Kim’s Video – Review
If you’re a movie lover of a certain age, then you know the power of a building filled with shelves, each shelf filled to capacity with films that you know, that you love, or better yet, films you don’t know… yet.
**NOTE: this post may be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
85 minutes, Not Rated
Written and Directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin
Synopsis:
Playing with the forms and tropes of various cinema genres, the filmmaker sets off on a quest to find a legendary lost video collection of 55,000 movies in Sicily.
What starts as a simple documentary of an attempt to find out what happened to a collection of unusual, extraordinary, or even one-of-a-kind movies amassed in several unassuming stores in New York City in the 1980s and 90s after they were sent to what was to be a repository for the exceptional collection in Italy quickly devolves into a document of one man’s obsession with film.
I was supposed to see this one at Sundance this year, but I couldn’t make it work.
Tracking the video collection from its humble beginnings as a side-hustle in a laundromat chain, to its home in several dedicated video stores (the titular Kim’s Video, well-known to New Yorkers and film buffs such as Quentin Tarantino), through the ups and downs of copyright violations, to its eventual search for a new home, Kim’s Video is at once a love letter to movies, a journey through an immigrant’s American dream story, a young man’s fight with reality, and an Italian mafia drama, replete with shady dealings and political intrigue, Kim’s Video demonstrates just how far someone will go in order to rediscover — and in this case, reclaim — a large chunk of not only their own lives, but something of indisputable cultural significance.
Depending on how you define both “culture” and “significance,” of course.
What is undeniable is that this collection of movies impacted a huge swath of cinema fans around the world. It’s breadth and scope brought it renown such that finding a location for the collection was never in doubt, but the selection of where to move it began a story worthy of inclusion in the collection of often-oddball films, itself.
Though the film veers as wildly as the director’s attention (and sometimes his apparent mental/emotional state), it is an intriguing look at the power and influence films, both individual and collectively, has over the human imagination. If you can keep up with director David Redmon, you’ll find you’ve had a hell of a ride.
Whether you’ve enjoyed it is for you to determine.
Kim’s Video is hits theaters this Friday.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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