CAST
Jack Black ... Jerry
Mos Def ... Mike
Danny Glover ... Mr. Fletcher
Mia Farrow ... Ms Falewicz

Directed by Michel Gondry

Opening Date: 22nd February
Running Time: 1hr 45 mins

The trailer promises a wacky Jack Black comedy but this is really an exercise in whimsy with occasional moments of laugh out loud comedy. Maverick director Michel Gondry, after two films with the equally eccentric (and, in my opinion, severely over-rated) screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, is now penning his own scripts. But his wafer-thin characterisation sees him relying far too heavily on the charisma of his leading men to carry the material.

If you don't like Jack Black or Mos Def, avoid this film. Or else go and end up thanking heaven for Danny Glover, who lends gravitas as Mr Fletcher, the Fats Waller worshipping owner of the titular video store ( which is named after a Waller song and housed in the building where Fats was born). The store which is now so decrepit that Fletcher's adopted son Mike (Mos Def) could easily demolish it by slamming a door, and only store survives because of the number of stubborn/deranged people in the neighbourhood who refuse to switch to DVD. Mike is left in charge while Mr Fletcher investigates whether switching to DVD is the only way of raising enough money for repairs before a council demolition deadline

Enter disaster in the shape of Mike's best friend Jerry (Jack Black), who talks him into an attempt at sabotaging the local power plant (a sequence featuring a sublime visual gag). The attempt leaves Jerry's brain magnetised, which in turn leaves all the store's videotapes erased. When Mr Fletcher's best friend, Ms Falewicz (Mia Farrow) demands Ghostbusters, Mike and Jerry have no time to hunt down a replacement copy. So they decide to make their own version with a camcorder, hilariously no-budget special effects, and Mike as Bill Murray…with Jerry as everyone else. This leads to crowds of new customers with requests for films that they want Mike, Jerry and leading lady/drycleaner Lorna to 'Swede' for them. Deeply demented versions of Driving Miss Daisy and Rush Hour 2 emerge and soon half the neighbourhood are joyously taking roles in the 'Sweded' films.

Be Kind Rewind is visually disappointing when set beside the quirkiness of Michel Gondry's music videos and his best film to date, Eternal Sunshine. Indeed the highlight of the film comes when he stops being restrained and indulges in some of his trademark in-camera special effects, using his long held patent on 'how'd they do that?!' trickery. The dazzling and hilarious long take in which Jack Black and Mos Def re-enact scenes from classic movies (including 2001: A Space Odyssey) using insanely inventive no-budget special effects is itself shot in an insanely inventive low-budget way. (Somewhere a post-modernist just got his wings).

Oddly enough, like Cloverfield, the usual sentimental cliches of movie logic do not apply in this universe. The unexpectedly realistic ending means that Be Kind Rewind works best as a love-note to film-making and audience participation rather than as pure comedy.

Fergal Casey