Of course, you could argue that this Star Wars Swede is advertising Star Wars too, while also advertising Be Kind Rewind. And when a bunch of goofballs at a London new media conference decided to Swede the season finale of Torchwood before it even aired, that could be seen as an ad for the TV show, a reminder to watch it on BBC 2 that evening.

But I gotta admit, my life was not complete until I watched the girls in the Sweded Predator shit-talking about pussy.

So does it matter where a meme like Sweding comes from? Does it matter that it originated in some marketer's mind rather than in the pop internet unconscious that gave us Rickrolling and the Numa Numa Dance? After all, the Be Kind Rewind crew have used all the tools that regular old meme-makers use: they created a You Tube page, and even link to Wikipedia on the official Be Kind Rewind website.

Plus, I ask you, do you think these kids Sweding the Matrix have ever even heard of Be Kind Rewind? I don't think so either. But they do rule at karate. Sort of.

Still, I'm left wondering if a manufactured meme like Sweding can ever really be as cool as a million people doing the Numa Numa dance for the sheer fun of it. When does a marketing campaign become a grassroots thing?

In the sequel, Mia Farrow and Danny Glover would pair off, and so would Alma (the cute dry-cleaning girl) and Mos Def. But poor demented Jack Black is left alone... until he finds a cute dog and becomes attached to it. And then everybody decides to mount a socialist revolution and take over the city hall of Passaic, NJ. They open a restaurant that gives away free food, they refuse to support the Iraq war, and they create more jobs for everyone.

Everything's fine for a while, until Danny Glover gets a brain tumor that turns him into a raving racist. He freaks out at Jack Black and drives him away, claiming that Polish people tricked African Americans into taking the lowest paid jobs. "It's terrible, frenzied, racism," says Gondry. Things get worse and worse, until a race war is starting. "Segregation is reinstalled."

Mos Def leads the African American community, and Jack Black leads the Polish community. (This is actually where my suspension of disbelief fails.) And Alma leads the Latino community. Everybody gets into a horrible fight.

But then the cute little dog dies, and somehow this convinces everybody to stop their race war. And then everybody realizes that Danny Glover just had a benign brain tumor, which made him turn racist. So everything goes back to normal.

It would definitely be the most demented Gondry film yet. I would probably pay $10 just to see Jack Black playing a zany manic white supremacist. But I might have a lot of elbow room in the theater. At the very least, it sounds more interesting than Cloverfield 2. [MTV Movies]

Like Eternal Sunshine, Be Kind is slipstream: a melding of genres that uses elements from science fiction but doesn't adhere to all the genre's expectations. The sequence where Jack Black decides to sabotage a power plant and winds up magnetized is very scifi, from the tentacles of current bathing Black's floating body to the weird visual effects that follow him around for a while afterwards. Most of the rest of the movie is "realistic," except that it's totally unrealistic. The movie requires just as much suspension of disbelief as the scifi-iest scifi movie.

So you've probably seen the "Sweded" versions of classic movies, like the clips of Ghostbusters and Robocop above. You'll probably be disappointed if you expect the whole movie to be about the wacky fan films which Jack Black and Mos Def make (with the help of an ever-increasing supporting cast). That segment, between Jack Black erasing all the videotapes and the fan-film operation getting shut down, occupies the middle segment of the film. But there's a lot of stuff before and afterwards.

The rest of Be Kind deals with gentrification and the destruction of old urban neighborhoods. The titular Be Kind, Rewind video store is in a condemned building in a crappy neighborhood in Passaic, NJ, which Jack Black describes as a "dump swamp" at one point. The store's only claim to fame is that jazz legend Fats Waller was born in the building, and you won't be particularly shocked when you find out halfway through that it's not even true. The store's owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) made up the Fats Waller myth to disguise from Mos Def (and himself) that they're trapped in hell with no way out.

The city wants to tear down the video store (where Glover also lives) and put up ugly condos in a bid to "improve" the neighborhood. As the movie goes on, you meet more and more characters who seem to be barely hanging on economically. The act of "Sweding" the Hollywood movies which Black erased becomes the ultimate empowerment for people who are slowly getting erased from their own neighborhood. It would be super depressing, if the movie didn't keep hammering home the idea that creating (or recreating) your own narratives can save you from being crushed. (I'm a sucker for that idea, so I totally bought into it.)

And then, after about 45 minutes of Black and Def's escalating silliness in "covering" 2001: A Space Odyssey and other random movies, the lawyers show up to put a stop to it. (One of those lawyers is played by Sigourney Weaver, who's already spent a lot of time being impersonated by a random African American guy in the Sweded Ghostbusters.) After all that yay-reclaiming-our-stories stuff, Weaver's character points out that the video store doesn't even own its tapes: the movies still belong to the studios, and Be Kind Rewind is just leasing them out, to rent them out in turn to other people.

