Be Kind Rewind

Ph. and I took in Be Kind Rewind last weekend.
It’s a fun, quirky flick about the desperate, inventive measures by video rental store
workers to recover after all of the tapes are erased. They even have a
trailer:

Catchiest for me was the premise of
Sweding
–home-grown, bricolage
film-making (grab a VHS camera, some magic markers, tin foil, etc.). The movie
gets a lot of mileage out of the idea, and in the escalating scramble to re-make
the erased movies, all sorts of mishaps come about: copyright infringement,
battles over microfame, VHS/DVD format tensions, and arguments over store-shelf
economics. But Sweding as an art stance, as a geek-hack aesthetic method:
even if you already knew what make-do composition was, the movie gives the idea
a nudge, renews some of the pleasure and spark in the spirit of carefree
re-makes–enough of a bump that we’re sure to see more

YouTubic transmedia
, like this Sweded version of The Shining:

Eesh. Might be creepier than the original, if a bit less drawn out in its suspense.