They are a simulacrum of homemade, and it is this fabricated fabrication which is beguiling. Part of what's funny is that you know, in your heart, that the silly cardboard costumes and stunningly ingenious mock-ups would in fact take months to make. As Jerry, Mike and Alma become enthused by their childlike, primitive industry, it begins to resemble the early days of Hollywood itself in the orange groves, with the cheesy props and hand-cranked cameras. The story has a little of the Woody Allen of Small Time Crooks the resemblance is underscored by the jazz piano and Farrow's presence. This is the vast detritius that Jerry and Mike are working with: a mountain of tat that they are reconstructing as passionately as Dresden cathedral. The whole idea of VHS movies, rows and rows of dusty old naff films, not new enough to be exciting, not old enough to be classic, is an intense comic embarrassment. Hollywood showbiz is about the now and the new, so there is something subversive about Gondry pitching his tent in the wasteground of obsolescence behind the gleaming edifice of modernity. But when local customer Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow) wants an uncritical new remake of Driving Miss Daisy, Mike is uneasy about the world-values that he is perpetuating. They are helped by local dry cleaner Alma, played by Melonie Diaz, who gets hold of costumes (bit of a cheat, this) and soon there are queues round the block and money is rolling in. ![]() Pretty soon, the homemade flicks get cult status the transformation becomes known as "sweding" and "sweded" films are much prized. (YouTubers have been doing this for ages.) The guys' versions of Ghostbusters, Rush Hour 2 and, bizarrely, the Muhammad Ali documentary When We Were Kings, complete with brow-furrowing commentary from George Plimpton, are hilarious. Maybe it is too easy to get recognition laughs by doing your own homemade version of well-known films, but it is funny. So armed with a chunky VHS camcorder, our heroes set out on a desperate mission to film their own no-budget version of the entire commercial Hollywood canon. Jerry's whole body becomes electro-magnetised after breaking into the local power station on an eco-sabotage mission, and by walking into the shop he erases every single tape. While Mr Fletcher is away for a week-long Fats Waller symposium, leaving the guys minding the store, something awful happens. They do not stock anything as trendy or futuristic as DVDs: no, they rent out dusty old-style video cassettes at a dollar a pop to the similarly retrograde locals. Mos Def and Jack Black play Mike and Jerry, two guys who work, or at least hang out, at a crummy old video rental store called Be Kind Rewind, which is owned by gentle old-timer Mr Fletcher (Danny Glover). It is simpler and happier than his previous movies The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it's got some laughs, but also some baffling flaws, of which more in a moment. ![]() This new movie, written and directed by Gondry, is probably his most uncomplicated, and the least burdened by the need to explain or embed its eccentricity in melancholy. He is a surrealist and a romantic and very French in his cerebral playfulness, though earlier collaborations with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman have given him access to a Hollywood-indie sensibility. ![]() His films have a wacky homemade aesthetic, a cheerful make-do-and-mend look, often introverted, bordering occasionally on something which is, to quote one character's harshly non-PC remark in an earlier film, "kind of retarded". ![]() If you can imagine a movie-maker who sustained a career while never leaving his teenage bedroom - putting each completed film outside the door on a breakfast tray for his mum to collect on her way down to the kitchen - then you can imagine the work of Michael Gondry.
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