Be Kind Rewind / Be Natural
An urban comedy and a documentary about early silent film? There IS a through line.
Be Kind Rewind (2008). Grade: C+. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018). Grade: C
Director Michel Gondry made many music videos before he began making feature films. Some pretty decent directors got their start that way, or in TV commercials — what is a music video but a longer TV commercial? But I can’t remember a single Michel Gondry-directed music video that I’d ever want to watch again. Compare that to Spike Jonze, who might have been the best music video director, ever. (And I own a DVD of his music videos.) Have you SEEN the one where Christopher Walken dances? If not, watch it NOW.
(My favorite thing in all of that is the way Walken presses an elevator button.)
What made Jonze such a great music video director was that he didn’t rely on hyper-fast cutting and empty-headed flashy visuals in his videos. They were usually simple ideas, executed perfectly. (Like the video for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” which is better than the song itself.)
And it’s what’s made Jonze such a good, thoughtful film director, too. Not that a movie like Being John Malkovich is simple to make! There’s a lot of complexity involved. There’s a car-crash scene in Adaptation shot from such a dramatic angle that it’s been copied (almost to death) in innumerable movies since. But Jonze’s visuals are never there to call attention to themselves. He’s giving you a good movie to follow, not impressing you with his cleverness.
Michel Gondry, unfortunately, LOVES his visual cleverness. I mentioned Being John Malkovich and Adaptation because they’re both written by the talented, odd Charlie Kaufman (and Adaptation might be one of the best screenplays ever featured in an American film). Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has a great screenplay, too, also by Charlie Kaufman — I used to own a book copy. But I didn’t own a copy of the movie, though, because Gondry’s flashy direction drove me nuts.
I’m less bothered by it now, and if I was stuck in a hotel room or something and Eternal Sunshine was on, I’d probably watch it. It’s still more visual trickery than the movie NEEDS, though. Jonze would have done it better. (Or Kaufman himself; I’ve thought some of the movies he directed were too mean, but he made a fine animated film, Anomalisa, about a rare condition that causes a person to see everyone else as having the same face.)
The wafter-thin plot of Be Kind Rewind involves Jack Black and Mos Def (the then-stage name of musician/actor Yasiin Bey) as a customer and employee of a dying video store in Passaic, NJ. Owner Danny Glover is away on a trip, and Black/Bey are up to shenanigans. One of these involves Black visiting an electrical substation, becoming “magnetized” in the process. And this causes him to accidentally erase all the video tapes in the video store.
When customer Mia Farrow comes in to ask for the movie Ghostbusters, they tell her to come again in a few hours, they’ll have it by then. So Bey/Black set out making their OWN version of Ghostbusters, filming guerrilla-style in a nearby library and using their own miniatures that they made for the Stay-Puft marshmallow man. They finish just in time to give the tape to Farrow, who enjoys it — and wants to rent more. That means the gents will have to make more.
This is the most enjoyable material in the movie, although it’s completely ridiculous stuff; most of the cheesy props and what-not that they scrounge up are meant to look handmade, and don’t. They look like prop designers made them, because prop designers DID. (Mystery Science Theater 3000, with the help of wizardly designer Beez McKeever,1 had more convincingly homemade-looking props on that show.) Nothing about these homemade versions of real movies feels remotely realistic or believable, and it’s not meant to be. It’s a fantasy.
You wish Gondry (who wrote the script) had come up with slightly cleverer fake-versions of the movie being “made,” here. They’re cute, but Gondry can’t think of more than one shot or two for each. Here’s a sample (it’s not my fault the thing ends abruptly, that’s how the video was uploaded — possibly to avoid triggering YouTube’s copyright laws):
That’s cleverly-done and storyboarded out. But, like most of the movie (and all of Gondry’s music videos), it’s empty trickery. There’s no real point to it. It’s amusing enough, as Bey/Black are amusing guys (so is Melonie Diaz, as a sort-of-not-quite love interest brought on to play the girl roles).
Your tolerance for this one will probably depend on how much you like the movie parodies — I chuckled a few times — and how big your tolerance is for Jack Black’s mugging. (I don’t mind it, but I wish he had more of a character to play here.) Aside from those elements, there’s not much going on here. There’s a whole subplot about how the store is gonna rescue the building from demolition, and how getting involved with making the movies brings the whole community together. It’s barely thought up. It certainly isn’t thought out. (Neighborhood residents WERE given a large number of small parts in this film, and many even get some lines, so that means they were paid more.)
