..a film made by and for anyone whose ever loved a film.

Be Kind Rewind is an unsung lament to a sadly dying art. In the same way Cinema Paradiso looked back to a golden age, the time when the community was gathered around the flickering screen and united by the common spectacle, this manages to evoke that dying memory of the time when people would clap at the screen and when screenings sold out.

The determindedly dated plot, set, I estimate in summer 2001, sees Mos Def and Jack Black fighting against the format war of VHS vs DVD, the Little Man vs The Unfeeling Corporate, our lives as they are vs the reality we create for ourselves.

Black and Def cut a wonderful, off kilter tone in this quirky semi-comedy. As with Gondry's other films, the humour is a deadpan, bizarre interpretation of our existing reality : when one of the leads becomes 'magnetised', scenes are interrupted with bizarre interference (as if we are watching a videotape on an old TV), and random objects fly around the scene dependent upon their qualities. The central plot of the film is charming : based on the theme that we define our reality, and take the existing modern mythology of cinema, and recast them in their own light.



There are some scenes which had me in tears of laughter : after you've seen it, the phrase 'NightVision' may never mean the same thing again. The charming ingenuity of the central conceit allows a large number of us who grew up watching TV-dupes and full screen VHS tapes of 'classic' movies like Ghostbusters and Firefox and the long-forgotten Red Dawn to both mock these films, and nostalgically relive them with the benefit of our notoriously unreliable memories and our childhood understandings. After all, would Star Wars have been so good if the first time we had seen we were 27 and not 7? It's a question no one will ever be able to answer.

The film shifts tone and becomes an eulogy to the dying breed of communal film-making and neighbourhood unity in its final strait. Somewhat oddly, the film ends on a morally ambigious tone which fails to satisfy beyond creating a temporary emotion : what the viewer is left with is an uneven and occasonally frustrating experience that is charming, funny and meaningful in a way that very few films even try to achieve, let alone sustain. Be Kind, Rewind is a film made by and for anyone whose ever loved a film.

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