Example #3 The Village Voice

This story relates to Clarence's earlier Guardian post on the new Gondry film. It also relates to cult films, indie films, and based on today's lecture -- postmodern films. In fact it even uses the word bricolage in the review!!! The whole article is here.

Here's the Reader's Degest version:

Like his previous feature The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry's gently outlandish Be Kind Rewind is a fantasy about fantasy—a fragile, somewhat precious celebration of DIY filmmaking and cult-film consumption that, given its gaps in logic, spectators are more or less obliged to mentally assemble on their own. The setting is a counterfactual universe in which VHS tapes remain rentable commodities, and Passaic, New Jersey, is the former world capital of jazz—mainly because someone claims it as the birthplace of the movie's presiding deity, stride pianist Fats Waller. ... The good folks of Passaic, which is to say the simpletons who patronize Be Kind Rewind, are menaced by the encroaching gentrification—or at least urban renewal—poised to level the video store. All that history turned to dust. Before the bulldozers arrive, however, Jerry's paranoid attempt to sabotage the power plant backfires. Dressed in tinfoil and lurching like Frankenstein's monster, he returns as a human magnetic force field who both distorts the movie's image and provides its situation when he inadvertently erases all the VHS tapes in the store.

Jerry has the ability to create minimalist video art simply by touching a TV screen, but, to make up for the lost inventory, he and Mike begin producing new 15-minute videocorder versions of '80s and '90s movies—beginning with Ghostbusters. ("I'm Bill Murray—you're everybody else.") The hilariously impoverished special effects are predicated on scribbled pictures, giant cutouts, and pragmatic camera placement. Reducing movies to their most infantile level, they're like kids at play. Jerry's assistant Watson (rumple-faced Irv Gooch) assumes the female parts until the filmmakers draft Alma (Melonie Diaz), a bored employee at the dry cleaner next-door.

Subsequent productions include RoboCop, The Lion King, When We Were Kings, and Driving Miss Daisy (with Jerry an aggressive Jessica Tandy to Mike's sullen Morgan Freeman), but not Back to the Future—the movie that Be Kind most resembles in its tricky premise, double-edged sentimentality, and convoluted nostalgia. Hardly industry calling cards, these ridiculously low-tech little movies—which Jerry and Mike refer to as "sweded"—are exercises in junkyard whimsy. The customers are thrilled (this is Chelm, after all), and anyone with a feel for film form will be delighted. The sweded productions are pure underground, somewhere between the 8mm epics the teenaged Kuchar Brothers made a half-century ago in the Bronx and the ritual developed by the Peruvian Indians in Dennis Hopper's Last Movie.

...

Is this comic bricolage a form of criticism? Gondry privileges audience devotion over corporate profit and argues that studio movies have grown ever more depleted since the '80s and '90s. (Having studied a successful DVD store, Mr. Fletcher realizes that there need be only two sections: Action Adventure and Comedy.) Villainy arrives in the form of an intellectual-property lawyer (Sigourney Weaver, herself a ghost of Ghostbusters), who shows up to enforce the piracy statutes and levy a $3 billion fine. The loss of the sweded tapes forces the community to produce an original movie—Fats Waller Was Born "Here." (Mike and Jerry both assume themselves physically appropriate to play the lead; everything grinds to a halt when Jerry shows up in blackface.) ...

Is the bricolage a from of criticism? In other words, is it pastiche or parody. Again, wow, is this eerily on target for today's lecture? It sounds like a postmodern film that's completely critiquing the PM condition -- as does Knightriders.