In the new documentary about the lost & recovered legacy of the cinephilic wet-dream video store Kim’s Video, narrator & co-director David Redmon surveys the current tenants of the building that used to house Kim’s famed collection of rare tapes & DVDs.  On the first floor, there’s a barcade; on the second, a gym; on the third & fourth, a karaoke restaurant.  These businesses that have physically replaced Kim’s storefront are presented as evidence of some great cultural loss and the emptiness of our current capitalist dystopia.  I’m not so convinced.  If anything, it’s somewhat comforting to know that the location was taken over by other small businesses that all have a strong social aspect built into their trade.  In a big picture sense, there’s really not all that much actual cultural difference between a video store & a barcade; they just service slightly different customer base of hopeless nerds.  Who knows, there might even be a future documentary in the works about the weirdos who regularly meet at that barcade and consider it their subcultural refuge from the unforgiving chaos of the Big City outside.  Maybe there’s a high pinball score on one of that bar’s machines that means a lot to those weirdos the same way a bootleg VHS of Godard’s Historie(s) du Cinéma would mean a lot to me. 

There are two reasons Kim’s Video is afforded a hagiographic spotlight that’s unlikely to be repeated for the workout gym that’s replaced its second floor.  The most obvious reason is that it was located in a large enough city to support a strong repertory cinema scene.  Thousands of aspiring filmmakers, NYU academics, and gorehound punks frequented the store in its pre-streaming heyday, finding access to a much larger, more adventurous library than what most American VCR owners could pick up at the nearest Blockbuster.  The documentary namedrops the Coen Brothers as former Kim’s Video members as a signal to the store’s historical importance, but the picture is much better sketched out by the slate of New York rep scenesters it gathers for testimonials.  Alex Ross Perry, Sean Price Williams, Eric Hynes . . . Its talking-heads cast list reads like a typical panel of guests for the Film Comment podcast.  The other major reason the store matters to inner-circle cinephiles is that the store’s owner, Yongman Kim, is one of them.  A failed filmmaker turned successful businessman, Kim made superheroic efforts to amass the best-curated video library in the world, out of love for the art and love for the hunt.

A lesser documentary might have stopped after collecting a few interviews about how great Kim’s Video was and profiling the eponymous Kim, who was coldly mysterious to the store’s members & employees.  A lot of its nostalgia waxing about the bootlegs & rare tapes Kim collected in the store ends early on, but after you catch a glimpse of the owner’s own rare feature film as a director (a post-Tarantino crime picture about a monk who spies on a teenage sex worker through a peephole, titled One-Third), you kinda get the sense that he’s just another dweeb who’s obsessed with movies.  He just happens to be tall & handsome as well, which makes him an anomaly on the scene.  Short of cataloging the 10,000 videos left in the Kim’s Video collection through a nonstop slideshow, it’s worrisome that there’s nothing left for the movie to accomplish just a few minutes in.  Thankfully, the mission shifts from that point to launching a David Farrier-style investigative piece about where, exactly, the collection ended up after the store closed.  Most of the rest of the documentary is relocated from NYC to Salemi, Italy, a small Sicilian village where the video collection was relocated in full.  I won’t spoil how the story develops after that expansion in scope, but it does include enough mafia threats, heist planning, and political intrigue to justify in-crowd New Yorkers making a feature-length documentary about their favorite video store.

Admittedly, the hunt for and return of the famed Kim’s Video library gets legitimately juicy as its story escalates, but a lot of this falls neatly into two familiar categories of mediocre pop media docs: the good kind (a montage of clips & posters of better movies to watch later) and the bad kind (navel-gazing diaries from a nerd who finds themself more interesting than the audience does).  The biggest hurdle in appreciating Kim’s Video as its own standalone movie is warming up to David Redmon’s personality.  He maintains a Michael Moore-style omnipresence onscreen, so that all of the film’s observations about the importance of cinematic preservation are heavily filtered through his specific POV.  It’s clear that Redmon loves Movies, but his personal version of cinephilia ultimately just isn’t all that interesting.  He has a strong handle on what qualifies as The Canon (frequently citing Godard, Hitchcock, Scorsese, Varda, and all the other usual suspects), but you can find The Canon in most public & university libraries.  When it comes to the obscure microgenre relics that made Kim’s collection special, he’s much spottier.  A stray title like Dream Demon or Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger will occasionally interrupt the endless parade of clips from Intro to Film 101 standards like Bicycle Thieves, Blow-up, and I am Cuba, but you get the sense that they’re only important to the documentary because they’re important to Redmon; they’re the ones he happened to rent from Kim’s or happened to catch on late-night cable as a child.  All of the grimier horror, porn, and experimental titles that you could exclusively find on the shelves at Kim’s only appear as VHS covers, indicating that Redmon only finds them interesting for their surface aesthetics.

The real shortcoming, though, is not in which clips Redmon and co-director Ashley Sabin select to illustrate their international movie heist; it’s how those clips are introduced.  It’s not enough for them to juxtapose images of Charles Foster Kane’s collection of treasures with the treasure vault of Kim’s video tapes.  Redmon also has to explicitly state out loud that looking at the collection reminds him of a scene from Citizen Kane.  It’s already a little on the nose for them to include clips from The Godfather to illustrate his travels to Sicily, but Redmon still feels a need to verbally explain the connection in narration.  Not only is that presentation a little clunky, but it also suggests that Redmon doesn’t fully trust in the visual medium he professes to love so much, or he doesn’t fully understand it.  I shouldn’t pick on him too much, though.  He loves Movies, so do I, and so do the other former Kim’s Video members who’d be curious to watch this and find out what happened to the treasure trove of rare tapes that used to be stored just a few subway stops away from their cramped apartments.  The documentary is ultimately a communal celebration, and Redmon & Sabin deserve kudos for turning that celebration into an entertaining story instead of a purely self-indulgent memorial for one small cultural access point among many.  I don’t know that its entertaining yarn about the recovery of Kim’s tapes is ultimately more valuable than the inevitable Letterboxd list that will catalog every title in the current collection, but it’s at least more entertaining to me, personally, than a documentary about a very special membership gym would be.

-Brandon Ledet