![]() ![]() I made movies on VHS (and S-VHS, and Hi-8, and Mini DV, and 8mm, and 16mm and…) and this movie captures the madness and ecstacy of amateur production better than any other.At what point are we going to say, hey, not everything can be bigger and more profitable every year? First they came for the small businesses, like all the funky little independent VHS stores and bookstores of my youth, now they’re coming for the post office, the public schools, the libraries. VHS was, in retrospect, a truly terrible technology: flimsy, blurry, easily degraded… so why do I miss wandering those aisles so much? So many parts of America have died in the last ten years, and we’ve all just started accepting that these things are gone for good.Gondry captures the democratic essence of movie-making: a collective art form that creates collective meaning, by and for a whole community. But if you really want to be filled with awe at the magic of the movies, nothing is better than Be Kind Rewind. (Couldn’t they just have made those drawings fly around the room on set, rather than fake that in post? For that matter, did they even set foot in Paris?) The Artist is a much better movie, which actually uses old-fashioned storytelling to re-create the early days of Hollywood. Hugo was “a love letter to film” that was slapped together out of post-production digital special effects.How come no one else could see the masterpiece I saw? I think part of the problem was the casting of Black: He’s wonderful, but some smart moviegoers who don’t like him stayed away, while some of his fans were infuriated by the movie’s causal pace. When I saw this opening weekend, I thought it this would be the hit that finally made him fully bankable, but instead it was greeted with general revulsion. The “sweded” version turn out to be wildly popular-but can they save the store from developers? How it Came to be Underrated: Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was one of the best and most acclaimed movies of the ‘00s, but he failed to get much traction with his follow-ups. When he leaves his store in the hands of Def and Black, they accidentally erase all the tapes, so they decide to recreate the movies from scratch, playing all the parts themselves. The Story: Glover runs an endangered old school VHS rental store in a working class neighborhood in Passaic, New Jersey. Stars: Mos Def, Jack Black, Danny Glover, Mia Farrow, Melonie Diaz, Sigourney Weaver ![]()
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