[rehab.is.for.retards]

Jack Black, Mos Def, and Danny Glover drive Be Kind Rewind (IMDB link opens in new window) through its fantastical and often times nearly horrible plot with all the finesse of a surgeon using a hammer as a scalpel. Fortunately, that is just what the story calls for.

Be Kind Rewind Movie Art

The entire film plays as an advertisement for DIY film making. A call back to early Lucas, or early childhood. The lo-fi special effects solutions leave you mouth agape from the sheer creativity of it all. Clearly Jack Black is not actually falling off of a sky scraper, but who would have thought to put him on his back, spinning on a lazy Suzanne, over a tiny town kids room play rug to achieve the effect.

The basic plot revolves around a desperate attempt to save a local VHS only rental store, about to be reclaimed by a city beautification project. When every video in the store gets erased from a “strange magnetic field” (it’s ok to call Jack Black strange, right?), the two shop keepers, Jack Black and Mos Def, resort to re-filming each of the video titles, one by one, to the growing amusement and interest of their neighborhood.

The bubbling, at times playful, at times insane energy of this movie left me laughing uproariously throughout nearly the entire film, although in the end, what I appreciated the most was how it left me with an urge to create.  It was a nostalgic throwback to watching the A-Team or, much earlier, the Muppet Babies.

One thing I particularly enjoyed was how the movie, for the first time, painted the beloved VHS camera and cassette of my youth as an underground “true art” tool.  When I was younger, I got my hands on an old 8mm and love the idea that DVD’s ugly uncle (VHS) could hold that sort of cachet for new generations of old media-culture junkies.

In eBay speak: “Recomend Seller A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++”