Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Three Sunday Reviews, Part 3: A Belated Surprise
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
I was ready to laugh at King of Kong and its cast of geeks. At the beginning, my expectations of goofy, self-aggrandizing classical video game players were met beautifully and I did laugh. Obsessives like these are funny. Something strange happened, though: the movie stops being funny (in a point-at-the-funny-man kind of way) and became a moving, involving story about a kind of beat-down man’s struggle to set the Donkey Kong world record.
Steve Weibe (pronounced “wee-bee") is a family man with an uncommon talent for Donkey Kong and looks, for all the world, like he’s going to be one of the goofy folks and I was fully prepared to give him the same mocking treatment that I was giving others in the show. [Aside - And, yes, I know: that’s not very nice of me. The truth is, though, that if you put your strange obsessions on display in a nationally distributed documentary, the giggles are your doing. This is why I keep my own funniest quirks hidden.] When Weibe is treated shabbily by the gaming establishment, Twin Galaxies, and at the hands of the previous world record holder, Billy Mitchell, it is almost impossible to keep from that knee-jerk American urge to rally behind the underdog. Weibe, with his reserved, stumbling personality makes a strange but natural hero.
On the other side of the tilt, Billy Mitchell, with his carefully cultivated Nick Cave appearance and gaming stardom, is just as natural in his assumed role of bad guy. He talks a big game, but refuses to play publicly against the newcomer. He manipulates and pushes. He rudely refuses to acknowledge Weibe’s existence at one point of the film--an impressive display of bad manners that makes even his friends start questioning his treatment of Weibe.
Within the confines of the movie, at least, Mitchell is a world class jerk.
The whole thing wobbles back and forth--triumphs are quickly replaced by disappointments and a sense that this gaming world just isn’t playing fair. The Girl, who had planned to start reading a book almost as soon as I popped in the film, was just as engrossed by Weibe’s struggle. It’s a truly useless struggle, to be honest, and the strain that it puts on his life is beyond any kind of a rational pursuit. But rooting for the Quixotic excesses of a man who simply wants to find one special thing inside of a disappointing and difficult life has never been more compelling.
Some bits of the movie irritate. It takes a bit to get to the meat of the story--a reality, I think, of the fact that the producers didn’t know where their film was going to go at the beginning and found Weibe’s epic struggle only by chance. During the in-depth introduction to Weibe, they note that he was an also-ran musician during the grunge era--and play an old track from The Cure to prove the point. It’s an odd thing, and a small one, but couldn’t they have licensed themselves a track from Tad or Alice in Chains?
Mostly, issues with the movie come down to nitpicking. It gets all the big parts right--it tells a great story, it focuses on interesting personalities, and it entertains far more than I would have expected it would. It’s sold as being hilarious--and it is funny, but it’s tremendously more than that. It’s no wonder that, as of this writing, the movie has a 96% positive rating from Rotten Tomatoes. It really is that good.
Wonderful stuff and damned close to greatness.
Comments & Trackbacks
I really loved this movie, too. I saw it in the theater though. Were the DVD extras any good?
Now you’ve also seen my youthful stomping grounds. That Funspot where the drama goes down is 40 minutes from where I grew up and a place I put in many hours of Tetris and Rampage!
The DVD extras were great. The Missile Command guy is funnier the more you get to see of him, a great deal of time is devoted to mocking and worshipping Billy Mitchell’s hair, and there is a lot of background for geeks to enjoy.
Defender was my game. Unfortunately, I had nothing like that Funspot to eat my quarters--I played in a dingy little pizza joint about half a mile from where I lived.
Tetris. You’re such a youngin’.
I got the movie on a whim. It came as a total surprise that I might actually enjoy it.
"It’s a truly useless struggle, to be honest, and the strain that it puts on his life is beyond any kind of a rational pursuit.”
While that’s true enough, I have to say that I don’t see the fundamental difference between Donkey Kong and golf (or football, baseball, hockey, ...). Note that I say that as a fan of most sports*; I’m not trying to denigrate sports movies.
There seems to be some need to ridicule those who choose sports that are insufficiently popular among the great unwashed; or maybe it’s more accurate to say that there’s a need to ridicule sports that weren’t played by the jocks in whatever high schools we went to. (Plus martial arts, of course, since we all know that the Karate Kid could kick the butt of the high school quarterback. Which is important.)
* I could even talk cricket without making a total fool of myself, for instance. Well, I mean, making more of a fool than is occasioned merely by talking about cricket, that is.
There’s a lot of truth to that. I think much of the difference in acceptability comes down to hair styles and manliness--and I’m not even sure that I’m joking.
My games were Joust and Karate Champ.
I actually have a Karate Champ game console in working condition (though I haven’t played it lately, and will probably sell it when we get back to the Continental US).
Youngster, some of us had to retire after crippling career-ending injuries at Pong.
Pong! We would have killed to have Pong! We had to program our own games on punch cards uphills both ways! My high score was 101101010.
Punch cards! We dreamed of the day when we could use punch cards, while we toiled away on Hollerith’s death ranch, holding the magnetic cylinders in our hands and magnetizing the 1s and 0s with our minds.
Punch cards were posh.
But you tell that to the kids today and you know what? They don’t believe it.
You were lucky to have magnetic cylinders. Our punch cards were used in a computer that used vacuum tubes. And we were so poor we couldn’t afford nothing, which is a vacuum. We had to scrimp and save so we could someday buy nothing to put in our vacuum tubes so they’d work!
Hollerith cards? Sometimes when we were really lucky, our computer operators would let us glue layers of paper tape together and pretend we had Hollerith cards. On especially lucky days, we might even be allowed to play 52 Pick Up, so we could feel more privileged.
Mostly, though, it was “Toggle in a 1! Toggle in a 1! Toggle in a 0!” for hours on end.
We were just happy to finally get toggles instead of soldering jumpers in one by one.
Oh, you bitches want to get old school, eh. All right. We can go down that road.
Toggle switches? Binary logic? Oh, we would have killed to have access to binary logic. We programmed the columns on the big engine by hand, we did, and it was cruel, finger-crushing work. I remember having to machine a new armature for the accumulator out of my own toe bones.
Now, unless someone wants to talk about how they had to rebuild the Antikythera Machine from scratch, I WIN.
Well, I didn’t want to complain too much, but ....
8-)
The Girl thinks that this might be the funniest comment thread ever.
I’m considering marrying someone else.
(Heheh. Just kidding, baby...)