Twisted, tangled, snarled zaniness around a behind-the-times video store, facing foreclosure, in Passaic, N.J. An habitué of the place (Jack Black, at his most demonically possessed) unwittingly erases the entire stock after he becomes “magnetized” while attempting to sabotage the next-door power plant: “I didn’t sabotage the power plant; the power plant sabotaged me.” With the help of the phlegmatic clerk (Mos Def, a half-step faster than Stepin Fetchit), he then sets about to re-shoot every requested title on home video — for some reason, the re-shot movies are said to have been “Sweded” — and thereby pumps new life into the business. Zaniness notwithstanding, there is a lumbering logic at work, a natural next step in the movie fan’s expanding sense of entitlement: first a video store on every corner, then a camcorder in every pot, et voilà. My movies, my remakes, all mine. Director Michel Gondry, a specialist in zaniness if not nearly a master of it (The Science of Sleep, Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), apparently sees nothing wrong with any of these developments (Power to the People!), though he can’t quite get out of the way of the steamroller of Copyright Infringement. His offhand style, by which he clearly conveys a looseness of standards, lacks the precision demanded of comedy. But his cheap knockoffs of big movies — Ghostbusters, Robocop, Rush Hour 2, Driving Miss Daisy, The Lion King, et al. — have touches of invention that would do credit to any gang of let’s-put-on-a-show neighborhood kids: e.g., the tomato pizzas that stand in for exit-wound blood splatters. In the end, the film as a whole seems little more than a tedious set-up for these knockoffs, which can be accessed, at your convenience, at a web address disclosed in the final credits. With Danny Glover, Melonie Diaz, Mia Farrow, Sigourney Weaver. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd