Date: February 5Location: Clifton Living Room
Over the past several years, there's been a trend of great documentaries about the incredible competition and fascinating characters found in "geek sports" — spelling in Spellbound, crossword puzzles in Wordplay and now old-school video gaming in The King of Kong. This one could be the best of them, largely because it focuses on a single hero and a single villain locked in a heart-pounding battle for that ultimate prize, the highest score in Donkey Kong. At times it plays more like a work of fiction than a documentary — one player is so clearly the protagonist that the filmmakers even play the Rocky theme to highlight his comeback. It's great fun, but at the same time I wonder if they didn't go a bit far. Surely the "villain" isn't as cartoonish as he's portrayed here. And isn't it the responsibility of documentary filmmakers to deliver something close to the truth? That's a debate worth having, but this is a wonderful film regardless.
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