Starring: Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover, Mia Farrow
Director: Michel Gondry
Studio: Partizan/New Line
Video: 2.35:1 anamorphic/enhanced for 16:9 color & B&W, 1080p HD
Audio: English DTS-HD 7.1, DTS surround
Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish
Extras: Portrait of Passaic, NJ; Behind-the-Scenes featurette; Conversation with Jack Black and Michel Gondry; Making-Of featurette, Musical Tribute to Fats Waller; Jack Black & Mos Def Improvise “Sweded” Theme Songs; Complete Fats Waller homemade Biopic (Extras: 480i & DTS 2.0)
Length: 102 minutes
Rating: *****
The second feature since the Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by French-born director of music videos Michel Gondry may not be Oscar material but it’s a hilarious, warmhearted and wonderful little flick. Plus it has some fine themes about acceptance, diversity, and community cooperation. However, to fully get into its wacky and offbeat mileau, you must turn off your rational mind in order to accept that: 1. A person’s entire body could get magnetized, 2. That person could accidentally erase all the videotapes in a video rental store, 3. That when he and the store clerk create their own super-amateur brief versions of Hollywood movies starring themselves and some friends and rent them to customers, people love them and line up to be in the next production, and 4. That the magnetized person doesn’t continue to erase all the videotapes they are making!
Jack Black is the magnetized menace, due to an encounter with an electric substation he was trying to sabotage. Mos Def is the clerk left to run the video shop while owner Danny Glover is away; it is in such a poor slum area that they still rent only videotapes, at $1 each. Their own absurd special effects using an old videocam are similar to the childish but often very creative effects Gondry has used in his music videos (of which there is an available compendium on DVD). The two misfits fearlessly tackle such epics as Robocop, Lion King, Ghostbusters and Driving Miss Daisy with predictably humorous results. Mia Farrow plays a somewhat bewildered lady who in one hilarious scene tells Mos Def she would like next to rent Driving Miss Daisy. He attempts to dissuade her, but in the following scene we see him with a cap on in the driver’s seat of a car, and Jack Black in drag in the back seat giving him advice. When renting their productions, they decide to improve their bottom line by charging an extra fee for videotapes which they have somehow specially customized; they dub them “sweded.” (This Blu-ray disc has a big hand-printed sticker on it saying “Sweded.”)
Another plot element is a frantic effort to save the video rental store, since business bigwigs in the town have plans to tear it down for development. There is also a side story about an original documentary the amateur crew makes on the life of Fats Waller, who the Glover character claims was born in his store building and made his famous pipe organ recordings at a church there in Passaic. This film opens and closes the feature and is shot in sepia with lots of scratches to look like historical footage – with Mos Def playing a very underfed Fats with a pillow strapped to him. The complete documentary is in the extras.
– John Sunier
