King of Kong!

In today's America, where more and more it is becoming cool to be liberal or just indifferent, I find it hard to distinguish what is "good" and what is "evil" (obvious George W. Bush nodding aside). Gone are the days in which the evil ruler has kidnapped the maiden and it has fallen in the hands of the daring hero to rescue her - the symbol of purity in a time of otherwise impure entities. Gone is the romanticism of the uncharted times and in its place we find the tediously gray minutia of our 9 to 5's in our cubicle systems. Oh how much we have progressed...

That is how I felt, until I saw Seth Gordon's 2007 documentary
The King of Kong.

I am a self-professed avid documentary seeker and watcher - I love them, especially if they are about something odd or something that I am interested in. The King of Kong fulfills both of these requirements, as it tells the story of two guys who share a passion for video games - old school video games specifically. They also share the passion to be THE BEST.

Steve Wiebe (pictured above) is a middle school science teacher who, after tragically being let off by his former employer, Boeing, picked up the hobby that many nerdy 30-40 somethings and nerdy Nintendo freaks have come to know and love as DONKEY KONG. The movie tells Wiebe's story in a way that makes him seem as if the world had left him in the cold, time after time after unforgiving time. It also made light to the fact that Wiebe was something of a savant, as all through his life, he had excelled abnormally at anything he was involved with - basketball, drumming, science...How has the world been so inaccessible to someone who seemed destined to succeed? Well, sure enough, where the "real world" had left him high and dry, the gamer world had suddenly gained interest, as it seemed Steve Wiebe was about to do what many believed impossible - beat the all-time high score on Donkey Kong with a score of 1,000,000.

Everything seemed to be looking up for Steve, that is until a dark force peered its head from the gaming underworld.

Billy Mitchell (whose name alone was enough to set him up for life to be a child icon, or a character from Leave It To Beaver) was a sort of video game "superstar" in the 80's. At the age of sixteen, Billy (pictured below) was featured in LIFE magazine as part of a "greatest gamers" article, as he was the holder of the top score for Centipede - another equally legendary arcade game. Since then, he has devoted his life to eagerly and unapologetically becoming the center of attention at his pursuits - namely arcade games. In the documentary, Mitchell, who has now become the owner and operator of the Rickey's World Famous Restaurant chain and, respectively, Rickey's World Famous Sauces, is portrayed as, for lack of a better word, a complete jackass. This wasn't hard to do on the filmmakers' part, as it is apparent from Billy's own dialogue, as well as his unrelenting self-promotion and incredible sneaky and calculating planning to do so (seriously, I didn't think people like this exists outside of fiction). The movie also makes you believe Billy Mitchell has figured that being an ass and being famous for it is a lot better than feeling normal, conscience-driven emotion and living in anonymity. Anyway, at the time of the documentary, Mitchell has learned of Wiebe's achievement and the apparent fame he had started to garnish (mainly within the fanboy, internet-surfing, D&D in your mother's basement crowd) and with a proverbial "Hell no!", sets out to show the world (of nerds) that he is the superior nerd-specimen - with a means that is just inexplicably evil in nature.

The film, aside from making a seemingly unimportant subject into a competition to DETERMINE THE FATE OF THE WORLD, being well-edited, and well-written (is this the right term for a documentary?), succeeds, in my opinion more importantly, in another area - it portrays the last outlet in which GOOD is pitted against EVIL in our modern times. What better arena for this timeless clash stemming from the gods, as far back as the apparent creation of humanity, then behind the joystick of an arcade cabinet? I certainly cannot think of one. Even the obvious example of war - our current pitiful meanderings in Iraq and the rest of the middle-eastern to eastern world comes to mind - has lost touch of the struggle of "good vs. evil" - in it's place, the struggle for money and power between corruption vs. corruption.

This film will remain an example of chivalry in an otherwise cold and concrete modern America - a film that I feel will be one of the defining moments of the technological era, along with iPods and talking toilet seats.