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Rating:
Gondry's previous film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," from my point of view, can surely be counted among the most intricate, emotional, and (let's just say it) genius films of the new millennium. Stylistically dark with contrasting colors and directed innovatively with excellent ideas and a sense of sadness and nostalgia that dominates throughout the film. Here the exact opposite happens... Or almost.
In this new comedy, the tones that hover are the same, but the colors turn out to be warmer and less cold. The direction is once again superlative as you find genius ideas and elements that even make you smile (see the part about the demagnetization...). Moreover, the film takes on a more comedic connotation compared to that expressed by Jim Carrey and company, thanks to a great cast of lively and talented actors like Jack Black playing an annoying, paranoid guy fixated on the conspiracy of the city's power plant, and Mos Def (Italian Job) playing a responsible young man, a bit naive and almost unreal in his faith in old-fashioned values.
Our guys are great friends and spend a lot of time together in an "old-fashioned" video store dedicated to renting VHS tapes for those who haven't switched to digital yet. One day the owner (an aged Danny Glver) has to be away for a while and Mike takes over. That's when the trouble starts. Jerry wants to attempt a sabotage on the city’s power plant because he believes it's frying his brain, but something goes wrong and he ends up getting contaminated and magnetized. Inadvertently, he demagnetizes the entire collection of video tapes and, cornered by customers, they decide to recreate amateur versions of the famous classics in cinema history, going against copyright...
The interpretations of this memorable work are numerous. It can be seen lightheartedly as a normal comedy with a comedic rhythm that's lively and amusing. It can be interpreted as an artful comedy trying to interpret the current cinema world—too dense with special effects and lacking convincing rhetoric or morals. It can be viewed as an atypical documentary on cinema understood as art. It can finally be appreciated as a tribute to the great classics of the past where passion and the desire to create dominated. It can be understood as a denunciation of the forced desire for technology, which gradually takes life and heart from every film, leaving it soulless. Or it can be found as a genius collage of all the interpretations just expressed that blend well throughout the film.
Let's just say the cast is a cameo of bizarre appearances full of situations already revisited in the cinematic world. A glaring example is the parallel between Jack Black from "High Fidelity," who wandered among the shelves of a record store, and the one who looks at the videotapes with the same "slacker attitude" and the same desire to teach others what true cinema is or, in the case of the film with John Cusack, what real music is. The appearance of Sigourney Weaver as a lawyer, when the film was reproducing "Ghostbuster," or the scenes where a fragile Mia Farrow rents a tape showcase situations turned upside down or already revisited in the past by Hollywood cinema. Then there would be so many gems that with each new viewing you find another even subtler one that's even more hidden.
In short, a film to own in your video library that uncovers hidden emotions in the viewer for a form of art (cinema) that you thought were lost or dormant, but which emerge in a powerful way surrounded by loud laughter. THOSE REAL ONES.
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