk the Line, and Capote is exactly what stops it from being in the same league as The Aviator and Lawrence of Arabia. Haynes' goal seems to be to rip apart the conventions of the genre and build it back up again with six different actors representing different stages of Dylan's career, his personality, and his myth. This technique is far from a gimmick, allowing the viewer to understand Dylan as an impression rather than a single figure. However, both The Aviator and Lawrence of Arabia capture the impression of their subjects (largely due to, especially in the case of Lawrence of Arabia , perfect film craft) yet also allow the viewer to relate and simultaneously despise their subjects. In I'm Not There the emotional attachment a viewer makes to any number of the six representations of Dylan is made specifically to that characterized representation, not Dylan himself. Both Scorsese and Lean operate within the typical dramatic arc sans the bullshit Hollywood ending. In the last shot of The Aviator we see Howard Hughes falling back into his world of madness and despair, a far cry from Ray Charles awkwardly crying in the Georgia Capital, or even a shot of the real Dylan blasting his harmonica at the end of I'm Not There. Both Scorsese and Lean bring a much desired edge to their films that is simply not found in any other biopic.

I must say though, the sequence in I'm Not There where Jim James is in white face and singing Goin' to Acapulco is one of the single greatest film moments in 2007.

Top 8 Film Moments of 2007:

8. Death of the dog in I am Legend.
7. Call it.
6. The death of the mother in 28 Weeks Later.
5. Goin' to Acapulco in I'm Not There.
4. Opening credit poll dance in Planet Terror.
3. I. Drink. Your. Milkshake.
2. The funeral in The Darjeeling Limited.
1. Where did Anton Chigurh go? in No Country For Old Men.



EDIT! David's addendum to best moments of '07.
10. Viggo's fight in the bathhouse in Eastern Promises.
9. I've abandoned my boy!

Yahoo film list decends from mediocre to absurd.

A new list pumped out by Yahoo presents their 10 most historically inaccurate films.

Utterly rediculous. As I'm persuing through the mediocre assemblance of rather recent films and sparese justifications, I'm thinking: What makes one film more historically inaccurate than another? What are the criteria, and how are they proporitioned? Why is there nothing from before the 90s on this list? Perhaps a 13 year old penned this.

Then I reach the final entry. 2001. The mere thought that this film was at all considered from a historical paradigm confuses and enrages me. I fear I lack the writing skill to capture my honest reaction to it. It's inclusion made another bullshit list into a catastrophe of film criticism. Worse yet is Yahoo's lack to provide an author, or any point of contact for that matter.

Let's take a minute to catch our breath here, and move on.

Back to the front nine, larger questions come to mind, such as, how historically accurate does a film need to be? What are cinema's obligations to history, and history's to cinema? It's an interesting topic, but I think that ultimately, in the larger scheme of cinema, superficial.

I recently took a History class look at these questions and many more, and I concluded that historians will never be content with a historical film. There will always be overlooked details, events that never happened, or sequence, or scale. Anachronistic results from the best of intentions. As a historian, it can be annoying, but only if the film isn't very good. Most historical films are using a real story to find dramatic action, and nothing more. Rarely do filmmakers seek to educate an audience. Films teach us, at best, a decent set of trivia for Jeopardy, but never have they been considered (rightfully so) as substantial sources of knowledge. Fiction seeks reaction, not retention.

However, an address on the genre of biofilm: misguided. These 'true' life stories often boil complex figures down to 120 minute servings. Cinema concerning the 'real' should be turned to as an afterthought of research. Cinema should reward knowledge. The people most deserved of remembrance are often the hardest to compress into film. The greatest biopic: I'm Not There. It appreciates Bob Dylan, rewards those who have followed his life and work, makes no definitive summary, no attempt at a thesis on his person or effect. The filmmaker is surely a supreme authority of Dylan, but acts as if in a room with other such fans, not at a podium before a crown of befuddled dolts.

Who SHOULD be Nominated for an Oscar in 2008

Who I think should win will be italicized and in bold.

Best Picture:
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The Darjeeling Limited
I'm Not There

Best Actor:
Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood)
Viggo Mortenson (Eastern Promises)
Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men)
Christian Bale (Rescue Dawn)
Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd)

Best Actress:
Julie Christie (Away From Her)
Nicole Kidman (Margot at the Wedding)
Ellen Page (Juno)
Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose)

Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem (No Country For Old Men)
Casey Affleck (TAOJJBTCRF)
Tommy Lee Jones (No Country For Old Men)
Kurt Russell (Grindhouse)
Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood)

Best Supporting Actress:
Kelly Macdonald (No Country For Old Men)
Cate Blanchett (I'm Not There)
Naomi Watts (Eastern Promises)
Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone)
Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton)

Best Director:
The Coen Brothers (No Country for Old Men)
Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited)
Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood)
Todd Haynes (I'm Not There)
David Fincher (Zodiac)

Best Original Screenplay:
The Darjeeling Limited
Superbad
Ratatouille
I'm Not There
Margot at the Wedding

Best Adapted Screenplay:
No Country For Old Men
There Will be Blood
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Zodiac