Notes From an EW Critic: The Visionary 'Momma's Man'

Michel Gondry is a rock star at Sundance. Before the premiere of his latest fancy, Be Kind Rewind, the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was surrounded by television cameras, and then, on the stage, he got a hero's cheering ovation. It's not hard to see why. Many Sundance filmmakers have gone onto mainstream careers, but you could give Michel Gondry all the studio backing in the world, as well as a budget of $100 million, and what he'd come up with, in every frame, would be an independent film. He wouldn't know how to think otherwise; caprice — visual, emotional, structural — is hard-wired into his nervous system.

Be Kind Rewind has a premise that's so silly-fizzy-catchy, so whimsically out there, so completely and utterly Gondry, you almost can't believe he had the tenacity — or the innocence — to see it through. The principal setting is a tumbledown, ramshackle video store — and I do mean grimy VHS, not DVD — in Passaic, NJ, where Jack Black, as a guy who likes to hang around the store, has a radioactive accident, gets literally magnetized, and ends up erasing all of the store's tapes. You'd think that this would be a medical crisis more than a video-store crisis, but no: Black and the store's chief clerk, played with winning unflappability by Mos Def, decide to restock the place by shooting their own hand-made, home-movie versions of Ghostbusters, Rush Hour, Boyz N the Hood, and many others. They're like Ed Wood making tin-pot blockbusters out of Scotch tape and cardboard and, at one point, a pizza placed under someone's head to look like blood on the sidewalk. Be Kind Rewind is a trifle that is also, at moments, a delightfully daft tale of pure-hearted, brain-dead movie love. (Its antecedents include both those great staged cinema re-enactments in Rushmore and the fabled shot-by-shot kiddie remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark.) I loved its anyone-can-make-art spirit, yet Gondry, I have to say, would really do well to stop writing his own scripts. Except for Eternal Sunshine, his movies, including this one, are such light souffles that they barely stick to your ribs, or to anywhere else.

***

The documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life was produced in association with public television, so I figured that it would be an attempt to squeeze the life of the great rag-doll punk priestess into the traditional PBS format of thoroughly archived, squarely shaped portraiture. I should only have been so lucky. The movie turns out to be a woozy and naïve art ramble. It was shot over a period of 12 years, during which Smith spent a lot of time sitting around an apartment in the Chelsea Hotel and visiting the graves of people like Blake and Rimbaud. She is a charming, and sometimes cutting, survivor, still haunted by the death of her husband, Fred ''Sonic'' Smith, in 1994. But where's the footage we most want to see, of Smith back when she was the fire-throated poet-revolutionary of CBGB's? The movie treats her '70s heyday as if it were some trivial prelude to her middle age, and to the film's own tediously ''poetic'' present-tense noodling.