Michel Gondry & Jack Black Go Full Video-Store Kid at Vidiots
Michel Gondry & Jack Black Rent-A-Stack on YouTube’s Vidiots.
The gruesome twosome genuineicons Michel Gondry and Jack Black take you through Vidiots’ 70,000-title collection, pulling favorites, curiosities and deep-cut movie memories straight off the shelves.
Get into all the intriguing and jolly film nostalgia.
For anyone who remembers the ritual of wandering a video store with absolutely no idea what they were going to leave with, Rent-A-Stack is built around that exact feeling. Vidiots revived the concept as a series where filmmakers and artists browse the collection, talk about the movies that shaped them and assemble a stack of recommendations the old-fashioned way: by physically grabbing titles off a shelf.
film
Seventy thousand titles. Zero algorithm.
Michel Gondry and Jack Black wander Vidiots like two movie-store lifers, pulling favorites and reconnecting with the physical-media ritual that inspired an entire era of film obsession.
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And yes, Gondry and Black are basically the dream pairing for this particular assignment.
Gondry wrote and directed Be Kind Rewind, the 2008 comedy starring Jack Black and Yasiin Bey as two guys who accidentally wipe out a video store’s tapes and then start remaking the movies themselves with whatever materials they can get their hands on. The whole thing is one giant handmade love letter to neighborhood video stores, movie obsession and the idea that cinema can belong to regular people too.
So seeing Gondry and Black roaming Vidiots together feels like a tiny sequel-in-spirit. Only this time, the shelves are very real.
Vidiots’ current collection spans more than 70,000 titles across DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD, with roots stretching back to 1985. The nonprofit says the library includes everything from new releases and studio standards to experimental work, music videos, shorts and hard-to-find oddities that would otherwise be buried by the endless-scroll universe.
That last bit is precisely why a series like Rent-A-Stack works. There is no recommendation engine quietly deciding what Gondry or Black should see next. They are walking aisles, noticing spines, remembering things, getting distracted and letting one movie lead into another — basically the analog browsing brain coming back online.
Vidiots calls the store a place to browse “free from algorithms”, and that really is the charm here. The recommendation is not “because you watched.” It is “wait, have you seen this?”
Images: Vidiots / Rent-A-Stack.
The pairing also arrived with a perfect bit of programming symmetry. Vidiots brought Gondry and Black in around a special 35mm celebration of Be Kind Rewind, which might be the most Vidiots thing imaginable: a movie about saving a video store being celebrated inside one of the country’s great surviving physical-media temples.
Vidiots itself has already lived through the kind of survival story Be Kind Rewind romanticized. It began as an alternative video store in Santa Monica in 1985, eventually became a nonprofit foundation, and reopened in 2023 inside the historic Eagle Theatre in Northeast Los Angeles.
Today it operates as both repertory cinema and functioning rental library, which is why this episode hits differently from a normal “celebrities pick their favorite movies” video. The shelves are not a set. People can still walk in, browse and rent from them.
Gondry and Black also make natural tour guides because both have always carried that slightly unruly, homemade relationship with culture. Gondry builds movies like visual inventions. Black approaches movie fandom with full-body enthusiasm. Put both of them into a giant video store and you really do not need much more of a premise.
The physical-media part matters, too. Streaming makes almost everything feel instantly available until, suddenly, it is not. Vidiots’ argument is much simpler: own the objects, preserve the work, keep the weird stuff on the shelf and let humans stumble into things they were never looking for.
Intriguing and jolly film nostalgia, indeed.
Now rent a little time with the gruesome twosome genuineicons themselves as Michel Gondry and Jack Black roam Vidiots, build their stack and let one movie memory lead to another.
Michel Gondry & Jack Black Go Rent-A-Stack at Vidiots
Vidiots’ Rent-A-Stack sends Gondry and Black through the nonprofit video store’s 70,000-title physical-media collection to pull favorites, inspirations and movie-store memories.
Source: Vidiots.
