Jack Black’s “Be Kind, Rewind” and Will Ferrell’s “Semi-Pro” follow two sweet, fired-up doofuses in quests to save, respectively, Black’s old-school storefront and Ferrell’s 70’s era Flint, Mich. basketball team. We know what happened to the relics of VHS and the ABA: Despite the survival of the Montgomery Biscuits, you know the Flint Tropics have to be as doomed as the horrible Shasta red apple soda in one of the movie commercials.

The characters’s scheme in “Be Kind, Rewind” is to save the Passaic video store by re-inventing the VHS experience (Shouldn’t they just switch to DVD? “They said that about laser discs too,” Mos Def says) by re-taping all the movies all by their low-tech selves (they flash a Hieronymous Bosch print in front of the camera to symbolize a scene of mass madness in “Ghostbusters”).

The idea in “Semi-Pro” is to try to get the team into the NBA, ahead of other ABA teams with more financial promise; the scene where Ferrell pre-emptively shouts and glorifies what he thinks is his team’s spot in the league, then makes to bite his hand off when he finds out he’s wrong is the closest anyone’s gotten to the allure of the oddly attractive Phil Hartman since he was murdered.

Despite the movies’ weaknesses (especially the token love story sub plots), there’s too much to love.

In the first, there’s the Fats Waller obsession that underscores the whole thing, the diss to the gentrification that would turn the building into a big stucco “Olde Passaic Gardens” and the inventive, brilliant ways the cast remakes their 200-movie stock to prevent that fate.

In the second, there’s Ferrell (as Jackie Moon, former funk star) melodically purring “baby, who wants to lick me sexy?” Later, improvising after a wrestling match with a bear goes, of course, totally wrong, he exhorts the crowd to use small children as shields (because bears like the tender meat) and to cover their sodas (because bears like sugar). Then, there’s his Dumpster serenade to suicide (it includes the line “I want to get an extension cord and hang myself sexy”).

Check out the credits of “Semi-Pro” for the legal statement that no one in the cigarette-heavy period movie accepted any compensation from tobacco manufacturers to have cigarettes in the movie.

Also notable? Brief scenes in both of them say something thought-provoking about race. In “Be Kind, Rewind,” while filming their Fats Waller bio, Mos Def assumes the role, natch. Black comes out, psyched and in black-face, totally ready to play the role he thinks he’s perfect for, natch, because he’s fat. Everyone is horrified — really, what would you think of that group gasp if they’d decided to do a story about Sinatra and Mos Def came out similarly swaggering, ready to do the role? Black’s character is color-blind — to an extent the world’s not quite ready for, yet. In Semi-Pro, it’s revealed at the end that Jackie Moon’s deceased mum was black. Her race is never mentioned at all. It’s a surprise. It’s never mentioned. But does that make you look at Jackie Moon’s character — with his afro, hoop skills and dirty funk songs — differently?

In the end, though, the main characters and their sidekicks are sweet and brilliant but faced with insurmountable odds against the destruction of their whole worlds. Not that I’m demanding they turn all “transformative and indie” and end with the main character throwing it all away for an existence gleefully shrieking into a landfill void in the rain in Jersey or splayed on a frozen lake on Long Island with a blue-haired girl. “Be Kind, Rewind” and “Semi-Pro” are the kinds of movies that end with crowds of screaming fans cheering for success they’ll forget by the morning. They’re not sugar-coma sweet, and it’s not that there’s no point in enjoying the occasional powdered sugar and honeyed funnel cake and washing it down with a bucket of fair lemonade, but the experience does leave you feeling kind of empty.