Remembering Be Kind Rewind

Michel Gondry has his first English-language feature in a decade out this summer, the musical Golden--a fact that doesn't seem to have been accorded much fanfare considering how much press he once got here, if you recall the fulsomeness of the praises for The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

As it happens that movie made less of an impression on me than his later Be Kind Rewind--to which the critics were much less kind than to Spotless Mind, I think unjustly. Granting that the film was not all it might have been, the fact that it centered on characters of a kind you don't see so much in contemporary American film, its quirkiness without pretension, its element of satire that could seem like biting the hand that fed it given how it treated Hollywood's studios and what they give the public (none of which could be expected to endear it to those who give the orders to les claqueurs), this was all manifest in its portrayal of everyday people turning from consuming the corporate crap shoveled out to them to making their own entertainment.

I'm not sure that the critics, or the general audience, have grown much more appreciative of the film since. However, in the era of generative AI, in which the day in which "everyone" can be their own auteur may seem to be fast approaching (as it is everyone can at least look like the auteur of their own film in the trailers they are sticking up on YouTube), that theme of the public ceasing to be passive consumers and becoming creators seems more relevant all the time.