DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
It appears that video tape will likely be to the generation currently growing up what 8-tracks were to my own. So it’s probably time to prepare for the day when the only references to VHS in movies will come attached to anachronistic jokes at the expense of my own nostalgia. That’s unlikely to be the case in the new film from Michel Gondry, though, since he’s a director known for avoiding digital age solutions to filmmaking problems. Be Kind Rewind is about a video store that still dispenses miles and miles of that magnetic tape, which becomes a problem when a friend (Jack Black) of a clerk (Mos Def) at the store inadvertently erases the store’s tapes after a freak accident in which his head becomes magnetized during an attempt at industrial sabotage. Faced with the threat of Def losing his job, the pair do what any reasonable people would do in such a situation, and attempt to remake the movies with a camcorder, casting themselves as the stars of films such as Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy, and Robocop. Sound implausible? Perhaps, but this is the world of Gondry, where just this kind of magically realistic whimsy is the norm. He is, after all, the man who convinced audiences that a machine that looked suspiciously like it was made of used kitchen implements could target and erase selected memories in the brain. For an audience willing to follow his flights of fancy, anything is possible.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a number of area theaters.
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While Fargo and No Country for Old Men tend to be the top critical darlings from the Coen brothers, and The Big Lebowski is the rabidly adored fan favorite, my own personal pick remains the surreal nightmare of 1991’s Barton Fink. Playing out like a David Lynch film scripted by Preston Sturges, Fink is both wildly hilarious and darkly disturbing, often at the same time. John Turturro’s turn in the title role is a career best, as an acclaimed young New York playwright who heads west to Hollywood to bring his theater of the “common man” to a larger audience, but ends up hopelessly blocked after he’s assigned a B wrestling picture to pen. John Goodman plays the mysterious traveling salesman in the room next door at the long-term hotel the studio has booked the writer into, and also puts up some of the best work of his career. The Coens satirical edge has never been sharper, as they cut into both low-brow Hollywood culture and high-minded (but out of touch) literary leftists with equal mad-eyed glee. The film builds to a wildly absurd and dream-like conclusion, ending with one of the most bizarrely appropriate final images in cinema history.
View the trailer.
Screening at the AFI tomorrow and Sunday at 9:15 p.m., and Monday at 9:10 p.m.
