Pretty soon, the homemade flicks get cult status the transformation becomes known as "sweding" and "sweded" films are much prized. (YouTubers have been doing this for ages.) The guys' versions of Ghostbusters, Rush Hour 2 and, bizarrely, the Muhammad Ali documentary When We Were Kings, complete with brow-furrowing commentary from George Plimpton, are hilarious. Maybe it is too easy to get recognition laughs by doing your own homemade version of well-known films, but it is funny. So armed with a chunky VHS camcorder, our heroes set out on a desperate mission to film their own no-budget version of the entire commercial Hollywood canon. Jerry's whole body becomes electro-magnetised after breaking into the local power station on an eco-sabotage mission, and by walking into the shop he erases every single tape. While Mr Fletcher is away for a week-long Fats Waller symposium, leaving the guys minding the store, something awful happens. They do not stock anything as trendy or futuristic as DVDs: no, they rent out dusty old-style video cassettes at a dollar a pop to the similarly retrograde locals. Mos Def and Jack Black play Mike and Jerry, two guys who work, or at least hang out, at a crummy old video rental store called Be Kind Rewind, which is owned by gentle old-timer Mr Fletcher (Danny Glover). It is simpler and happier than his previous movies The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it's got some laughs, but also some baffling flaws, of which more in a moment.
This new movie, written and directed by Gondry, is probably his most uncomplicated, and the least burdened by the need to explain or embed its eccentricity in melancholy. He is a surrealist and a romantic and very French in his cerebral playfulness, though earlier collaborations with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman have given him access to a Hollywood-indie sensibility. His films have a wacky homemade aesthetic, a cheerful make-do-and-mend look, often introverted, bordering occasionally on something which is, to quote one character's harshly non-PC remark in an earlier film, "kind of retarded". I f you can imagine a movie-maker who sustained a career while never leaving his teenage bedroom - putting each completed film outside the door on a breakfast tray for his mum to collect on her way down to the kitchen - then you can imagine the work of Michael Gondry.
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