This is fluff that thinks it’s more than fluff, alhough WHAT it’s thinking isn’t clear. It’s probably the same old hoary Hollywood bull poop amount how movies “unite us” or something. Really, the only movie I’ve ever actually liked celebrating Hollwood’s legacy was The Artist, and that one because it itself was very well-written, directed, and acted. It wasn’t relying on our feelings about older movies to carry us through. (It got some criticism for stealing a plot point from Singing in the Rain and for using some music from Vertigo. Well, it’s a better movie than Vertigo.)
Be Natural is also celebrating the power of old movies, in a different way; it’s celebrating a woman who helped blaze a path for women directors in the very earliest days of film, the French filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché. And it’s also directed by someone with a taste for visual flashiness, veteran movie-title designer Pamela B. Green.
Green starts this story off with very elaborate animation and graphics and NEVER LETS UP. It’s abysmal moviemaking and totally gums up the material. Some of which is good material. But Green doesn’t trust you enough to let you simply hear an intersting story and watch some interesting clips. She’s gotta dazzle you. It more than once dazzled me to sleep, and I was in no hurry to go back to see what I missed.
Guy-Blaché does sound like a very interesting person. She was working as a stenographer/secretary at a French photography-supply company (one of the owners was Gustave Eiffel, of the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty). Within a few years, the Gaumont company was making short movies to be shown at fairs and such. And Guy-Blaché was the one in charge of making them. She was the director, before that word was used in movies. And, probably, the only woman director of her time.
Eventually she and another Gaumont employee moved to America, and built a studio in Fort Lee, NJ. Several other companies just starting out in movie made studios in Fort Lee, too. Including the ones that would become Fox, MGM, Paramount, and Universal. I didn’t know they were all in Fort Lee! (I did know that one of the reasons movies eventually relocated in California was to get away with patent violations — Thomas Edison wanted a huge chunk of anything made with one of “his” movie cameras.)
Guy-Blaché was one of several people pioneering the art of narrative film, ones that told stories instead of just showing real-life scenes like pretty scenery. She seems to have been rather jerked around by her husband, Herbert Blaché — he was a serial cheat, they later divorced, and when Herbert worked as a director-for-hire in Hollywood, he relegated Alice to being his assistant. She never directed a movie again after 1918, and was largely forgotten by many film historians. Possibly because film historians did not want to acknowledge a woman’s role in building the industry.
So, there’s good stuff to make a documentary about. But Pamela B. Green is making it, largely, about how muchly much Pamela B. Green worked on this documentary. I swear, it feels like there’s as much time spent showing you all the lengths Green went to as there is showing clips of Guy-Blaché’s movies. Which is definitely a mixed-up set of priorities. And there’s innumerable interviews with Famous Modern Movie people talking about how unfairly Guy-Blaché’s memory was dismissed, and her films unseen.
Jay Weissberg at Variety disputed a WHOLE LOT of this material. He mentions that there is considerable scholarly reasearch about Guy-Blaché, and many of her films have been available on DVD since 2009. He says while it is quite possible that being a woman is why Guy-Blaché’s contribution to film history was forgotten in the mid-20th century — it’s also possible that she was just one of many film pioneers whose work was forgotten in that time. That there wasn’t always malicious intent behind this.
I obviously am no expert on this subject, but I’m going to lean towards thinking Weissberg is probably right. Pamela B. Green’s shallow visual flashiness doesn’t suggest someone who’s putting a lot of real thought into the project. A lot of work, yes, but not thought, not so much. So I can readily believe that this filmmaker either didn’t know or didn’t care (or didn’t cite) the work other people had done about Guy-Blaché.
As this movie’s visual annoyances piled up, Mrs. twinsbrewer expressed some disappointment with Jodie Foster for being the narrator here; she likes Foster a lot. As do I. But I rarely blame a narrator for a movie being bad. They just see the words they’re going to say, which in this case are about recognizing a trailblazing woman in film history. I completely see why Foster — herself a decent director — was drawn to Guy-Blaché’s story. (I wish Foster had made this movie, instead!)
So, as promised, there’s your through-line from a documentary about a silent film director and a 2008 Mos Def/Jack Black comedy. That both of these are using flashy visuals to hide how little they have inside. (And both involve movie people praising themselves for being part of such a noble storytelling art). But I liked Be Kind Rewind better. It has jokes. It also has a 10-minute featurette on the DVD about Passaic, NJ and the locals there who were involved in the film that’s better than the film itself! It’s called Passaic Mosaic, and it’s by veteran TV director Lance Bangs.2 Well worth a look at if you want to see Be Kind Rewind — be sure and check it out if you do.
McKeever sometimes sends neat props in to Seth Myers’ “Corrections” segments. In this fun post, she talks about getting invited by Paul Reubens to join in part of his show as Pee Wee Herman.
Who has worked on a few Spike Jonze movies, too.