In Passaic, New Jersey, the declining "Be Kind Rewind" VHS rental store owned by Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) is due to be demolished to make way for high-end development unless he can find the money to renovate his building, despite his claims that jazz pianist Fats Waller was born in that building. (Waller was actually born in Harlem on May 21 1904) Mr. Fletcher leaves on a trip for several days to join friends and memorialize Waller, leaving his only employee, Mike (Mos Def), to tend to the store, cautioning him to keep Mike's paranoid and klutzy friend, Jerry (Jack Black), away. Jerry becomes magnetized after attempting to disable a nearby electrical substation, believing its energy to be melting his brain, and when Jerry enters the store the next day, he inadvertently erases all the VHS tapes. Mike quickly discovers the disaster, and is further pressed when Miss Falewicz (Farrow), Mr. Fletcher's friend, wants to rent Ghostbusters.
To prevent her from reporting a problem to Mr. Fletcher, Mike comes up with an idea: as Miss Falewicz has never seen the movie, he proposes to recreate the film using himself and Jerry as the actors and cheap special effects hoping to fool her.
They complete the movie just in time when another customer asks for Rush Hour 2. Mike and Jerry repeat their filming, enlisting the help of Alma (Melonie Diaz), a local woman, for some of the parts.
Word of mouth spreads through Miss Falewicz's nephew of the inadvertently hilarious results of Mike and Jerry's filming, and soon the store is seeing more requests for such movies. Mike, Jerry, and Alma quickly pass off the movies as being "sweded", insisting the films came from Sweden and thus able to demand long wait times and higher costs for the rental. Soon, to meet demand, Mike and Jerry enlist the locals to help out in making the movies, using them as starring roles in their films.
When Mr. Fletcher returns, intent on converting the store to a DVD rental outlet, he quickly recognizes that they are making more money from the sweded films than from normal rentals, and joins in with the process. However, the success is put to a halt when two court bailiffs (Sigourney Weaver and Paul Dinello) arrive, insisting the sweded films are copyright violations, and seize the tapes and the store's assets, crushing the tapes via a steamroller. Without any money to repair the building, Mr. Fletcher gives up hope, and is forced to reveal to Mike that he had lied about the building being Fats Waller's birthplace. Mr. Fletcher is given a week to evacuate the building before it will be razed.
Jerry, with the help of the local townspeople, convinces Mr. Fletcher and Mike to give one last hurrah and put together a movie dedicated to Fats Waller's life, and the two quickly warm up to the idea. On the day the building is scheduled for demolition, Mr. Fletcher invites all the locals to watch the final film. In his eagerness to start the show due to the presence of the demolition crew waiting to start the job, Jerry accidentally breaks the only TV the store has, but a nearby DVD store owner loans them his video projector, allowing them to show the movie on a white cloth placed in the store's window. As their film ends, Mr. Fletcher, Mike and Jerry exit the store to find a crowd has gathered to watch the film through the window, including the city official and wrecking crew, and they are given a rousing applause by the gathered crowd.
Films that were erased and recreated are referred as being sweded. These remakes are unedited with only a single take per scene. The tapes are described as having come from Sweden as an excuse for higher rental fees and longer wait times. Jerry fabricated the word sweded while arguing with a customer.
In light of the theme of sweding, director Michel Gondry sweded a version of the trailer of the film, starring Gondry himself. On the official website, users can engage in sweding, which puts their faces on the VHS cover of a movie. The Be Kind Rewind YouTube minisite also encourages filmmakers to create sweded versions of popular movies.
The movie did not make any direct references to any web-based services, however the act of copy infringement and the country referenced points to online movie sharing or illegal piracy. The term "sweded" references the controversy within the distribution of movies online, through file sharing. The idea of filesharing has been fought by media/movie corporations seeking to protect their copyrights online, thus taking down many forms of file sharing. However, these same rights are protected by Swedish governments, as a form of free speech, rights of the consumer, allowing torrent based websites (i.e.: The Pirate Bay) to continue to operate in Sweden. In the movie, the characters also had problems with authorities in making sweded movies due to copy infringement.
The concept of the original website designed by Tequila reinforces an interest in online copying. Asking users to Swede their favorite websites, making alternate versions of Google's website with that same homemade Sweded "Arts and Crafts" style. This website originally hosted at BeKindMovie.com has been taken off.
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