Sunday, March 02, 2008

Be Kind, Don't Pan

Saw the new Michel Gondry movie, Be Kind, Rewind, tonight with a couple of work friends. I liked watching it, and my friends liked watching it; but I want to like it a lot more than I did, and there's a lot in it that really doesn't work, even on its own terms. Peculiar movie. Gondry' s basically writing a love letter to his own idiosyncracies here, and a movie this nice at heart is hard to write off, especially when there are a few genuinely gleeful moments that pay off. Still, the tone is kind of uneven, the writing is badly paced, and there are a couple overzealous montage applications. Way, way way sillier movie than The Science of Sleep, incidentally. (Now that movie I liked a lot. I am still thinking I should get around to seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind eventually.)

Anyway, the point is that if you share my movie tastes you should probably wait for Be Kind, Rewind to come out on video.

3 Comments:

Blogger nate said...

I'll wait for Jack Black and Mos Def to do a quirky, ad-hoc reenactment of it on VHS.

3/02/2008 9:19 PM  
Blogger Pete said...

I thought it was pretty funny. I saw it with a couple friends in a mostly-crowded theatre. Laughed out loud quite a bit. We had a brief discussion afterwards of the massive plot holes and barely-existent plot, but the final consensus down here in Grad-school-land was that the funny parts were funny enough to make up for the rest. (The montages are a bit of a let down, but the 2001 sequence within the one of them was great.) And the Ghostbusters parody is fucking amazing. I'd actually say that it's worth it to see in the theatres, just because, watching it at home on the TV with one or two people probably won't evoke nearly as much social-laughter.

3/02/2008 9:24 PM  
Blogger Dan B. said...

Oddly enough, your review of Be Kind, Rewind more or less fits how I felt about The Science of Sleep.

3/06/2008 10:57 AM  

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