Jack Black and Mos Def fight over the colonization of culture.
Be Kind Rewind is less of a film and more of a series of visual inventions strung together in sequence. As such, its characters are arbitrary and its story is tacked on; everything exists to give Michel Gondry an opportunity to showcase his fertile visual ingenuity. But by the time Mos Def hides from the police using an urban camouflage suit and Jack Black uses a "video negative" button on his camcorder to playfully shoot night scenes, I had lost any desire to play along. The arbitrariness of these contrivances jarred me out of the narrative. Similarly, the exposition scenes written simply to justify the time needed to create the Sweded films become exhausting after awhile.
The overall theme of Be Kind is an apologetic for the film itself. At the end, the protagonists go all Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland on us and decide to put on a show creating a mockumentary based on creatively falsified information. The idea is a Romantic one; creativity is freedom from a literal adherence to the truth. The problem with this idea is the same one that plagues the film. In Be Kind, black culture is stripped of its history and its suffering, and serves primarily as a source for Gondry's cinematic riffing. In Gondry's world, we needn't understand anything; we simply use it to stimulate our own creativity. For Gondry, African American culture serves as a quick signifier for community and soul, an image that in this movie, exists without weight or bearing. Be Kind's cinematic cleverness is a form of talking without listening. The film brings community together but only to laud Gondry's genius.
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