I just finished watching Be Kind, Rewind starring Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover, Melonie Diaz and Mia Farrow.
Glover owns a VHS video-rental store in a condemned building in a run-down neighborhood. He has one employee, Def, who seems to be mildly retarded but not without common sense. Def’s friend Black is paranoid delusional and tends to break things unintentionally.
Black, attempting to sabotage a power substation (because he thinks its electromagnetic waves are controlling his brain) accidentally becomes magnetized, erasing all the tapes in the store. Worse, Glover is out of town visiting friends, having left Def in charge with one instruction; to keep his friend out of the store.
They set about re-making the movies, eventually involving almost everyone in the community as actors with hilarious results. They call the cheesy remakes “Sweded”; a cult following develops, and people come from as far away as New York to rent tapes. It begins to look as if they might earn enough money to save their building and their neighborhood from the developers.
And that’s when Sigourney Weaver shows up as an MPAA lawyer with a court order to destroy all their work and confiscate the money they made from it. In a completely realistic scene, she arranges for a steam roller to flatten all the tapes as the neighborhood’s residents – nearly all ad-hoc actors now – watch in horror. At least, it’s realistic given how the MPAA reacts to any other use of movie content but meek consumption.
(I don’t think “Sweding” a movie would really be a copyright infringement but of course, I’m not an MPAA lawyer.)
With all hope lost and destruction of the building only a week away, the whole community makes one last movie; a fictitious retelling of the life of Fats Waller, a Jazz musician. With wrecking balls hanging alongside the building, they show it in a sweetly triumphant ending.
And the fate of the building? Left to the viewer’s imagination.
It’s a goofy plot with even goofier characters. But it’s easy to care about them, and share in their despair and triumph. OK, it isn’t The English Patient but it’s fun. I’m likely to watch it again sometime.
Will I watch The English Patient again? Not likely; I didn’t even finish watching it the first time. Guess that tells you something about my taste, or lack of taste, in movies, so you are forewarned.
I loved this movie and found it delightfully hilarious. In part because as a kid my dad bought a camcorder, one of the huge VHS ones, and we reenacted Star Trek scenes with it as kids including the transporter parts. So we made swedes and I’m betting people all over did too. As kid I loved the idea of making films, I guess I just loved too many other things to develop any talent or true interest in it.
To me I just couldn’t get over the fun of reenacting someone else’s work with poorly done everything and the sappy community come togetherness. Two things I enjoy.