Day of the 'Dog: Be Kind, Rewind

When I first received Be Kind, Rewind from Netflix, I watched maybe 15 minutes and then left it for later; it didn't suck me in, to say the least. Then, since things that are new to us always seem to come in groups, my guitar teacher mentioned it, and how much he enjoyed it. He admitted it was different, but well worth it.

So, I started it over, and watched it the whole way through - by the end, very glad that I did.

Rewind is not a movie where Jack Black is in full effect, nor is it one in which Mos Def is portraying his typical, off-handidly funny role. So don't go into it thinking you'll be falling off of your chair with laughter in the first ten minutes: watch it for the long game.

In this, Rewind is rich with a cultural literacy of film that will have you smiling and nodding your head. The story is, a video store down on its luck in a poor neighborhood reinvents itself by re-shooting popular films locally when all of the VHS tapes become magnetized. The members of the neighborhood pull together to support the store not only by paying the exorbitant prices for the custom films, but also by participating in them.

Why it deserves 'dog status: Check out the respectable IMDb score of 6.7 and more than 30,000 votes, and you might deduce that Rewind got its comeuppance. While I applaud the sheer number of votes (though I'd have scored it a little higher), it still strikes me as vastly under-exposed. Me and my guitar teacher are the only people I know who've seen it, so while 30,000 viewers out there thought it worthy of a review, it's still way off the radar.

Too, Rewind exposes the ridiculous nature of the MPAA copyright infringement lawsuits - a brave and novel approach to a subject often glazed over or ignored by screen actors as well as writers and treated with either willful ambivalence or ignorant finger-wagging by the public at large (thanks largely to the MPAA's moralized anti-piracy propaganda).

While there are some great laughs, Rewind feels more like a documentary of a formerly indolent and decaying piece of America revitalized by innovation and a redefining of neighborly relationships and a patched sense of community.

For this reason, and the earnestness with which some silly ideas are put forth, Rewind is a rare treat of a movie.