Be Kind Rewind & My New Project

Last week, I watched Be Kind Rewind with some friends because Blockbuster didn't have A Few Good Men.

I'm glad someone else needed to know that Tom Cruise couldn't handle the truth. While Be Kind Rewind seems like an inconsequential and silly story about some guys who remake their favorite movies (poorly), I saw it as something else. I saw it as a filmmaker's love letter to his medium.

In the movie, Jack Black and Mos Def have 2 hours, 45 minutes to remake Ghostbusters after it had been erased to retain one of their best customers. So they do it -- they made a movie with one camera, three people, and a little ingenuity (using the "negative" filter on the camera to turn day into night, turning a cat into the monster in the refrigerator). And it was a hit. Their success snowballed Their films became popular. So popular, that the government shut them down. And then, what did they do? They didn't sulk (for long, anyway), but they made another movie -- a big movie with all the people they met and entertained through their Sweded videos.

The end is probably one of the most poignant scenes in a film I have seen all year. The neighborhood, the people who made the movie, sit in the video store one last time before its demolished to watch their movie. The TV breaks before they can begin their screening, but serendipitously another local video store owner comes in with a projector. People put a sheet up on the window, and the film is projected on the sheet for the people in the store ... and for the community outside the store. The entire neighborhood is standing in the streets, on their balconies, and as the movie plays, the community who hasn't been behind this video store for long enough to save it from destruction, comes together because of it. And not to save it, because it will be demolished, but to appreciate the power of a story, and the power of community, and the power of the film to bring the two together.

Gondry's two-fold theme in this movie, the power of movies to bring people together, and the
power of people to make their own movies, advocates a proletariat cinema -- movies made by the masses for the masses -- that both transcends and "subscends" YouTube. The cinema subscends YouTube because Gondry focuses on a corner video store that has no DVDs to rent, the main characters have a boxy camcorder that takes only a videocasette, they have no editing equipment, and ostensibly no computer. The lack of technology is quaint, and at the beginning, the audience can't help but wonder how they'll create a successful movie (or any movie) with two people, a deficient looking camera, and no time. But when they succeed, not only in finishing the film, but also in the eyes of the rentor, the barrier of technology magically disappears. The remainder of the first 3/4 of the movie is fun -- watching the characters recreate old favorites and wanting to see what they will make next, not wondering if they could make anything at all. But still, the amazement lingers (I can't believe they could make that with what they have). The emphasis on YouTube is what videos people make, not if they can make a video at all, and the audience mindset rests with that initial amazement, even after the characters prove themselves again and again.

However, the whole film focuses on a community coming together around movies -- watching them, and making them. YouTube provides a virtual community, but it's hard to replicate that community that's created by watching a movie with someone, or waking up at dawn with people to capture that perfect morning light, the ambiance of which is essential for your movie. And by stripping away the technology and the YouTube and even the computer, movies are boiled down to their purest form -- a projected story told by people who banded together for a common purpose. And I prefer the transcendence of sharing something with a small, flesh and blood community than the mechanism of sharing globally via binary.

The message I left with was that anyone can make a movie -- no matter what equipment you have or how much money or how many people you have to help you. All you need is a camera and an idea. This is a true love letter to a medium that is currently drowning in ideas about the importance of production values and losing the essential element of story. Gondry is trying to save motion pictures from drowning in the smog of technology by breathing in the fresh air of ideas. And whether film itself or the industry or even anyone else appreciates it, I love him for it.

A couple days ago, I thought about this movie in a new light. I booted up my old desktop, the one I only use for video editing, to finish a movie I wanted to submit to the Port Clinton Film Festival (a new festival that had waived its entry fee) and the deadline was the next day. I shot it entirely on my own and was excited to finally complete a movie for the first time in 3 years. And then, my trusty editing program crashed. It won't open, it won't let me edit. Nothing. I guess Murphy missed me, got jealous of all the other laws I was studying, and decided to visit me in a big way. I was foiled again. The deadline has passed. But I can't let a snag like a dead editing program kill my buzz. I need to make movies. I have no portfolio and if I want to call myself a filmmaker, I need to create one. So I am, Be Kind Rewind style -- not by Sweding, but by taking what I have and making a movie. No excuses. No whining. Just film.

I'm making one movie a month for at least a year, maybe longer. July's entry will probably be something that doesn't require editing. We'll see. I'll keep you updated. I still don't know if I'm posting on YouTube, somehow it seems against the Be Kind Rewind message (even though YouTube was used as the center of a viral marketing campaign for the movie).