Be Kind Rewind
starring Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover, Mia Farrow and Melonie Diaz
written and directed by Michel Gondry
Rating: 0
Be Kind Rewind is like a cross between and old Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin zany comedy and a Spike Lee urban neighborhood-based black empowerment story. Jack Black plays Jerry, an eccentric New Jersey junk yard man who accidentally erases all the VHS videotapes in his friend, Mr. Flethcher’s store after his brain becomes magnetized. Why his brain becomes magnetized is another story, but it is part of his eccentricity. With his friend Mike (Mos Def) he sets out to re-make the lost films. Of course people in the neighborhood notice, but the home-made films prove a hit despite it all.
This film should have been funnier. It was an interesting idea but it didn’t really go anywhere. Instead it was just another vehicle for Jack Black to act goofy, which he does really well. You either like Jack Black or you don’t. I don’t, really, but I keep giving him a chance to entertain me and he fails because he is just so damned annoyingly silly. Maybe plain silliness was good enough for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, or for silent movie making, but it doesn’t blow any air up my legs in the 21st century. It is precisely because I have so little patience right now for Jack Black’s antics that I declined to rent his other movie in rental shops here right now, Tenacious D, which looks like it is better than this one.