Chiefly because I have yet to find a way to create an extra
24 hours within a single day, I’ve been remiss in dropping advance nuggets on
some of the best in forthcoming indie flicks. One standout in particular,
though, is The King of Kong: A Fistful of
Quarters, a documentary about the battle for the Guinness Book of World Records-recognized high score on the arcade
classic Donkey Kong, chiefly between an unassuming middle school science
teacher and a smarmy hot sauce mogul. (I personally think the filmmakers should
have gone with just the last title, but I understand both the relevance and the
zeitgeist pop of the former tag as well.)
Though it sounds wonkish and severely defined by its subject
matter, director Seth Gordon’s movie is anything but. Family man Steve Wiebe (above right) is
the upstart hero of the piece, a straightforward, earnest guy who sets the
record for Kong — notoriously the most difficult of all the early arcade games
— and submits it via videotape, to a recognized governing body. The old
record-holder, though, doesn’t plan on going quietly into the night. That would
be Billy Mitchell, a silver-tongued and (frequently) self-proclaimed Jedi
Master of gaming, who unleashes a fascinating scheme of proxy psychological
warfare. I’ll get into it more next week, but the movie is quite funny and even a bit heartrending at times — and
consequently, like the fascinating cultural curio Dogtown and Z-Boys before it, it’s already been tapped to be remade
into a narrative feature film. The King of Kong releases from Picturehouse on August
17 in
Angeles