King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, 2007) ***

Dir. Seth Gordon
Starring Steve Wiebe, Billy Mitchell, Walter Day

One of the more popular formats for documentaries these days has been following a group of offbeat individuals who have a passion for some unique style of competition. The king of this genre was Jeffrey Blitz’s Spellbound, which followed teenagers competing in the national spelling bee. As the genre has expanded, the competitions followed become more and more peculiar. We’ve also recently seen documentaries about inner city kids learning ballroom dancing (Mad Hot Ballroom), and obsessive Scrabble players who travel the country to play in tournaments (Word Wars). Seth Gordon’s King of Kong is one of the most original yet; it follows the battle between two guys in achieving the highest score on the classic video game Donkey Kong.

Billy Mitchell is the all time Donkey Kong champion, achieving a score that is thought to be unbeatable. He is also an ambassador for classic video gaming and is well revered among enthusiasts in that area. In one interesting segment, he is shown offering encouragement to Doris Self, who was one of the few female players to have achieved a high score on a video game back in the 80s. Steve Wiebe is a married man and father who just got laid off from his job. During his down time (with the surprising support of his wife), he decides to make a run at Billy Mitchell’s high score on Donkey Kong.

King of Kong takes us inside the interesting world of classic video game competitors. These are guys that could care less about the latest high tech gaming system. They’d rather hang out at a place like the Funspot arcade in New Hampshire, playing old school arcade games like Pac Man, Burgertime, Centipede, and of course Donkey Kong in their original versions. One of these people, Walter Day, decided there should be a central resource that verifies the high score on all video games. In the early 80s, he created Twin Galaxies, an organization that verifies high score submissions from people around the country. This organization still exists today and is even endorsed by the Guiness Book of World Records.

Gordon does a really good job of exploring this world, and initiating the viewer in the various intricacies of classic video games. The concept of a “kill screen” (when the game stops because it has run out of memory) is introduced and shown to be the pinnacle achievement that gamers try to reach. There is also a clever use of diagrams that show the patterns in a game like Donkey Kong, and help explain how Steve Wiebe’s engineering background definitely comes in handy. The people that obsess over these games aren’t mindless idiots pushing around a joystick. Casual viewers will be surprised at the level of thought and planning that these gamers go through when attempting a new record.

The film really takes off when Steve Wiebe breaks Billy Mitchell’s legendary record and Twin Galaxies gets mixed up in the fight over the validity of that score. Up to this point, Gordon’s film had painted a very positive picture of Mitchell, but that comes to a screeching halt when Mitchell and his followers attempt to discredit Wiebe’s score. This leads to Wiebe making several attempts to prove his score in person, including direct challenges to facing off against Mitchell in head to head competition. Gordon takes a completely one-sided view of events at this point, and from here on out the film paints Steve as the hero and Billy as the enigmatic villain. Gordon piles it on a bit high to make his chosen hero to look like a saint (despite some obviously poor parenting skills exhibited at one point in the film). To be fair, he does have quite a bit of video evidence to support this viewpoint, but his inability to explore Billy’s motivations for his actions really hampers the overall story that the film presents.

Despite this flaw, King of Kong remains an entertaining film thanks to the colorful and informative presentation of an obsessive hobby not many people know still existed, at least in the format shown here. Like the best documentaries, it uses real life events and fashions them to form a very satisfying story arc that leads to a surprisingly rousing conclusion. It may not reach the heights of Spellbound, but it stands shoulder to shoulder with the other strong works in this genre.

Day Night, Day Night (Julia Loktev, 2007) ***

Dir. Julia Loktev
Starring Luisa Williams

She prays to someone. She could be Christian, or Muslim, or any other religion. The prayers are kept vague so we don’t know. The specific religion is not important. It’s all about the strong conviction she has to go through with the plan. We also don’t know her name or her ethnicity (thanks to smart casting), or her specific political opinions. What’s important is she has a strong belief that she wants to do something. Julia Loktev’s interesting experimental film Day Night, Day Night follows this young woman’s journey as she prepares to be a suicide bomber. This bold idea carries the film pretty far, but the lack of narrative rhythm and a huge misstep in the third act prevent it from being completely successful.

The film starts with the unnamed woman being picked up at the airport. From that point, she is taken to a hotel room where and is told to wait. Time passes as she paces the room, looks out the window (which gets her a warning phone call not to do that), and clips her toenails. Eventually, several men (of various ethnicities) wearing ski masks show up and take her (and us) through the extensively process of preparing for the mission. This sequence is appropriately tedious. Loktev rightly has no intention of make this seem like a thrilling venture.



One of the most interesting aspects of Day Night, Day Night is how it follows the rather mundane tasks of preparing for the bombing. The camera lingers on a blinking turn signal, as the woman is mere seconds from exiting the car to go and complete her task. The people who fit her with the bomb and explain her how to use do so in the most casual manner possible. It’s like they’re teaching her how to correctly use a home appliance. There’s a disturbingly amusing scene where the planners make her try on several different outfits as if it’s an episode of America’s Next Top Suicide Bomber.

This is all very interesting to be sure, but the lack of structure does make the proceedings tedious after a while. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if Loktev had stayed true to her vision throughout. Unfortunately, she tries to get a little too clever with a sequence in the third act, attempting to inject some unnecessary humor into the film and completely undermining her central character’s plight. This sequence is surrounded by moments of excruciating tension, which lose a bit of steam when we see our usually quiet protagonist coming up with a clever quip like she’s walked off the set of 30 Rock. This brief moment is a huge miscalculation, ruining the consistency of the film’s style, and making the repetitive earlier scenes seem rather pointless.

The film isn’t completely apolitical. While avoiding the baggage that ethnicity or religion would bring, the depiction of the main character is very telling. As played by Luisa Williams, she is a somewhat naﶥ and very nervous, and can be seen snacking up to the very moment where she is expected to carry out the plan. We are given small hints that she was drawn into this because of something that happened to someone she loves, most likely her brother. This is not the typical obviously evil person that can be spotted in a crowd. She has the presence of someone who was that clumsy girl in your sociology class one day. This is a far more upsetting depiction than someone who is confident and more capable, which is why the little comedy sequence at the end is such a big mistake.

This film deserves bonus points for even being made. Unfortunately, it has very little chance of going anywhere. In an era where Hollywood pats itself on the back for the “courage” to tackle racism in the simplistic Oscar winner Crash, there is really no room for a movie about a suicide bomber. Hopefully films like this will get more and more attention and Hollywood will have the nerve to get more daring, but until then scour your arthouse theaters if you want to see films that really challenge you, and not ones where Sandra Bullock decides not to be racist because she fell down the stairs.