Just watched Be Kind Rewind on PirateCity. In the interests of research, I tested an illegal video service that streams movies for free. The quality is fairly poor — somewhere between YouTube and Vimeo. And not ideally, I watched this widescreen movie in 4:3. Jack Black seems a lot slimmer nowadays.
As I am sure you know, the plot is that the videotapes at the store run by Mike (Mos Def) and friend Jerry (Black) are accidentally wiped. They decide to remake the movies themselves in order to avoid getting in trouble with the store’s owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Baker).
Surprisingly, the neighbourhood takes kindly to these homemade remakes, thanks to their authenticity, and… but that would spoil it. The remakes are retitled as ‘sweded’- hence the title of this post.
The movie is fun and has some memorable moments: well worth 100 minutes of your life. It’s a sentimental story, though, and, frankly, I don’t think that it could happen in real life.
In real life, raising the initial funding would be really easy but gaining community support would be a massive challenge. Almost the opposite of the film’s premise.
Community, home-grown video projects are typically created because there’s funding available from agencies like RDAs (Regional Development Agencies). They do some stuff. No-one outside the project cares, the project leaders only care because of the funding, and once the funding money is spent, they generally die away. They are supply-driven. Some bright spark in Whitehall or somewhere comes up with the idea of a community creative project and throws a couple of million at it. They haven’t bothered to survey the landscape and so it stumbles at the first hurdle, getting anyone interested.
Agencies leap at the chance of delivering to this non-existent demand, and come up with all kinds of reasons why yes, it really is out there on the street because that couple of million sounds pretty sweet. They have probably failed to deliver on a couple of projects like this before, but they do know how to write a tender document. The creative industries are rife with this shit.
As we all know, successful projects are driven by demand. And so, is there a demand for sweded video community or even a sweded commercial project? The geek demand I know about. The star wars pixellated remake (link) and sweded Doctor Who are out there, but I don’t know about mainstream stuff.
Is there sweded Desperate Housewives?
[SPOILER]
In the movie, the protagonists are eventually slammed by copyright lawyers and have to come up with their own material. I am not a lawyer and so I am not sure of the legality of that. I believe pastiche and parody allows some protection.
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