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Be Kind Rewind
PG-13

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Mike (Mos Def) rents Ms. Kimberley (Mia Farrow) a homemade Hollywood movie.

Michel Gondry's latest bit of comic whimsy doesn't just demand suspension of disbelief -- it demands you chuck common sense at the door. Gondry, who co-wrote the fantastically trippy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and wrote and directed the appealing but much less fantastic The Science of Sleep, now cooks up a tale set in and around a rundown Passaic, New Jersey video store that rents only VHS tapes. VHS in the age of DVD? What planet are we on? Anyway, for purposes of Gondry's jerry-rigged modern day fable, Jerry (a tiresomely quirky Jack Black) accidentally erases every tape in the store owned by kindly Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), prompting Jerry and video store clerk Mike (Mos Def) to recoup the loss by shooting no-budget remakes of the store's rental items such as Driving Miss Daisy, Rush Hour 2, RoboCop and Ghostbusters.


New Jersey video store clerks Alma (Melonie Diaz), Jerry (Jack Black) and Mike (Mos Def) make their own kind of movies.
The whole movie builds toward a save-the-store plotline Frank Capra would have snickered at and is obviously meant to charm the hell out of us courtesy of the two lead actors and a supporting cast of marginal, loveable loonies (including Mia Farrow). A few of the movie do-overs are pretty funny; Mos Def's underplaying is a nice break from Black's never-too-much attack; and the always-welcome Sigourney Weaver breezes in as a copyright lawyer who puts the screws to our heroes. With its forced goofiness, if Be Kind Rewind were on VHS, it would make a great candidate for instant erasure. No need, though, because Gondry's movie, which made its debut at Sundance this year, fades from memory while you're watching it. Let's hope for something better next time from such an imaginative, visually inventive and unpredictably talented writer-director.

by Stephen Rebello

Photos: Abbot Genser/New Line Cinema

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