Be Kind Rewind
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Be Kind Rewind is a 2008 American comedy film from New Line Cinema, directed by Michel Gondry and starring Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover and Mia Farrow. The film premiered on January 20, 2008 at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. It was later shown at the Berlin International Film Festival. The film opened on February 22, 2008 in the United Kingdom and in the United States.
The title is a reference to a phrase commonly displayed on VHS rental tapes during the medium's heyday.
Plot
In Passaic, New Jersey, the declining "Be Kind Rewind" VHS rental store owned by Mr. Fletcher (Glover) is due to be demolished to make way for high-end development unless he can find the money to repair his building, despite his claims that jazz pianist Fats Waller was born in that building. Mr. Fletcher leaves on a trip for several days to join friends and memorialize Waller, leaving his only employee, Mike (Mos Def), to tend to the store, cautioning him to keep Mike's paranoid and klutzy friend, Jerry (Black), away. Jerry becomes magnetized after attempting to disable a nearby electrical substation, believing its energy to be melting his brain, and when Jerry enters the store the next day, he inadvertently erases all the VHS tapes. Mike quickly discovers the disaster, and is further pressed when Miss Falewicz (Farrow), Mr. Fletcher's friend, wants to rent Ghostbusters. To prevent her from reporting a problem to Mr. Fletcher, Mike comes up with an idea: as Miss Falewicz has never seen the movie, he proposes to recreate the film using himself and Jerry as the actors and cheap special effects hoping to fool her. They complete the movie just in time when another customer asks for Rush Hour 2. Mike and Jerry repeat their filming, enlisting the help of Alma (Melonie Diaz), a local woman, for some of the parts.
Word of mouth spreads through Miss Falewicz's nephew of the inadvertently hilarious results of Mike and Jerry's filming, and soon the store is seeing more requests for such movies. Mike, Jerry, and Alma quickly pass off the movies as being "sweded", insisting the films came from Sweden and thus able to demand long wait times and higher costs for the rental. Soon, to meet demand, Mike and Jerry enlist the locals to help out in making the movies, using them as starring roles in their films. When Mr. Fletcher returns, intent on converting the store to a DVD rental outlet, he quickly recognizes that they are making more money from the sweded films than from normal rentals, and joins in with the process. However, the success is put to a halt when two court bailiffs (Sigourney Weaver and Paul Dinello) arrive, insisting the sweded films are copyright violations, and seize the tapes and the store's assets, crushing the tapes via a steamroller. Without any money to repair the building, Mr. Fletcher gives up hope, and is forced to reveal to Mike that he had lied about the building being Fats Waller's birthplace. Mr. Fletcher is given a week to evacuate the building before it will be razed.
Jerry, with the help of the local townspeople, convinces Mr. Fletcher and Mike to give one last hurrah and put together a movie dedicated to Fats Waller's life, and the two quickly warm up to the idea. On the day the building is schedule for demolition, Mr. Fletcher invites all the locals to watch the final film. In the anxiousness to start the show due to the presence of the demolition crew waiting to start the job, Jerry accidentally breaks the only TV the store has, but a nearby DVD store owner loans them his video projector, allowing them to show the movie on a white cloth placed in the store's window. As the film ends, Mr. Fletcher, Mike and Jerry exit the store to find a crowd has gathered to watch the film through the window, including the city official and wrecking crew, and they are given a rousing applause by the gathered crowd as the film ends.
See also
