Mos Def does it himself
Good ideas tend to catch on. In the couple of weeks since Michel Gondry's delirious Be Kind Rewind was released, YouTube has been flooded with sweded videos - "sweding" being the process outlined in the movie whereby a Hollywood title is remade for peanuts by amateurs using a home movie camera and whatever props and costumes are to hand. Now, alongside clips from Be Kind Rewind showing Jack Black as Robocop or Mos Def as a Ghostbuster, you can see YouTube users take on Terminator 2 (subtitled Low Budgment Day), Blade Runner, Fight Club and dozens more.
However, another clip has surfaced that aims to take Gondry down a peg or two. Bearing the not-at-all-hysterical title Be Kind Rewind: URGENT, it begins with a sarcastic notice: "Great idea for a film, right? A video store makes their own versions of popular movies and rents them to its customers, instead of the real movies. Brilliant idea! Gee, I wonder how they came up with it. Hmmm."
The material that follows is excerpted from a running sketch on The Amanda Show, a Nickelodeon series starring Amanda Bynes that ran from 1999 to 2002. Its basic premise is indeed strikingly similar to Be Kind Rewind's. The weirdly-accented staff of the Blockblister video store (apparently an Eastern European man and his son and daughter) palm customers off with their own crummy versions of The Wizard of Oz, Titanic, Scream and the like. Their response to complaints is the rousing refrain: "This movie is better. Muuuch better!"
There's no reason to believe Gondry had even heard of The Amanda Show, let alone ripped it off. The YouTube clip certainly doesn't show any identical jokes, just a similar basic concept, and more than one person can have the same funny idea. (See also Rushmore and Jonathan Caouette's high-school production of Blue Velvet.) Gondry might, however, appreciate the characters' can-do ethos - in another episode they develop their own alternative to DVD using a lawnmower and blocks of wood - and kudos should go to The Amanda Show for developing a sketch based on user-generated content before YouTube even existed.
If Be Kind Rewind is about anything, it's about how a pre-existing idea can be reshaped to suit the needs and pleasures of a new time - a notion, in fact, that is inseparable from the history of art. And if we want a sign that this idea's time has come, we just have to look at the video store customers' reactions: in The Amanda Show, they are angry and frustrated by these mash-ups; in Be Kind Rewind, they can't get enough of them. And now they're uploading their own.
