Photo Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

Only at the very end of Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind is there a glimpse of brilliance. As newbie filmmakers Jerry (Jack Black) and Mike (Mos Def) premiere their feature film for cast and crew in the soon-to-be-demolished Be Kind Rewind video store, a mass of local Passaic, New Jerseyites gather outside to watch the projection that flashes on a white bedsheet taped to the store's window. The sheer sweetness and touching idealism of those last images, of that mass applauding Jerry and Mike's slipshod, fantastical film, somewhat saves Gondry's otherwise purposefully illogical screwball comedy. A film better suited for an audience of children, Be Kind Rewind overturns the adult emotional playfulness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep for an imaginative vision devoid of any bitterness. It's family fare, quite innocuous, morally stimulating and reminiscent of a porch film, those now too often rarely well made pieces of cinema that spring emotions of comfort and friendship to the surface.

When Be Kind Rewind video store owner Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) heads out on vacation, in reality a covert operation to spy on his competition in hopes of learning how to save his floundering business, Mike is left one instruction, "Keep Jerry Out." Paranoid that the local electric plant is mussing up his health, erratic and easily irate Jerry convinces Mike to tag along for an impromptu sabotage operation. When plans go comically wrong, Jerry ends up magnetized and upon entering the video store accidently erases all of the old school VHS tapes.

With a business to run and no product to rent out, Jerry and Mike set on an odyssey, camcorder in hand, to remake short versions of high-brow and low-brow Hollywood hits from Ghostbusters to The Last Tango in Paris. With the help of business-saavy Alma (Melonie Diaz), who plays lead actress in all of the remakes, and the support of kindly neighbors like Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow), the spur-of-the-moment dubbed 'sweded' tapes make their rounds in the local community, shooting the once-endangered video store into the spotlight. Playfully shot by cinematographer Ellen Kuras, inventive montage sequences of Mike and Jerry's film production move story pacing along well, although as they roll out too many, too often in editing, there's an overwhelming feeling that Gondry is simply making an extended music video.

Unsurprisingly, fame is short-lived for Mike, Jerry and Alma when a studio lawyer (Sigourney Weaver, in an oddly jarring but humorous cameo) threatens the filmmaking trio with criminal charges for copyright infringement. Last ditch efforts to save the Be Kind Rewind find the community banded together and making a biopic of local jazz legend Fats Waller. The bravado with which the intrepid crew makes the feature serves as an inspiration, yet it's still hard to believe that their production is ultimately anything more than D-list awful and laughable.

In terms of acting, Def is the backbone of the trio, his contribution one of innocence and honesty, and Farrow, right behind him, breaths gentle vivacity into a supporting role. Lacking originality in his recent character creations, Black needs a new schtick, and he needs it fast. The point of acting, presumably, is to grow artistically. The point Black lately demonstrates is that acting is about giving the same performance in every film. Diaz is adequate, although her casting choice seems to play more into Gondry's need to showcase romantic Passaic unity in a White/Black/Hispanic tie-up. Glover plays a failing businessman with comic timing and a bittersweet flare better in another film released this year, John Sayles' Honeydripper. Lest he should establish a cinematic stereotype that black businessmen are always struggling against failure, Glover may perhaps consider avoiding roles of this nature for a few years, although his showing here as Mr. Fletcher is still undeniably endearing.

It's a word in fact that well sums up Gondry's work. It's truly endearing; it's light-hearted; it's entertaining. But, as for the artistic challenges and medium innovations Gondry usually presents his audience with, those are as long gone in Be Kind Rewind as the VHS format the film immortalizes will very soon be.

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