Hello!

I agree with your interpretation. I hadn't heard of the other one but I find the idea that you express to be the best. The film is really about community, after all, and a 'miracle' ending involving outsiders just doesn't work.

Agree with your second point. I thought the film was a gem, personally.

Can a moderator fix the title so that comments are blacked out in "Recent Comments"? I apparantly don't know how to do that.

I thought the film was a gem, personally.

Oh me too! It wasn't a perfect movie but I found myself completely enthralled by it.

I tried watching this over the weekend, but after 20 minutes I still didn't care about anybody in the movie enough to keep watching. I wanted to like it, but there was nothing grab me. I'm even more stunned to find out that this movie had the type of ending that could inspire discussion. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood.

Slack-a-goo - I saw this in the cinema and it took me a while to get into it too. It grew on me after the first half hour or so and by the end I'd really enjoyed it - but I'll admit if I hadn't paid for the ticket already I may not have stuck with it. It might be worth giving it another go.

One of my fave films. No comment on this discussion, just to say that this is how I discovered who Michel Gondry was and I've been a fan of his ever since.

Total no-brainer for going to see one of his movies.

I didn't get a sense that the store would be saved, no. I think people are seeing what they want to see, but I don't think such a thing was ever implied.

I thought the ending was sort of deliberately story-book-ambiguous—whether or not the shop would be saved by this semi-magical turn of events wasn't intended to be clear, the film was more acknowledging the tension between pessimism/pragmatism and optimism/fantasy, something that basically ran through the whole film up to that point anyway.

I still need to see The Science of Sleep, which I get the impression I would enjoy more than I did Be Kind Rewind, for being a little bit more Gondry The Experimentalist and less of the Gondry The Sentimentalist. I loved Eternal Sunshine in no small part for the hand he had in the design/effects of it, but I like David Gilmour's work in 70s Floyd a lot better than I like his solo albums, so, you know.

I liked Rewind, but I wasn't particularly drawn in to it. It had a lot of charm and some wonderful moments (I loved the Sweding scenes to death), but it felt weirdly uneven, like Gondry had people he liked doing things that amused him and if there was a movie there when they were done that would be convenient. As a sort of meditation on authenticity and storytelling and friendship and loyalty, it's a nice set piece, but it wasn't a very satisfying film to me.

FWIW, I liked The Science of Sleep much, much better than Be Kind Rewind - it's a little darker and yes more experimental. It's another movie where my interpretation differed from what some or most people saw as plot of the movie. Maybe that's the beauty of Gondry films; however, it makes me sort of mad when they get bad reviews because the reviewer has a rigid interpretation of a particular plot point or scene as a cliche, when I saw it as a wonderful subversion of cliche instead.