Philadelphia Weekly

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Reviewed by Matt Prigge

Now showing

In the documentary VHS: Kahloucha, we meet a Tunisian filmmaker so DIY that his films--imitations of American actioneers with titles like Misery to Get Rid of the Booze and Tarzan of the Arabs--are shot on bulky old-school VHS camcorders and feature things like baddies hurling visibly hollowed-out TVs. He couldn't ask for a better (albeit inadvertent) Hollywood adaptation than Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, a gentle and sneakily affecting ode to Ludditism in which two shlubs (Jack Black and Mos Def) make 20-minute film adaptations with similar equipment in gentrifying Passaic, N.J.

For reasons too bizarre to surmise, unkempt junkyard worker Black winds up magnetized, and he accidentally erases all the VHS tapes--yes, VHS tapes--at the video store at which his friend (Mos Def) works. Not wanting to destroy the dynasty of owner Danny Glover, away on secret business, the two (plus scene-stealing laundromat chick Melonie Diaz) wind up "Sweding" the store's supply--their inscrutable term for making backyard remakes of films like Robocop, The Lion King, 2001 and When We Were Kings. (Among the titles mentioned but, sadly, not seen is Gummo. I mean, damn.)

Made on the fast and cheap ("I'm Bill Murray. You're everyone else," Mos Def tells Black when embarking on Ghostbusters), they're also boundlessly resourceful--in other words, not terribly far removed from Gondry's own work. A scene where our stars try to duplicate the dangling-from-a-rooftop scene from Rush Hour 2 using a miniature city, a jungle gym and a comically forced perspective could be slipped into almost any of the director's refreshingly tactile music videos.

Eventually, though, the central premise winds up taking a backseat to something even better. Turns out everyone in the neighborhood loves the rinky-dink epics, and they want in. At this point Rewind basically becomes Gondry's The Science of Sleep crossbred with his Dave Chappelle's Block Party, whose sense of a community coming together proved inspirational in the best and least noxious kind of way. Most of the time Rewind is as amiably ramshackle as its films-within-the-film, but it builds to a fairly devastating climax, with Passaic brought together in collective union/delusion over these handcrafted films.

Gondry's work is sometimes derided for what's (mis)perceived as twee insularity, but Rewind makes it clearer than before--maybe too clear, in fact--that it's the tug-of-war between the inside and outside world that interests him, not just the former.

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The Signal

Directed by David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry
B

Reviewed by Doug Wallen

Now showing

If The Signal feels like a few different films, that's because it is. A collaboration between a trio of writer/directors who each tackle an act, this low-budget genre exercise emerges as something more than the bloody thriller it was conceived as. Bowing to three different personalities, it rides a premise lifted right out of Japanese horror: A signal invades every TV, phone and radio, sending anyone exposed into a murderous spiral of madness.

The film is set on New Year's Eve in the ominously named city of Terminus, where Mya Denton (the refreshingly unglamorous Anessa Ramsey) is returning to her suspicious husband Lewis (played with asshole-ish perfection by AJ Bowen) after a late-night tryst with her lover Ben (Justin Wellborn). Unfolding like a zombie movie, the plot stirs the increasing chaos in Mya's apartment building into what appears to be a full-blown apocalypse.

People everywhere are killing each other, but unlike in a zombie movie, it's hard to tell who's infected with the signal and who's defending themselves. (The film's cheeky tag line is "Do you have the crazy?") The premise exposes our dependence on technology--how do you get help if radios and phones don't work?--and offers shades of Videodrome in that cancerous signal, which looks like a staticy version of the colorful iTunes Visualizer.

As expected, every act--or "transmission," as they're billed--goes in its own direction. David Bruckner's opening "Crazy in Love" features Death Proof-style faux-'70s credits and purposefully choppy editing, plus a scene that forecasts Blair Witch-damaged torture porn before getting down to the story at hand. The third act, Dan Bush's "Escape From Terminus," is meanwhile hampered by a prolonged showdown between Lewis and Ben. That leaves Jacob Gentry's loose midsection, "The Jealousy Monster," which plays the gore and confusion for well-earned laughs (think Shaun of the Dead) while remaining nail-bitingly suspenseful and plenty dark.

Together they make for a fun, diverting film that has something for every horror fan. Given its shakily filmed doomsday and young cast of unknowns, The Signal will likely get compared to Cloverfield, but it's sturdy enough to stand on its own, gaining giddy turbulence from its three-headed approach without derailing along the way.

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