INKSTAND

Years ago a man named Billy got the high score on Donkey Kong. Recently, a man named Steve claimed to have beaten that score. Who’d have thought a documentary about this situation could be so much fun to watch.

First of all, Billy is really full of himself. He exudes a brand of confidence rarely seen in an individual, much less someone who played a lot of Donkey Kong. He spits phrases that seem right at home on a No Fear t-shirt and wears his hair in a style that I don’t think was ever popular.

Steve is a man who never fulfilled his dreams of being in a band. He got laid off at Boeing the day he bought his house and went into teaching. He has a wife and kids who seem to just barely tolerate his drive and mild-mannered passion to beat Billy’s high score.

I got some strange feelings from both these men from things that either I inferred from the movie, or the movie only eluded to. I got the feeling that Billy is a control freak. There are shots of him stocking store shelves with the hot sauce from his restaurant, as vendors tend to do. He clearly pushes other products on the shelf to the side to create more facings for his hot sauce. I also think he insisted on certain things about how the film was presented. For instance we don’t see his wife, or even know that he’s married until he’s about to encounter Steve for the first time. Then he brings her out, of course she’s “hot”, and he struts her around the arcade. An arcade, mind you, where everyone kisses Billy’s ass and sort of snub Steve, hoping he’ll lose. Oh, that’s another thing, they have to compete for the title and Billy gets all weird and mind-gamey with Steve.

As far as Steve goes, his wife doesn’t say it directly but it is clear that she is at her wits end over the whole video game thing. She tells how people came to inspect Steve’s home Donkey Kong game, bother her mother and basically breaking in. His daughter is shown once saying something to him about it destroying his life. Even on the video that he sent in originally, you can hear his son yelling and crying in the background to be “wiped” while Steve tells him to wait.

This is a pretty entertaining movie because the people in it create drama wherever they can find it.
Here’s a clip of Steve winning. Note how everyone kind of doesn’t want him to win. Also note how Billy does everything from afar, via telephone. His response to Steve winning here was to send a video tape of him beating the score. So much drama!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 1:05 am and is filed under movies, geeky not in the cool way. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.