Be Kind Rewind

Moments in this movie take their place among the best scenes ever crafted for comedy. Which scenes? The football-pizza-afro trifecta, for one, or the Jack Black in blackface faux pas. The ostensible premise is interesting enough, and the actual hidden premise is quite clever and Gatsby-esque, in a Frenchman sort of way. I have only two complaints. First, the movie spends too much time recreating their swedings; though each is delightful, none beyond the first two or three contributes to the film's oddball charm or complicate its apparently simple structure. Second, could we not find a more Aristotelian way of magnetizing Jack Black? Electrocution by power plant? This is not probable.

But it takes real skill to pull off this kind of project, and I respect Monsieur Gondry for delivering another unexpected, unprecedented, practically unthinkable but undeniably pleasurable alternative to Bunuel. As much as I do enjoy my nightmare birds and bourgeois nymphomaniacs, I welcome a cuddlier kind of surrealism.