Video rental stores are a dying breed, having been rendered extinct by the meteor of streaming.  Scarecrow Video in Seattle, Washington. Black Lodge in Memphis, Tennessee. Even the last Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon.  These are all relics from a bygone era, when people would pop by their local Blockbuster before going home on a Friday afternoon, curious what new releases they should watch that weekend. It was a social experience, a tactile ritual.  And from the 1980s to the late 2000s, Kim’s Video in New York was a part of that.  Fans of the now-shuttered store chain will likely be disappointed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s frustratingly navel-gazing, poorly researched and executed documentary, imaginatively named…Kim’s Video.

In an early display of the directors’ journalistic ‘skills,’ the film opens with the directors stopping people on a New York sidewalk, asking them what they know about Kim’s Video and what happened to it.  This sloppy, slapdash opening produces no answers and inspires no confidence in the filmmakers’ storytelling skills. From there, we jump back to the ‘80s and to a vague account of how this particular video store chain came to be.  Yongman Kim, who had previously served in the Korean military, operated a dry cleaning business in New York, then began carrying bootleg VHS tapes for people to rent.  This proved financially lucrative enough that Kim decided to open up stores devoted solely to video rentals. The film claims that at one point, the location on St. Mark’s had more than 55,000 titles from around the world. 

We next jump to the shuttering of Kim’s Video in 2009, when, faced with the onslaught of digitization and streaming, the business was no longer financially viable.  The question then arose of what to do with Kim’s massive collection.  Numerous institutions and schools offered to host the collection, and for reasons that the filmmakers never feel compelled to explore, Kim chose to give the collection to a tiny town in Italy—Salemi, Sicily.

In one head-scratching choice after another, the directors next go to Italy—without a translator, mind you—and after struggling to communicate with the locals, almost none of whom speak English, they decide to just break into the collection, stumbling amongst the VHS tapes in awe and marveling at the state of disarray (water stains, mold, empty boxes, etc.).  They then stumble through conversations with various Italian officials, trying to discern what exactly happened to Kim’s videos. During their travels, they discover potential Mafia connections to some of their interviewees, but again, maddeningly, refuse to follow the threads.

Instead, the film pivots to (or rather, more firmly establishes itself as) a story about the directors themselves, particularly Redmon.  He increasingly uses clips from classic movies—La Dolce Vita, The Godfather, to name a few—accompanied by self-aggrandizing voiceover narration to suggest that he himself is in a movie, that this is some grand quest for the ages.  Yet these clips have little or nothing to do with the story that Redmon ostensibly set out to tell, and the connections only get more tenuous as the doc progresses.  By the time he stages a cringey “heist” to rescue the tapes (which, it bears repeating, was condoned by no one, least of all Kim himself), featuring people clad in all black and wearing masks of famous directors’ faces (Herzog, Hitchcock, Varda, etc.)., it’s apparent that this isn’t a story about Kim’s Video.  This is a story about one filmbro incel’s relationship to Kim’s Video.

As a personal fan and advocate of video stores, this movie made me angry.  There is a compelling story here, but Kim’s Video is not it.  Rather than tell a standard, coherent history of this beloved New York video store, Redmon and Sabin choose to focus on what happened after Kim’s stores closed—in other words, surely the least interesting part of this history. And on top of that, it’s apparent from the beginning how ineptly executed this is.  Rather than plan ahead for their trip to Italy or even hire a translator, Redmon just shows up in Salemi like a dumb American with a camera.  The protracted scenes of the (endearingly helpful) locals trying to find someone who speaks English are exquisitely painful.

Again, when a tantalizing thread does appear, such as the one-time mayor’s blatantly obvious connection to the Italian mafia, Redmon and Sabin don’t pursue it at all, instead settling for a lazy, “Oh that’s cool I guess” observation before returning to their self-mythologizing. The same goes for Kim himself, and everyone else they speak to.  All of their interviewees are clearly duplicitous and hiding something, but the filmmakers lack either the motivation or skill, or both, to follow the story where it leads. This lends the documentary a feeling of not being just reactive and complacent, but self-delusional (I can not communicate enough how unbearably self-important and stupid the heist scene is). No one would accuse the Tiger King filmmakers of being Ken Burns. But at least they had the good sense to follow the story where it took them, and (gasp!) to ask questions.

The final scenes only confirm just how little Redmon and Sabin actually care about their subject.  After spending an hour and a half tracking down and reclaiming the video collection, the final fate of Kim’s videotapes is delivered via disjointed, vague on-screen text during the final credits, almost an afterthought. (I had to turn to Google to help me understand what actually happened to the missing tapes.) 

In the end, you’ll leave the film with more questions than answers, knowing next to nothing about the subject matter. Instead, you’re more likely to come away with seething rage toward Redmon and Sabin, who had the gall to co-opt a genuinely fascinating story and turn it into their own vanity project.  I just hope to god that if and when a movie gets made about Black Lodge, that it’s done by documentarians who not only respect their subject, but have the curiosity and skill to do it justice.