Be Kind Rewind

Watching this movie reminded me of some of the best Simpson episodes, but not in a positive way. A good example would be Boy-Scoutz ‘n The Hood, where Bart ends up in a Boy Scouts-like organization. But to get there, the plot needs to go through the following hoops: 1) Homer eats peanuts. 2) Homer loses the last peanut under the couch. 3) Instead of finding the peanut, Homer finds a $20 bill. 4) The $20 bill is taken by the wind and lands at the feet of Bart and Milhouse. 5) They spend it on, among other things, a Slurpee made entirely out of syrup. 6) The pure syrup Squishee makes them go on a drugged-our crazy bender. 7) The next morning, Bart discovers, in the sugared out state, that he joined the Scouts, and his parents won’t let him quit. Be Kind Rewind is a lot like that. To get from where it starts to where it ends requires jumping across a dozen plot element lily pads. Unfortunately, instead of being an amusing chain of events like The Simpsons, it is a series of half-baked ideas and dropped sub-plots, all so the movie can get to a schmaltzy ending it neither sets up properly or earns. For some reason, every character in the movie seems to be either the victim of a traumatic brain injury, or built on a lead mine, as everybody is profoundly naive and stupid. This is necessary because it’s the only thing that allows this movie to shamble through the hoops of its bizarre and convoluted plot. It would be more tolerable if the movie was a zany, madcap comedy, but it isn’t. The comedy is mild and lasts for maybe the first third, before pivoting to a “we gotta win the talent show to save the rec center” plot, before that pivots into a “the neighborhood becomes a community” plot, picking up and discarding a bunch of subplots along the way, and ignoring plot holes that could pass a planet. I’ll say that Jack Black’s normal, and highly irritating, awkwardly intense man-child schtick is not present here. He’s still awkward, but it isn’t as abrasive and one-note as his other movies. And Mos Def is fun, even if he’s a little too low key here. And I will say the cast does seem to be having fun with this. But I didn’t, because the movie spends more time pivoting than moving forward. It’s a dozen ideas in search of a movie, and it needed to settle down and pick one or two that worked together and went with it. It almost feels like the movie is being written and filmed in real time, that’s how disjointed it is. And when it gets to the ending, and nothing is resolved — in fact, the protagonists lose everything — it feels like a big waste of time. Theirs and ours.