On Fairytales and Michel Gondry

What's wrong with believing in fairytales? In my opinion, nothing. Fairytales are the life-blood of our society, or at least the part of society that encompasses the wishers and dreamers and artists, inventors, entrepreneurs, or basically anyone else who has any sort of ambition in life. They allow us, normal people, to believe that it's possible something great can happen, or more correctly, that we are capable of making something great happen. Michel Gondry is a filmmaker who creates realistic fairytales, fantastical stories about seemingly real people who end up, through some wacky happening finding something greater than themselves. He is also one of my favorites. As an avid Michel Gondry fan, I had been warned against possible disappointment in his latest film, "Be Kind, Rewind." But, as an avid Michel Gondry fan, I wanted to see it regardless of other's reviews, figuring that I would find something to like about it, which indeed turned out to be true. Though the story was lacking at times, and Jack Black's ridiculousness sometimes bordered on annoying, for the most part it was entertaining and endearing.

The tale of little video store struggling against the corporate conglomerate is nothing new, but this story changes quickly when the store's owner, Mr. Fletcher, leaves town for a couple of days to investigate ways to make his business more profitable and save his building from being condemned, and he leaves Mike in charge of the store. During a freak accident where Mike's friend Jerry tries to sabotage the local power plant (and the logistics of this are a bit confusing) he becomes magnetized, and when he shows up to the store the next day, accidentally erases all of the video tapes. In a moment of desperation and brilliance, Mike decides to film his own version of the movie Ghostbusters for an important customer. Their rationale--she'll never know, she's never seen the movie!--is completely unconvincing, as it is clearly Mike and Jerry filming themselves, but their growing excitement, and the artful movie-making montage, kept me watching. Their little shop becomes wildly successful, with townspeople lining up around the block, asking for their favorite movies to be "sweded," their term for those films they've re-made themselves. And then things become a bit muddled after this--the movie studios shut down Mike and Jerry's operation, which consequently means that Mr. Fletcher won't be able to come up with the money to bring his building up to code and it will soon be seized and demolished. The community is heartbroken, and so they help Mike and Jerry finish their one last film effort, a movie of their own about Fats Waller, a jazz musician and the town hero. A group of the film's main-players gather in the video store for one last screening while the demolition crew waits outside. When Mr. Fletcher hears a commotion outside and leaves the screening to see what's going on, he finds the entire town gathered outside, rapturously watching and cheering for the film.

They didn't succeed in saving their video store. They didn't even succeed in saving their building. Under most people's direction, Mike, Jerry, and Mr. Fletcher would have seemed like incredible failures, but somehow I found their (perhaps, overly) earnest pursuits and struggles endearing, which was, I assume, Mr. Gondry's purpose. Though in the end they didn't achieve what they set out to, what they did achieve was even greater, for it allowed them to realize their potential to do and create something more that they thought they were capable of. And for this reason mostly, even though there were so many other reasons to be disappointed in this movie, I couldn't help but kind of like it in the end.