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.

Check out the movie’s official site.