The Infinite Nostalgia of Be Kind Rewind

When I first heard that preeminent super-genius Michel Gondry would be making a big-hearted comedy about a goofball who accidentally erases all of the videocassettes at a video store his buddy works at and then must remake all those movies himself starring Jack Black and Mos Def I got very excited.

It felt like Gondry was making a movie specifically for me and not just because many of my happiest childhood and teenage memories revolve around video stores.

It seemed like the perfect combination of stars, director and premise. It did not hurt that Gondry was only a few years removed from co-writing and directing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which won Gondry an Academy Award for his work on the screenplay for a masterpiece that is widely considered the best movie of oughts.

It similarly followed 2005’s Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, which I’m guessing plays very differently now but charmed the shit out of me at the time of its release.

It felt like Gondry was building towards a big mainstream breakthrough. I thought that if Be Kind Rewind was half as good as it had the potential to be, then it would be a great movie and a massive box-office hit.

I was right about Be Kind Rewind radiating all the promise in the world. And I was right about it being a formula for a wonderful crowd-pleaser you want to live in and revisit on a regular basis.

I was wrong, however, about Be Kind Rewind being a huge hit. It might just have been too quirky, French and Fats Waller-centric to connect with the American moviegoing public.

I nevertheless have always been a fan. I liked it when it came out. I liked it even more when I re-watched it for My World of Flops and deemed it a Secret Success. I fucking loved it when I saw it for a third time as one of the book-only entries in The Fractured Mirror.

Be Kind Rewind has aged beautifully in no small part because it has always been a proudly retro throwback purposefully lost in time, a tribute to the homey pleasures of video stores and the popcorn escapism of our youths.

It’s pretty much nostalgia porn, a movie that taps into a potent strain of movie lover longing for the safe, sacred spaces we used to know when we and the world were younger.

Fourteen years have passed since Be Kind Rewind was released theatrically to mixed to positive but far from glowing reviews and unmistakably disappointing box-office.

That means that the movie is now the beneficiary of a sort of double nostalgia. It appeals to people like myself who have incredible nostalgia for the video stores of the 1980s and 1990s but also the magical, tacky vulgar videocassettes that inhabited them.

Part of the tremendous, child-like joy of Be Kind Rewind consequently comes from just looking at all the video boxes and movie posters.

It’s no coincidence that the poster we see most in Be Kind Rewind is for the movie Blast From the Past since Be Kind Rewind is itself a blast from the past in so many ways, like focussing on a video and thrift store that only rents videotapes for a dollar and has to be dragged kicking and streaming into the DVD era.

As someone who fetishizes and romanticizes half-forgotten obscurities I experienced a feeling approaching exhilaration just watching a list of all of the movies its heroes are “sweding” or remaking on the fly with non-existent budgets and twenty minute runtimes.

Part of that pleasure was the cheap buzz of recognition that comes with seeing a bunch of not terribly well known movies that I’m familiar with and some of that cheap but potent nostalgia comes from imagining what the buddies’ versions of Gummo, The Last Tango in Paris, Body Shots and the gloriously obscure 1993 cable TV movie Live Wire would look and feel like.

So I encourage y’all to check out Be Kind Rewind and also to join my Patreon, where I have posted over two dozen exclusive articles for the Fractured Mirror book. Like Be Kind Rewind it’s designed for nostalgic movie buffs and obsessive cinephiles.

We’re having big fun over at the Patreon. Think of it as a virtual video store with me as the endlessly accommodating owner and sole employee.

AND, if you want a whole book full of pieces about movies like Be Kind Rewind by pre-ordering my massive, 600 page magnum opus on films about films, The Fractured Mirror, which you can pre-order here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

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