I saw an excellent film last night with these guys. It was called The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and is a documentary centered around one man’s attempt to break the world record for high score in original Donkey Kong.
I knew going in to it that I would like it because I like documentaries. I feel like an old man when I suggest yet another documentary for a movie tonight. I like to think that old men watch documentaries on Nazis and trains and I stick with the quirky fare.
So I was expecting a quirky documentary, especially with the website saying it was “this year’s Spellbound.” It was much better than that. Spellbound was “interesting” but it just let us look in to a world that we are unfamiliar with. It didn’t weave a story like The King of Kong did. Typically, a standard documentary just gives you visual facts and uses some clips of the interesting characters to get an emotion. These emotions in a nerd-based documentary, such as Trekkies, Wordplay or Spellbound, are ones that Make You Feel Embarrassed ForTM the nerd.
The guys in this documentary (and I use “guys” gender-specifically) are certainly nerds, considering they are in a field of competitively gaming with games that haven’t been around for 20 years. But they have become characters in an excellent story. Instead of being just another nerd, you have “the bad guy” nerd, “the good guy” nerd, their respective sidekicks, the sensei and the boy wonder.
There are so many ups and downs that obviously happened and real life but were revealed to us in such a dramatic way (yes, dramatic stories for Donkey Kong) that you get sucked in to the story. It’s probably a lopsided documentary, in that they obviously have picked the bad guy and aren’t letting you decide (although it can’t be that hard to make Billy Mitchell out to be a bad guy), but it makes for a much more enjoyable movie.
I could go in to even more excruciating detail but I don’t want to give too much away. I would recommend seeing it tonight at the Bijou if you’re in the area. It is showing it’s last run at 7pm tonight. I would also recommend if you intend on seeing this movie, don’t get any sort of spoilers (like looking up records). I wouldn’t even spend much time at the website because it might give away too many of the excellent characters.
I would say watch the trailer then go see the best documentary I’ve ever seen.