2008 Woodie Awards
Humor sporadic in Jack Black movie parody 'Be Kind Rewind'
Justin Pacheco
Issue date: 3/13/08 Section: Entertainment
03/13/08 - "Be Kind Rewind" has its fair share of funny moments and has an innately interesting premise, but it also has its fair share of plot holes and flaws that keep it from being more than mediocre.
"Be Kind Rewind" stars Jack Black, Mos Def and Danny Glover as Jerry, Mike and Mr. Fletcher. Jerry is the paranoid owner of a scrap yard and Fletcher is the owner of a rundown VHS rental store named Be Kind Rewind. Mike works in the rental store and was apparently raised by Fletcher.
While Fletcher is away spying on a rival rental chain, Mike is left in charge of the store. After a botched attempt at sabotage on the power plant near Jerry's trailer home he becomes magnetized.
When Jerry enters the store and touches the tapes, his personal magnetism erases all the movies.
When their one loyal customer, an old women named Ms. Falewicz (Mia Farrow), wants to rent "Ghostbusters," Mike comes up with the solution of filming their own version of the film.
This becomes the key plot point of the movie, as the homemade versions of movies made by Jerry, Mike and Alma (Melonie Diaz), a young woman from the dry cleaners, become very popular in the neighborhood.
The rest of the movie involves the trio making movies and charging high prices for memberships to raise enough money to save the video store from being torn down to make room for condos.
Instead of complaining about how generic a plot point this is and how often "evil developers" have wanted to destroy a crummy building and build something else in movies, I'm going to move on to the most enjoyable part of the movie: the remade movies.
The short clips of the homemade versions "Ghostbusters, "Rush Hour," and "Driving Miss Daisy," are very clever reminiscent of angryalien.com's hilarious 30-Second Bunnies Theatre. The clips are very abridged versions of the movies with poor special effects, which adds to the humor of them.
Some of these clips are available on YouTube and on the movie's official Web site and are probably more worth checking out than the movie as a whole.
"Be Kind Rewind" stars Jack Black, Mos Def and Danny Glover as Jerry, Mike and Mr. Fletcher. Jerry is the paranoid owner of a scrap yard and Fletcher is the owner of a rundown VHS rental store named Be Kind Rewind. Mike works in the rental store and was apparently raised by Fletcher.
While Fletcher is away spying on a rival rental chain, Mike is left in charge of the store. After a botched attempt at sabotage on the power plant near Jerry's trailer home he becomes magnetized.
When Jerry enters the store and touches the tapes, his personal magnetism erases all the movies.
When their one loyal customer, an old women named Ms. Falewicz (Mia Farrow), wants to rent "Ghostbusters," Mike comes up with the solution of filming their own version of the film.
This becomes the key plot point of the movie, as the homemade versions of movies made by Jerry, Mike and Alma (Melonie Diaz), a young woman from the dry cleaners, become very popular in the neighborhood.
The rest of the movie involves the trio making movies and charging high prices for memberships to raise enough money to save the video store from being torn down to make room for condos.
Instead of complaining about how generic a plot point this is and how often "evil developers" have wanted to destroy a crummy building and build something else in movies, I'm going to move on to the most enjoyable part of the movie: the remade movies.
The short clips of the homemade versions "Ghostbusters, "Rush Hour," and "Driving Miss Daisy," are very clever reminiscent of angryalien.com's hilarious 30-Second Bunnies Theatre. The clips are very abridged versions of the movies with poor special effects, which adds to the humor of them.
Some of these clips are available on YouTube and on the movie's official Web site and are probably more worth checking out than the movie as a whole.