Saturday, October 27, 2007

What Do You Write In A Sympathy Card For Cancer

"The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" (2007) by Seth Gordon

Because today we remember who was the Red Baron? Why is the pilot who, during the First World War, was able to bring yourself down more enemies than anyone else. 86 aircraft shot down, an incredible number, especially when you consider that the runner had scored just over twenty.

relata Referer: are in train and I have no way to control, but more or less these were the stoned one of the protagonists of this entertaining documentary, during a daring analogy. The Red Baron was at the time, the number one aviation Teutonic to aim, reflexes, coordination of body, mind and instrumentation. Much like the world champion of Donkey Kong.

Who has approximately forty years, surely you remember Donkey Kong: roughly contemporary with the more famous Pac-Man, was that game where a mustache Omarini must climb up complicated structures to save his girlfriend from a gorilla that 'kidnapped her - dodging at the same time, the barrels that the ape throws him off the pace, but also challenging other perils such as fire-balls, springs bouncing and elevators. Those of my generation, we played a bit 'all: gamers have known in later incarnations and versions later, when Omarini the mustached and has been dubbed Super Mario has a brother (Louis), creating a pair of Super Mario Bros. - even brought to the screen in one of the first, infamous, for film adaptations of successful video games.

For most of us, the era of video games "arcade" has also left room for other hobbies for many has been to enrich the heritage of nostalgic memories of adolescence. For some, however, Donkey Kong has remained an all-consuming, an obsession, a matter of life and self-assertion. There are people who have, in their garage, the heavy original cabins, as detected by amusement arcades and lovingly maintained in office for two decades. People who are still able to play for hours in pursuit of "perfect match", the one where you can skip all the barrels, to put out a hammer all balls of fire, to take all the elevators and get to the twenty-fourth, impossible, the game screen, the so-called KILL SCREEN, one in which the computer's memory is no longer enough to manage the game and the mustachioed Omarini lose, automatically, a life after a few seconds, whatever I was doing, even without barrels nearby .

There are people who for a quarter of a century, takes up an organization allow for the championships of Donkey Kong, there are those who spend hours and hours to look at vhs where gamers of all U.S. record footage of their matches, to check that there are no tricks and, if so, validate the record that proponents claim to have achieved. And there are those who on their league position remained unbeaten for twenty years has built his life and his personal success, and a retinue of loyal acolytes willing to do anything to touch the hem of the robe to the master.

"The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" is the story of this great champion and a challenger, so that attempts to break his record of eight hundred thousand stitches and broken - not just for the sake of defeating the person, as to prove himself to be first in something, after failing as a musician, as a player baseball and basketball and as a businessman. The success and failure in their lives, after all, is to some extent a personal matter, and if you have not achieved success in fields where we measure the normal people, after all, you do not see why you should not do so trying to save a girl from pixel to pixel of a gorilla, skipping thousands of barrels made of pixels.

There are half a matter of rules: a record from a video that is documented as a record achieved in public, in a tournament? The machines are all the same or are there some that is more or less easy to play? It's not that you can falsify the software? E 'lawful swearing during the game? And then

There are deeper questions: fear and desire of the comparison, the power of friendship, popularity, money, a title acquired, the need to prove something to others around you because it means prove it to themselves. In addition to the considerations that only those old video game long can possibly really understand: the obsession of the challenge, the alienation that you care and feeding at the same time, simplify electronic tensions in life that never occur in repetitive screens , sinking into the hypnotic reasoning that after a while 'begin to develop according to the logic of the game.

There is all this and more in this film that manages to laugh without become acrimonious, without pretending to judge a group of "white and nerdy" who have found their reason for living in a discipline that maybe no one would ever expect. E 'at the same time a parody of the documentary of inquiry and investigation itself, compelling, engaging and, in his 79 minutes, absolutely impeccable. If you had twenty years in the eighties, you can not miss stuff, but it is even if you have any passion that monopolizes a large part of your free time and sometimes becomes awfully serious for you more than it deserves. Such as write to a newsgroup.

Rome Film Festival, October 25, 2007


The movie trailer on YouTube

0 comments:

Post a Comment