I sort of expected the movie to turn into the battle over whether Black and Def should be allowed to create their own fan-films for profit. (That's what the trailer left me expecting, anyway.) But the fight is over really quickly, and nobody even utters the phrase "Transformative work." Larry Lessig should not see this movie, it'll just upset him. Within a couple minutes after Weaver and the other stooge show up, a steamroller is destroying all of the awesome tapes Mos Def and Jack Black have made.

I won't spoil what happens after that, but suffice to say the movie has a long coda (probably another half an hour or so) in which it proves, once and for all, that creativity can bring everybody together, and that the stories we create ourselves are better than the ones other people provide for us. And better, for that matter, than the "truth." (It all ties back into that myth about Fats Waller being born in the crappy video store.) It's a super uplifting ending, even as you're left with no doubt that all these people are royally fucked.

That's the other reason I want to claim Be Kind as a type of science fiction: not only does it have a science fictional McGuffin, and "Swede" several scifi movies, but it's also all about the power of invention. Both in the sense of making shit up, and in the sense of cobbling together solutions out of technology. It's not quite as great, or as clever, as Eternal Sunshine. But it's a worthy successor anyway.

• The Starship Exeter: This Star Trek fan-made series comes from the heart of Austin, Texas, and looks like it was filmed alongside the original series. From the sets all the way down to the smallest props, its got the looks. The acting can be slightly hammy at times, but whoever said Shatner wasn't pure pork?
• 
  
• Time Distortion: If you can manage to build a replica of the TARDIS, then you've done 95% of the work required to make a Doctor Who fanfilm, mostly because the special effects budget for the BBC back in the day was probably about ten bucks. For the whole season. Kevin Hiley and buddy Jonathan Miles made an audio version of this story when they were both 13 years old, and 13 years later, they made a live-action version that captures the cheese, camp, and charm of the original Doctor Who.
• 
  
• Troops: 1977's Hardware Wars was the first-ever fan film that poked fun at the Star Wars universe but this one takes the cake as far as making something new out of something old. It's Cops with Stormtroopers, what more do you need to know? Oh, and it's hilarious. It helped spawn other Star Wars-themed comedy fanfilms like Trooper Clerks and Pink Five.
• 
  
• Batman: Dead End: While the Star Wars and Star Trek universes normally receive the most attention from aspiring fanfilmers, Batman has had some pretty decent entries as well. The best of the bunch is this 2003 short film that wowed director Kevin Smith and artist Alex Ross. It inspired other Batman fanfilms like Grayson, about an adult Robin trying to find out who killed Batman (excellent) and World's Finest, where Batman teams up with Superman.
• 
  
• Indiana Jones: The Adaptation: This is probably one of the most inspiring stories of labor, love, and fandom. Three twelve-year-old buddies saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, and starting making a shot-for-shot remake with a camcorder. It took them seven years to finish it, and it premiered in Texas on the big screen in 2003. Producer Scott Rudin bought the rights to their story, and art house comic book favorite Dan Clowes is writing it.

• The Wachowskis' Speed Racer movie backgrounds will be all greenscreen like 300, says star Emile Hirsch. All except for Chim Chim the monkey, which is real. And presumably flung its poop at the pristine green walls. [Empire]
• Dave "Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" Eggers collaborated with director Spike Jonze on the script to Where The Wild Things Are, Jonze's next movie. Wild Things will mix live puppeteering and computer animation. [Hollywood Reporter]
• The Mist took ninth place in the holiday weekend box office, behind more obvious holiday movies Enchanted, This Christmas, Bee Movie and Fred Claus. But Beowulf, American Gangster and Hitman also blew The Mist away.

• Jack Black is bummed that he didn't get to star in a Green Lantern movie. Black was set to star in a comedy, involving an ordinary schlub who joins the corps of space cops with wishing rings. He would have attacked his enemies with green boxing gloves, cages... and condoms. Suddenly, the upcoming Justice League movie (which includes Green Lantern) doesn't sound so bad. [MTV Movies Blog]
• But Black's getting his revenge, by creating a fake trailer for Robocop. It's one of the viral videos posted on the Web site for Be Kind Rewind, his January 2008 film about a guy who erases a video store's stock and decides to remake every movie himself. [Slashfilm]
• When Michelle Forbes return to play Admiral Cain one last time, she chased the other Battlestar actors around the set demanding if they knew who the final Cylon was. And she got nothing. Come to think of it, maybe Cain's the last Cylon? [TV Guide]
• The fans are all right. Southwest Airlines' Spirit in-flight magazine randomly decided to feature an article about fan-fiction. Want to see a version of Heroes where the physics actually makes sense? Leave it to the fans. [Spirit]