I haven’t yet seen Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, but A.O. Scott’s New York Times review made me want to:
…It treats movies as found objects, as material to be messed around with, explored and reimagined. It connects the do-it-yourself aesthetic of YouTube and other digital diversions with the older, predigital impulse to put on a show in the backyard or play your favorite band’s hits with your buddies in the garage.
And the deep charm of Mr. Gondry’s film is that it allows the audience to experience it with the same kind of casual fondness. It is propelled by neither the psychology of its characters nor the machinery of its plot, but rather by a leisurely desire to pass the time, to see what happens next, to find out what would happen if you tried to re-enact “Ghostbusters” in your neighbor’s kitchen.
I would argue that “the do-it-yourself aesthetic of YouTube and other digital diversions” and the “older, predigital impulse to put on a show” are in fact one and the same. It is this motivation that drives a great deal of the creativity on today’s Web. What’s different today is that the “backyard” theater can pack in, potentially, millions. The garage is infinite.
David Edelstein didn’t like it quite as much, but he concludes:
…it radiates the kind of optimism you don’t see in films about how new media is turning us all into passive voyeurs in our own hermetically sealed bubbles. This bubble is warm and inclusive.
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