I love the recent Michel Gondry movies because they mostly have to do with the very primal urge to create and the creative process itself. Dave Chappelle's Block Party gave insight to comedy and stage performance while documenting the organizing of a spontaneous event, and The Science of Sleep highlighted how having a strong artistic side is equal parts joy and frustration as it tends to correlate with  having a social handicap.

Gondry's latest movie, Be Kind Rewind, is more direct and simple -- it's an ode to finding one's creative side and the joys of being able to share one's creations with others. The movie's story is typically, eccentrically Gondry-esque: when Jack Black gets magnetized and erases all the VHS cassettes in the video store Mos Def is tending, they decide to recreate the movies by re-enacting them themselves and recording them. To their surprise, their versions, which they say are "Sweded," turn out to be hits in their little community and soon everyone wants to be a part of the process.

This movie is a fantasy, because creative enthusiasm isn't necessarily so infectious, but, with its wacky premise, it's already asking the viewer to run along with it. And if you do, you could get swept up in its scrappy, construction-paper spirit. Be Kind Rewind is for all the people who have ever created their own movies, songs, books, and comics from whatever they could obtain, and it imagines a world where such creations are eagerly embraced.

In this YouTube age, Gondry may be on to something, but I think it's more accurate to eschew the randomness YouTube largely exposes to understand a disciplined creative process (watch how the main characters direct their scenes, even in their nutty, desperate ways), and to revel in the concoctions that emerge.

(Released by New Line Cinema and rated "PG-13" for some sexual references.)

Review also posted at ww.windowtothemovies.com.