Be Kind Rewind

Not as funny as I was expecting for a Jack Black movie, but I thought it was a clever premise. It was a quirky movie about a video store in a low income area in New Jersey that rents only VHS tapes. The store looks like a post apocalyptic supply closet that happens to have a small collection of videos. The shop is not doing well and is under threat of demolition, despite the owner’s insistence that the jazz legend Fats Waller was born in the building and is therefore a historic site.

The owner, Mr. Fletcher is resigned to the fate of his shop and goes on his yearly memorial for Fat’s death leaving his only employee played by Mos Def, to watch the shop giving him strict instruction to not let Jack Black into the store. Because we all know what comedic pudgy guys do when the grown-ups are away. So Mos Def is able to keep Black away for all of 1 minute. Black goes on a night mission to take down the local power plant for reasons only a paranoid conspiracy theorist could understand. Black is caught in some electrical booby trap and becomes magnetized and without fail goes straight to the video store where his new found superpowers proceed to erase every tape in the shop.

Once discovering the erased tapes the two panic and are very close to being ratted out by Mia Farrow. So Def and Black try to trick Farrow by filming a reenactment of Ghostbusters using a hand cam and staring themselves. The movie is 20 minutes but becomes a success when one of Farrows multiple adopted family members sees it and asks for others like it. Dubbing the movies as being “Sweded” the pair start an endeavor to re-film the erased movies and rent them at a higher cost with the hopes of saving the building.

Craziness ensues with the two characters acting out the roles in the movies. Slowly, the customers become part of the process, acting out their favorite characters in their favorite movies. It is a cute movie about pride in ones community and history. I liked the movie for its originality, what I didn’t like was it didn’t feel cohesive, which was disappointing coming from the director of Eternal Sunshine.