Kim's Video

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分类：未知地区：美国年份：2023

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更新时间:2024-06-24

Kim's Video影评：[Film Review] Kim's Video (2023)

KIM’S VIDEO follows documentarians David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s undeterred investigation and rescue of the titular video retail store’s massive donation (over 55,000 titles) to Salemi, Sicily in December 2008.

Once a cinephile’s haven in East Side NYC, Kim’s Video, opened in 1987 and renowned for its vast and esoteric collections, including bootlegged copies of rare titles, whose notable employees including name filmmakers like Alex Ross Perry, Todd Phillips and cinematographer Sean Price Williams, cannot escape the decline as the outgrowth of the media dematerialization in our digital era.

Curiously, the film doesn’t dilate on the store’s provenance and development, as its owner Kim Yong-man, a Korean-American, retains a cagey character through and through. Appearing as a respectable business in South Korea, he seems to be living a double life in two different continents. And out of respect and privacy, KIM’S VIDEO makes no comments about that.

The driving force behind the documentary is Redmon’s idée fixe on the follow-through of the donation. Surprisingly, he found out all the titles were laid languishing in some ill-equipped storage rooms in Salemi. The initial promises from the Italian party of making good use of the collection all fall through because of a shell game arranged by Vittorio Sgarbi (currently the undersecretary for culture in the Meloni Cabinet, and then mayor of Salemi, a rather shady figure in the film) and his mafia-connected cohorts. A lesson to be learned about failed due diligence from Kim’s part. Frustratingly, no light is shed on as regards how the deal with Salemi was cinched in the first place, as Kim himself is tight-lipped.

Persistently being fudged by Sgarbi and failing to coax Kim into legally reclaiming the titles, Redmon and co., inspired by their love of films (in particular, Ben Affleck’s ARGO, 2012), is emboldened to square away a derring-do in Salemi that eventually prompts Kim to draw up a deal with Salemi to finally bring the collection back to NYC, and Kim’s Video was relaunched as Kim's Video Underground in 2022, 18 years after its closure.

Blending a cineaste’s fervent passion to the Seventh Art with a mystery-solving mission, KIM’S VIDEO tries to do good by both but the result is a curate’s egg. On the one hand, the cultural and language barriers are thinly veiled as the chief obstacles and yet we all know there is something iffy going on which the filmmakers have no resources to disclose. A posteriori, the Argo-esque rescue is too simplistic which makes the climatic elation feel not fully earned. However, on the other hand, the filmmakers’ allegiance to the inexhaustible allure of cinema is indefeasible.