Wednesday, February 27, 2008

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.

Posted by Derek Mueller at February 27, 2008 10:25 PM to Media