The delightfully dippy Be Kind Rewind isn’t only a movie that feels as if it was a pleasure to make. It’s about how making movies can be fun – creative, exhilarating enterprises undertaken purely for the joy of the experience. Written and directed by Michel Gondry, Be Kind Rewind stars Jack Black and Mos Def as a pair of video-store clerks who inadvertently erase all of their VHS rental copies. And so they start creating their own versions of blockbusters – Rush Hour 2, Robocop – using little more than cardboard and aluminum foil. The stars are wonderfully goofy – Black as the live wire (you should see his Jessica Tandy); Def as the sly straight man – while Gondry gets to indulge his papier-mache artistry. In its intentional amateurishness, Be Kind Rewind makes you nostalgic for the early days of backyard moviemaking, before digital video cameras and desktop editing software turned everyone into mini-Spielbergs. Our homemade movies are smoother now, but aren’t they often, as a result, less personal and less creative?
