Sigh. So close, Michel, so very close.

The Tattooed Man is a big, big fan of French stylist Michel Gondry and so there were big, tattooed hopes for his new one, Be Kind Rewind.  I mean, come on, his video work is among the best in the world, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is flat out brilliant and heck, while it played to more mixed reviews than Sunshine I'm even a big fan of The Science of Sleep.  And the idea of Gondry making a film about a couple blue collar slobs making lo-fi versions of their favorite films was just gold, pure gold.  So how could it go wrong?  Well ... two things.  Lack of script and an unrestrained Jack Black.

Sorry, Jack.  Your time's up.  Black could seemingly do no wrong for a while - okay, he did do Shallow Hal, one of the worst films ever, but that was in the middle of a serious hot streak so it's easy to overlooked - but he clearly peaked with School of Rock and it's been all downhill ever since, Black relying purely on gimmicks and twitches with pretty much zero effort to actually, you know, act.  There's talent in there, we've seen it before, and Gondry's proven he can pull surprising performances out of manic comedians but Black is, bluntly, absolutely horrible in this film - completely out of step with Mos Def and Danny Glover, who seem to be living in another world entirely.  Combine Black with a script that's BADLY underwritten, particularly in the early going, and you've got a film that very nearly dies a sad and pathetic death in the opening act.

Happily, things get better.  Lots better.  By now you should all be familiar with the story behind this thing:  Mos Def, a rather 'slow' young man, works at a failing video store that rents nothing but VHS tapes, tapes that are all erased simultaneously when his best friend - the junk yard dwelling Black - touches all the tapes after being accidentally magnetized.  Desperate to save the store the duo begin to record their own ultra quick and low budget versions of the films they've erased to replace the stocks, dubbing them 'Sweded' versions and in the process become local stars.  Getting there is painful but the second the story gets to this point - with the duo shooting laughably bad versions of Ghost Busters, Rush Hour 2, Driving Miss Daisy, etc -  things get jumping.  It's smart, it's funny, it's touching, and - very deliberately, I think - it's a striking comment on what is possible with just a bit of creativity.

There are lots of ways to unpack Be Kind Rewind.   Some look at it as nostalgia, which it is.  How many members of the video generation spent days and weeks of their youth making bad films exactly like this?  Some look at it as a shot at the MPAA and the whole concept of copyright ownership, and that's certainly there as well.  But what Be Kind Rewind really is is a plea to its audience to create rather than consume.  The Sweding process feeds the audience practical tips on how to make films yourself, the techniques used poorly by the film's characters being the exact same ones Gondry uses himself in his own work and it's impossible not to think that Gondry is deliberately letting people take a look behind the curtain.  "This is how you do it, it costs nothing, now get to it."  It's the over riding theme that runs through the film:  consumption isolates, creation unifies.  It's an odd stance for a major studio film to take - one that argues against people buying the inevitable DVD - but it's definitely where Gondry wants to go with it and good on him for doing it.

In completely unrelated news, the Oscars were this weekend and a bunch of people won a bunch of little gold men whose value are hugely over rated.  Yawn.  And Hong Kong star Edison Chen - you may know him from The Grudge 2 and he's got an upcoming role in The Dark Knight -  has just announced his retirement from the Hong Kong entertainment industry in the wake of a sex photo scandal.  Which means the HK industry works in precisely opposite fashion to the North American one ... if only things had gone this way for Paris Hilton ...