After seeing Be Kind Rewind a couple of weeks ago, I can still only come up with two words to describe it: “amazing” and “heartwarming.” So many times I’ve been turned away by comedies that rely on sexual or just plain cheesy humor to make an audience laugh. Be Kind Rewind has neither. It also lacks the fake ending inherent to many comedies. Instead it relies on the humor of our own daily lives and stories to captivate viewers.
Directed by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Be Kind tells the story of Jerry and Mike, played by Jack Black and Mos Def respectively. Mike is left to run his boss’s ancient video rental store, which only rents VHS’s, while his boss goes to scout the competition. He feels a huge sense of responsibility and desires to live up to his boss’s trust. Meanwhile, Jerry believes that the power plant sitting next to the trailer that he lives in is destroying his brain. The only way to fix this, he thinks, is to destroy the power plant. He gets Mike to help him; but midway through the attempt, Mike bales out, because he doesn’t want to let his boss down.
The next day, Jerry stumbles into the rental store saying that the power plant attacked him, but what neither of them realizes is that Jerry’s electrocution magnetized his brain, and his being in the store erases all of the VHS tapes. Customers begin coming in, complaining that their tapes are blank. Eventually, an older lady who frequents the store comes in searching for Ghostbusters. They promise her that they’ll have the video by the next day. After frantically calling all of his friends to see if they own a copy, Mike is desperate. Which is when Jerry comes up with a brilliant idea. Why not remake the movie themselves? They find an old camera and hilariously remake the movie. When the lady’s son and his gangster friends watch it, they like it and ask Jerry and Mike to remake more. They dub their technique of remaking “sweding.” With the help of an Indian girl who works at a dry-cleaning store down the street and Jerry’s mechanic Wilson, they swede over two hundred films, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Lion King to Driving Miss Daisy to Robocop.
As I stated above, this movie is truly heartwarming. There is very little crude content, although there is just enough to earn it a PG-13 rating. As an aspiring filmmaker myself, it really inspired me into thinking that you don’t need high-tech equipment or genuine actors to make a good movie. All you need is people and their stories. Jerry and Mike begin by remaking other people’s ideas; but as they begin to include the entire community into their films, they and we realize that as the film’s tagline says, “sometimes the best movies are the ones we make up.”
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