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Panicking, Mike does what anyone in his position would do: He downloads a pirated Ghostbusters rip from a torrent site and copies it over the blank tape. No wait, I meant he rents the DVD from a local competitor and copies it onto the tape. No wait, he doesn't do that either.

Instead, Mike hatches a scheme that only a character in a Gondry movie would dream up: He and Jerry will produce Ghostbusters the old-fashioned way—themselves. After all, they reason, Miss Falewicz has never seen it, so how does she know it isn't a rock-bottom YouTube-level goof with no plot, a couple of guys humming their own theme song and a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man made of real marshmallows?

It's so crazy it just might have worked—but then the ersatz remake winds up in the wrong hands … with unexpected results. And of course Ghostbusters isn't the only film people want to see. Pressed to come up with more titles, Mike and Jerry stall as long as they can, explaining that the wanted films are, um, hard-to-find imports from Sweden, yeah, that's the ticket.

Mia Farrow as Miss Falewicz, Danny Glover as Mr. Fletcher

Although it's pretty much instantly obvious what's really happening, for some reason the Swedish connection sticks, and eventually the "Sweded" remakes become a local cult phenomenon. With only Jerry's mechanic (Irv Gooch) standing in for all supporting characters—including women—the collaborators quickly feel the pinch of their limited cast, and begin scouting for a more kissable leading lady. Although Jerry's first choice, a Latina clerk at a cleaner's, is unavailable, her sister Alma (Melonie Diaz) turns out to be much more than another pretty face, and soon the a la carte filmmakers have a third partner.

In a slick Hollywood comedy like Bowfinger, the "Sweding" process would be wackier and more over-the-top, with more gags and possibly more laughs. Gondry is content to go for naive charm and conceptual inspiration, which will delight some viewers while leaving others cool. Certainly the more familiar you are with the original films, the funnier the "Sweding" scenes are. My favorite bits include brilliantly low-budget special effects for King Kong, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Men in Black, as well as Jerry and Mike's impersonations of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 2.

In all this absurdism, there are only a couple of bits of hard reality pushing back, both involving the inexorability of bureaucracy and the legal process. There's also an emotional speed bump when Mike's last-minute inspiration to save the shop unexpectedly opens the door to a melancholy truth he would rather not have known.

Be Kind is escapist fantasy, but its escapism is self-consciously so; the hardness of the world lightly papered over, but not really covered or forgotten. "Our history belongs to us—we can change it if we want to," someone goes so far as to say at one point. But Be Kind never forgets that there are limits to what we can change, realities we can't remake, erase or rewind.

What we can do is—be kind.

Talk About It

1. Have you ever visited a site from your childhood and found familiar landmarks gone or changed? What was different? What was the same? How did it make you feel? Did you think the changes were beneficial, harmful or neither?
2. Why do we sometimes feel it is important that things stay the same, even if we know change is necessary or inevitable?
3. At one point a character learns that something he always thought was true was a lie told to him since childhood. Is this lie like parents deceiving their children about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy? Is it unlike? What do you think of such deceptions? Are they harmless or wrong? Why?
4. What do you think of Miss Falewicz's line, "Our history belongs to us—we can change it if we want to"? What do you think she means by that? In what senses might someone want or try to change the past? Is it ever something we can do? If so, is it something that should or shouldn't be done?

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