Review of Be Kind Rewind (2008) by Anders B — 09 Jan 2010

What makes a good movie? I think that if the story is interesting and actors are good, it's quite enough. If a movie doesn't bore me to death it's propably a good one. Or at least decent.

Be Kind Rewind is not a good movie. It's a great movie.

It's a story about a small video rental store that has it's loyal customers but is inevitably losing the battle against it's big and shiny rival. Danny Glover plays the owner of the store. He has hard times as he is forced to renew the movie collection from old VHS-tapes to DVDs in order to keep the store up. If he doesn't do so, customers will eventually leave and the store will be teared down.

He leaves the store for Mos Def's character to look after for few days while he's out of town. Jack Black plays his a bit dumb friend who gets an electric shock and becomes magnetised. Because of this, he accidentially wipes blank every cassette in the store. They notice this after all the customers comes complaining about cassettes being empty.

They become anxious to fix the problem and comes with a great idea: They'll shoot every movie again by themselves! This is called "sweding". It has something to do with Sweden but I don't know what or why.

Soon this "sweding" of popular films becomes a huge hit and the store is about to rise from the ashes. Just when everything seems to be allright again, some hollywood people interrupts their business and insists them to destroy every sweded movie and pay big fees for the studios whose rights has been violated.

This drives the store down and everybody gets desperate. However, as the last effort and with a little help from the town's residents, they decide to shoot their own film about a famous jazz musician who had lived decades earlier in the same building where the video store is. Although the movie they come up with is done practically with no budget, it has so much heart and effort in it, that eventually everybody wants to see it and forget their differences for awhile.

I like most of Jack Black's films plainly because they are funny as hell. This movie though, is somewhat different. Sure, it still has a lots of Jack Black goofing around, but especially in the end, it gets quite touching. I'm not too sentimental, but I have to admit that after seeing this movie I felt both sad and happy at the same time. Sad because it was such a great little story, happy because occasionally I laughed with tears in my eyes.

The only reason why I don't give this movie five stars is that although it was truely great and fun to watch, it wasn't bigger than life. Just.