VHS or Meta?

Michel Gondry's follow-up to The Science of Sleep stars Jack Black and Mos Def as a pair of small-town cinéastes who set out to reshoot the classics

Whenever a director makes a movie about making movies, he gives us a peek at his attitude about the industry. In most cases (Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Robert Altman's The Player), it's the negative that shines through, the desperation, the disillusionment. Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, by contrast, reveals an unabated, child-like fascination with craft. The log line is deliciously cookie-cutter: after a magnetized Jack Black accidentally erases all the VHS tapes in a cash-strapped video store—a stubborn holdout against DVDs—he and the clerk, played by Mos Def, reshoot all the films themselves on a camcorder to save the beloved smalltown shop from heartless developers. Gondry's devilish originality is in the details, such as using a flashlight, a sheet, and a fishing rod to re-create Slimer in Ghostbusters, or outfitting RoboCop in junkyard scrap. The film is an ode to old-school, shoestring filmmaking, and to the kind of ingenuity that Gondry has shown throughout his oeuvre, from his all-Lego video for the White Stripes to the surreal Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

JULIAN SANCTON