Double Feature #5

Nanny McPhee Returns!
Emma Thompson starred in the first movie, which I believe was based on a novel. However, she came up with the sequel on her own, and it may even be better than the original. Both films are highly enjoyable, though, so it's sort of like comparing Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. The first film I'd give a 9 out of 10, but the sequel, in my opinion, is a perfect 10.
The sequel follows the formula of the first, except Thompson changed it to a mother who must take care of the farm in the country on her own with her three children while her husband fights in one of the world wars. She also has to take care of her niece and nephew, who arrive from London. The children don't get along, and the mother is already being pestered by her brother-in-law to sell the farm since it is half his. Also, she works for Maggie Smith, who plays a senile storekeeper (though she does have her moments of clarity toward the end, as she is the grownup version of Aggie, the baby from the first movie). This movie was made probably after filming for Deathly Hallows had wrapped, so we've got Thompson and Smith as well as Ralph Fiennes as the stuffy head of the war office and the father of the niece and nephew (and yes he is still an awkward hugger). Nanny McPhee also has acquired a magical flying motorbike. I wonder where she could have gotten that from...
Anyway, the children must learn to get along while facing real problems - their creep of a scheming uncle trying to sell the farm out from under them and sabotaging their efforts to save it, the possibility that the father may or may not die fighting for this war, and the fact that the cousins' parents are getting a divorce. Also, Nanny McPhee makes them disarm a bomb. Fun! In this way, real life problems closer to the present day - not that the subplot with Angela Lansbury's character wasn't a real life problem for that movie's time period, but not a lot of people in the audience could relate to that. Case-in-point, you will not be disappointed much when Nanny McPhee Returns.
The novelization contains Emma Thompson's on-set musings on shooting the film as well as parts of the story not shown on film. There's also a bit where she compares a meeting of two characters to Mickey Mouse having breakfast with Darth Vader...BEFORE Disney bought Star Wars and Marvel. That's right, she called it!

Be Kind, Rewind
A video rental store run by Danny Glover is about to be closed down. He leaves Mos Def in charge while he's out spying on a DVD rental store. Jack Black accidentally erases the tapes after becoming magnetized by an electric fence. What follows can only be described as a series of abridged movies as they try to replace the tapes by filming re-enactments of their content.
At first it's just to appease the public, but then everybody in the community gets involved in acting in them as well. But then the FBI finds out and threatens to sue them for copyright infringement. Sigourney Weaver goes as far as taking all the abridged tapes (they call it Sweded) and steamrolling them in the street outside the shop (ironically the first film they did was Ghostbusters).
Danny Glover returns to this and the fact that they will inevitably lose their shop because the tenement building has been condemned. Mos Def wants it declared a historical landmark, but they can't do that because all the stories Danny Glover told him about it were lies. Before the community loses the building forever, they all create a documentary on Danny Glover's stories and screen it in the shop with the DVD rental store's donated projector.
Jack Black has his usual antics, and the guy from The Blind Side has a cameo, but the plot of this movie is schizophrenic at best as they jump from one abridged movie to the next interlaced with clips from the documentary they make at the end before they even get the idea to make it. I'd give it a 6/10.