Be Kind Rewind

reviewed by Sam Osborn

We all have a place to rent movies. Our place to rent movies. My place, The Video Station, is a two floor monolith of titles, where the browsing of films is discouraged by the sheer volume of shelves. You stand the chance of getting lost; and it’s better just to ask. And so you approach the filmic lotuses crouching behind their counter, where they await any customer upon whom they can drop some prodigious film knowledge. Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry’s follow-up to 2006’s Science of Sleep, is the swan song of this dying tradition. In fact, Mr. Gondry laments the diminishment of many traditions here. His film is a ballad to the Video Station, to Jazz music, to independent filmmaking, DIY community artistry, and to the VCR. It seems ironic then, that in order to make such a loaded film, Gondry went through Hollywood for distribution, cast Jack Black and Mos Def instead of local actors from his New Jersey set, and will obviously capitulate to a DVD transfer and rental through Netflix and Blockbuster when Be Kind Rewind is released for home viewing.

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Charlie Bartlett

a little review by Sam Osborn

Somebody asked Jon Poll, the first-time director of Charlie Bartlett, how he’d chosen the script as his first project. “Well,” he said, “I read about a hundred scripts and narrowed it down to about two. The first was Charlie Bartlett, obviously. And the other was Juno.” He was confused when the audience laughed. He said, “What? What’s so funny?” Nobody could tell him, or had the heart to tell him, that he’d made the wrong choice.

Charlie Bartlett is a fine movie, but it’s not “the love song to teenagers” that Mr. Poll hails it as. It’s a film about kids that’s written by adults. And though this is usually the case, the best stories about youth understand their subjects as their peers would. Think Tina Fey’s playful satirizing of the high school experience with Mean Girls, or Noah Baumbach’s understanding of divorce and brotherhood in The Squid and the Whale. With Charlie Bartlett we get the feeling that it was written by the parents. And maybe that’s why the parents’ sub-plots ring more clearly than the teenagers’. Robert Downey Jr. as Principle Gardner and Hope Davis as Charlie’s mom are both broken characters, struggling to stay afloat as their children stir the waters they swim in. The main story, in which Charlie (Anton Yelchin) finds popularity in bathroom-stall psychology and prescription drug dealing is more of a clever riff on Ferris Beuller’s Day Off than a smart swing at the Ridalin and Zoloft-dazed generation of teenagers today.

Charlie Bartlett: Directed by Jon Poll. Written by Gustin Nash. Starring Anton Yelchin, Kat Dennings, and Robert Downey Jr. Rated R for language, drug use, and brief nudity.

Definitely, Maybe

a little review by Sam Osborn

While staying within the fencing of its own genre, Definitely, Maybe tells a distinctly American story of adulthood, fatherhood, politics, and, of course, relationships. Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds), a successful Manhattan ad man, is implored by his daughter, Maya (Abigail Breslin of Little Miss Sunshine fame) to explain the story of her conception. You see, Maya’s a fresh graduate of public education’s grand sex ed program, and thus wildly curious about doing it. Not helping matters is the envelope landing on Will’s desk containing his divorce papers. Guilty and defenseless against his daughter’s pleas, Will is harangued into recounting the tale of meeting her mother. The catch is that there are three women involved, and Will mounts the story up as a mystery for Maya where she must guess at the end of the tale which of the three women is her mom.

The film is timely if not current, with Will spending much of his time scrambling through the nineties while writer/director Adam Brooks draws neat parallels between the 1992 election of President Clinton and the Democratic surge occurring as I write this. The political spin, along with all the other tangential interests of Definitely, Maybe, might come randomly, but they also quietly work to make Will Hayes into a kind of new Everyman for the American male. This understanding of, how should we put it, the male national conscious, is refracted then into the three women of his romantic life: Emily (Elizabeth Banks) the college sweetheart, April (Isla Fisher) the wandering friend, and Summer (Rachel Weisz) the surreptitious workaholic. In working his way through the tangled stories of all three, Mr. Brooks contains himself to the tools his genre. There are the sweet monologues, guitar strums and orchestral hoorahs, there are the last-scene kisses, and mid-movie break-ups. No beat is missed. But also strung effortlessly among these familiar landmarks is a reminder that there are certain few people in our lives who shape and define us. They are worth the love and the pain we invest into such relationships, and in some cases, they mean as much to the children that are, by consequence, produced. Definitely, Maybe is still the Romantic Comedy you shelled out ten dollars for. But as we exit the theatres, let’s try and say something other than, “That was cute.”

Definitely, Maybe: Written and Directed by Adam Brooks. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Abigail Breslin. MPAA Classification: PG-13 for sexual content including some frank dialogue, language and smoking.