Reviews

Film

Be Kind Rewind

Directed by Michel Gondry, starring Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover, Melonie Diaz

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 mom to collect on her way down to the kitchen - then you can imagine the work of Michel Gondry. 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".

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. 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.

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). 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. While Fletcher is away for a week-long Fats Waller symposium, leaving the guys minding the store, something awful happens. Jerry's whole body becomes electro-magnetized after breaking into the local power station on an eco-sabotage mission, and by walking into the shop he erases every single tape. 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. Maybe it is too easy to get recognition laughs by doing your own homemade version of well-known films, but it is funny. (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. Pretty soon, the homemade flicks get cult status; the transformation becomes known as "sweding" and "sweded" films are much prized. 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. But when a local customer wants an uncritical new remake of Driving Miss Daisy, Mike is uneasy about the world-values that he is perpetuating.

The story has a little of the Woody Allen of Small Time Crooks; the resemblance is underscored by the jazz piano. 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 Guardian

Book

Willing

By Scott Spencer, Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers

Scott Spencer has, through his career, established an instantly recognizable voice: blunt, earthy and intellectual, if not always wise. Spencer's central characters are typically misruled by obsession with women, usually younger; with their parents, often still living; and with money, rarely their own. It is not a Scott Spencer novel if the main character does not, at some point, fear for his sanity.

The narrator of Willing is Avery Jankowsky, a failing freelance writer who will be driven into the world of commercial sex tourism. Avery envisions himself as "the guy in the stands at the World Series ... his hand on his heart and his eyes bright with belief during the singing of the national anthem. Why would you even give him a second look? But you do." This assumption gives the longtime Spencer fan his first sense that something is profoundly wrong with Willing. The New York Times Syndicate

(China Daily 03/06/2008 page20)