Be Kind Rewind

I'm not sure if Michel Gondry is a writer of remarkable merit. I lean towards no. His best film by far, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, was written by Charlie Kaufman (but to be fair, so was his worst, Human Nature) and many of my favorite lines in his newest offering, Be Kind Rewind, I wager are improvised.

The plot here mostly serves as an excuse to let Jack Black and Mos Def goof around, making their own versions of Hollywood movies to replace the ones destroyed in their video store. The set up is hokey and cliche. Local video store loved by the locals can't make enough money to pay for the repairs the store needs to keep from being turned into condos.

The first act takes far too long, particularly since Def and Black play to their archetypes, particularly Black, doggedly establishing characters I already knew. The third act sputters toward a bygone conclusion, laying on additional cliches, and hurriedly establishing character relationships previously undeveloped.

But aside from this, there is a whole lot to like here. First off, Jack Black may never top his performance in School of Rock (and it might be asking too much of him to expect as much), but the riffs and variations he does on his simpleton artist wannbe, while no longer surprising, are still simply funny. He possess as much energy as almost anyone on screen today. Mos Def has dropped the cloying posturings and vocalics of his previous roles (notably Hitchhiker's Guide and 16 Blocks), leaving his low key charm solidly in tact.

Gondry, for his failings as a writer, shows himself again to be an inventive director, using the no budget remakes of his characters to show off his penchant for inventive, low-fi special effects. There are some true gems here, including an ingenious use of negative photography and copy machines.

This might all be clever, sure, but what makes the movie, what holds it together, why I liked it as much as I did, is, well, how darn likable it all is. Black and Def have a well-worn chemistry and it's fun to alternately watch them argue and touching to see them express affection. But the savior might very well be Melonie Diaz. As cute as she is sensible, she is able to play someone reasonable and sensible enough to drive the characters (and the movie) forward, while still retaining the aloof, skewed, innocence necessary to fit seamlessly into what amounts to a movie as dedicatedly goofy as I've seen in quite a while.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

What helped clue me in to how I felt about this one was seeing the poster on the way out. As I looked at the beautiful woman whose face occupied the top half of the poster, I felt less of a connection to her than I did before I saw the movie. There were no gentle cooing noises in my ear. No pangs of nostalgia over our times together. And no real palpable remnants from the movie itself either.

Perhaps it is an inherent difficulty in the subject matter, but I failed to bond with the film on the emotional level I wanted, and needed to. There were at least two scenes where I knew I should be crying (or tearing up), where the culmination of what had come before gathered to a head, but I remained distanced.

This isn't to say that I was unmoved. The performances were appropriately sincere. I liked and respected all of the characters. The film was beautifully and ingeniously shot, the camera offering almost no shots outside of the POV of the protagonist for the first 30-40 mins or so. But this could be the problem. I needed a swelling, grown from an emotional current flowing throughout the movie. But instead I felt jarred between the memories and fantasies the character delves into to escape his condition, and his condition itself. The other characters were kept too far away. The happinesses of the past were fragmented into glimpses only and never gelled into a larger fusion, consuming the film and existing as part of what was going on.

Also, we are denied a sense of the dehumanizing effects of Bauby being completely paralyzed, except for his brief thought of suicide. Instead he seems bemused going back toward put out most of the time. I liked that this character (whether or not he was representative of the actual person) had a sense of humor about his condition, which made it easier for me, as an audience member, to deal with the topic. But there has to be some sort of connection made between what he is doing because of his condition and the effects of the condition itself.

But it's still a good poster.