Be Kind Rewind (2008)
Directed by Michel Gondry
A man whose brain becomes magnetized unintentionally destroys every tape in his friend's video store. In order to satisfy the store's most loyal renter, an aging woman with signs of dementia, the two men set out to remake the lost films.
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The two friends' initial foray is to re-create "Ghostbusters," and there isn't a laugh in the whole sequence.
Since there’s no way to quickly locate a VHS replacement copy of Ghostbusters for Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow), a customer who threatens to tell Fletcher that Mike and Jerry are ruining the store, the duo set out to recreate the film on their own with a camcorder and a lot of low-tech ingenuity.
When loyal customer Ms. Kimberly, tasked by Mr. Fletcher to check in on the store while he's away, comes in to rent Ghostbusters, Jerry and Mike's solution to the crisis is hardly logical, but certainly inspired: Produce and shoot a replacement version of the film within 24 hours so she'll be none the wiser about the store's ruined inventory.
Desperately seeking to assuage lovely but demanding customers like Farrow's Miss Falewicz, Jerry and Mike go about creating homemade remakes of the likes of Ghostbusters, Men in Black, and many more.
This is okay by the locals, including dotty Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow), who is only just now getting around to seeing Ghostbusters.
A passion and appreciation of movies and moviemaking give this film a thematic backbone reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s “8½”and Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso”.
Writer/director Michel Gondry ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "The Science of Sleep") has proven himself visually imaginative, but when he works from his own scripts the films seem half-baked.
But Be Kind Rewind is not only a far kinder (and, yeah, gentler) film than its 1980s predecessors, it's also writer-director Michel Gondry's sweetest and most accessible film to date, with none of the narrative convolutions and isolation of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep.
If you saw Gondry’s film “The Science of Sleep,” where Gael García Bernal’s character created TV sets out of cardboard and dreamt of a life-size stuffed horse made of socks and fabric scraps, you’ll know the aesthetic at play here.
Gondry's approach to such an effects-heavy premise is thoroughly refreshing, as it was in his last two films (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep).
For my money, it’s the best work Gondry has ever done—and that’s saying something for the man who made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and The Science of Sleep (2006).
His first two features, Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, were at the very least co-written with the ingenious Charlie Kaufman; this and his prior picture, The Science of Sleep (an occasionally diverting but ultimately overly self-involved coming-of-age fantasy) were from Gondry solo scripts, and they're a bit on the thin side.