Be Kind Rewind.

"Like his previous feature The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry's gently outlandish Be Kind Rewind is a fantasy about fantasy - a fragile, somewhat precious celebration of DIY filmmaking and cult-film consumption that, given its gaps in logic, spectators are more or less obliged to mentally assemble on their own." J Hoberman in the Voice.

"Be it whimsy overload or muddled politics, Be Kind Rewind contains reminders of the limits of this brilliant artist," writes Elbert Ventura in Reverse Shot. "That the movie still enthralls is a testament to the fact that Gondry's starting point - an aesthetic in which each frame bears its maker's sensibility - is miles ahead of where most filmmakers aspire to be."

Premiere's Glenn Kenny finds Rewind "slight and finally unconvincing, alas.... Part of the problem's the writing: Gondry's just not that good at it." And here, "one feels he wants you to buy something he himself can't be bothered to believe in."

Updated through 2/25.

"Gondry's comedy, which can't seem to get either [Mos] Def or the normally robust [Jack] Black out of second gear, is never able to transcend the illogical underpinnings of its plot and its numerous anachronisms, no matter how much fanciful whimsy the gifted Frenchman and his collaborators can conjure from the settings and their performers," writes Brandon Harris.

"If it weren't so genuinely ramshackle, Be Kind Rewind would be a terrific, brainy thesis film masked as shabby, pop fantasy lark," writes Vadim Rizov in the Reeler. "Gondry-lovers will want more from their boy, Black stalwarts will definitely want better for theirs."

"To call the narrative shambling and the acting amateurish is not wholly an insult, because Be Kind Rewind is determinedly unslick," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Gondry, like many French-born filmmakers, has the Big Deconstructionist Idea. He's exploring the gulf between the democratization of moviemaking and the daunting amount of money, technical resources, and personnel it takes to make anything that the mainstream audience will want to see. He's also showing how far a little bit of wit and humanity can go."

"In good whimsy - [Pushing Daisies], say, or Amélie - you have colorful art direction, larger-than-life characters, and charming but not particularly realistic situations, but it all works because there's a core of believability to the storytelling," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "And then there's bad whimsy, which brings us to Be Kind Rewind. Bad whimsy has all the great art direction and nutty plot setups, but they all get shoehorned into a real-world context, whereby the characters can only exist in this bell jar of kookiness by acting like they've all had frontal lobotomies."

"The surprisingly nostalgic sight of VHS boxes is the most poignant thing in Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "It's like the closetful of stacked-away board games in The Royal Tenenbaums: the detritus of our youth or of once-shared passions.... Like Tim Burton turning the biopic Ed Wood into the loony story of communal activity, Gondry uses his nostalgia for the outmoded form of movies-on-videotape to reinforce a sense of social solidarity."

"A George Méliès for the age of infinite possibilities, Michel Gondry, like the music-hall conjurer turned f/x pioneer of cinema's infancy, takes 'the magic of movies' as a literal proposition, a matter of process," proposes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

"While the film does have a sweetness to its goofball comedy that is often quite warm, the 'heart' that a perfectly cast Mia Farrow laments is missing from most movies is here missing as well," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"This idea that people are capable of creating their own entertainment that not only they enjoy but other people can enjoy [is what drives this film]," Gondry tells the Vue Weekly's Brian Gibson. "And in the process they become really creative and they change the course of pop music or art or whatever. It's been going over and over in music. And I was imagining this phenomenon happening in film."

"It's a film that seems unwilling to go an inch out of its meandering way to impress you or make you smile, which may be why it's such a surprise when it occasionally manages both," writes Rob Davis in Paste.

Paul Matwychuk: "This is what you call a movie with its heart in the right place - it has an affection for the mongrel, homegrown culture of those pockets of the United States into which the corporations haven't yet penetrated that reminded me of those great Jonathan Demme movies of the 70s and 80s: Melvin and Howard, Citizens Band, Something Wild, Married to the Mob.

For the New Yorker's Anthony Lane, the film's got "a charming conceit, designed as a paean to the ramshackle; sadly, every minute of Gondry's film is irrefutable proof that charm is not enough."

"The established phenomenon of fan fiction has found new life in the intersection of film and the internet, spawning a vast parallel filmography of no-budget, DIY doppelgangers." Ryan Gilbey in the Guardian on Rewind and Son of Rambow.

Sara Cardace (Vulture), Brett Michel (Boston Phoenix), Keith Phipps (AV Club) and Nicolas Rapold (New York Sun) all interview Gondry.

Online listening tip. Spout's Kevin Buist and Paul Moore put ten bucks on the table and call up Gondry.

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance.

Updates, 2/22: "Sweet-natured and likable as the movie is, it never really delivers on the promise of its ingenious premise, which hints at a subversive retelling of mainstream Hollywood movies but stops short at goofy homage," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"It is propelled by neither the psychology of its characters nor the machinery of its plot, but rather by a leisurely desire to pass the time, to see what happens next, to find out what would happen if you tried to re-enact Ghostbusters in your neighbor's kitchen," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

"Gondry isn't an especially skilled storyteller," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "The film has energy but no real pace. The characters don't grow so much as hang around, and his script frays into a bunch of loose strands. But the visual wit, game performances (including a glowing turn by Melonie Diaz as a neighbor roped into small-scale movie stardom), and overflowing humanity have more than made up for the shortcomings by the time the film finds a final moment that's simultaneously abrupt and magical. And clearly not designed by committee."

"It absolutely is not a rib-tickling movie-movie mashup, featuring affectionate, hilarious takedowns of movies you love and movies you love to hate," warns Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. The point, rather: "All of us have had our imaginations so thoroughly colonized by corporate entertainment product that to set ourselves free we have to exorcise it all first."

Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian: "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."

"This is a movie that takes place in no possible world, which may be a shame, if not for the movie, then for possible worlds," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Steve Erickson talks with Gondry for Film & Video.

Update, 2/23: "Be Kind Rewind, while erring just this side of too adorable for its own good - it's nothing if not enjoyable for once again showcasing Gondry's ingenious guerilla filmmaking tactics - is still a bit of a setback," writes Michael Joshua Rowin for Stop Smiling. "Gondry may be a one-of-a-kind visualist, but he's far from a seasoned writer, and even with his new film's grassroots bid for racial harmony and take-back-the-neighborhood organizing there's something missing here on basic levels of character and story that prove Be Kind Rewind more a wishful nostalgic fantasy than the playful assaults on reality that have defined Gondry's previous efforts."

Update, 2/25: "[T]he most striking holdover from Gondry's work as a short-form director is his miniature montages - such as the vanishing memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the delusional dream sequences in Science of Sleep," writes AJ Goldmann, who also interviews Gondry for the New Republic.

Posted by dwhudson at February 21, 2008 3:37 PM