In Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, two down on their luck eccentric individuals decide it's time to sabotage a local power plant. Jerry (Jack Black) is convinced that the government is using that power plant to manipulate minds, and, ironically enough, after Mike (Mos Def) abandons him during the act, a bolt of electromagnetic something or other blasts him, magnetizing his brain. Which wouldn't be all that bad, but Mike works at Be Kind Rewind, a struggling video store in New Jersey which only has two months to bring its building up to code and avoid demolition. Jerry's new brain erases all of Be Kind's inventory, leaving them with only one way to get around bothering vacationing store owner Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) with the bad news: create their own home videos as quickly as they can and supply them to their customers as alternative versions (what they call "sweded") of their favourite films. At first the idea seems ludicrous, but as Ghostbusters, Robocop, and Rush Hour II come off without a hitch, their revolutionary idea pulls ahead full-throttle.
Be Kind Rewind seems ridiculous but its intellectual salute to forms of disenfranchised discourse demonstrates how the poor can take back the means of production and forge for themselves a dignified existence, where their insights and means of expression matter (a manifestation of what Žižek refers to as 'The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime'). It’s slightly off-beat but ludicrously effectively, emphasizing the value of friendship and the benefits of creativity.
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