DAA Documentary Double Feature!!

Today we're gonna do a double feature, two of my favorite documentaries that have just been recently released on DVD.

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King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

2007
Directed by Seth Rogan

Some of the greatest documentaries of all time succeeded on the strength of bringing the viewer into a strange subculture. Maybe one that they never knew existed, maybe just one that they hadn't been interested enough to explore before. King of Kong is in that tradition, and the subculture in question this time is competitive gaming. Imagine a world made up of thousands and thousands of Dwight Schrutes, and you might get an idea of where this is headed.

In this world, Billy Mitchell is king. Mitchell had 15 minutes of fame as a teenager in the 80's after grabbing the highest recorded score in the world on the original arcade version of Donkey Kong. In 25 years, nobody ever came close to beating that score, elevating Billy to the level of poster-boy. He's essentially spent the last couple decades showing up at random conventions and arcades, wearing tight pants and talking shit to 12 year olds. In 1999 he was named the "gamer of the century".

But now it's the new millennium, and finally a real contender has risen to the challenge, threatening Billy's longtime record. That man is Steve Weibe, a white bread suburban husband and father of two who has a small chip on his shoulder. Well, maybe not so small....the guy has pretty much failed at everything he's ever done. But he's determined to stake his claim at something, and if it wasn't baseball or garage band super-stardom, then goddamn it, it's gonna be jumping over barrels thrown by a cartoon gorilla.

Steve Weibe, being watched
by the creepiest referee ever

If Mitchell is the reigning king of this underground world, then his kingdom is Twin Galaxies arcade in Iowa, which we find out is widely considered to be the epicenter of competitive gaming across the globe. Yes.....Iowa is the epicenter of something. Get out the permanent markers and make your signs, you earned it.

There is a kind of shameless hero-worship going on at Twin Galaxies that really is hilarious. In the minds of these fanatics, their arcade is CBGB's circa '74 and Billy Mitchell is Lou Reed. You know........without the creativity and heroin and actual vagina contact. They literally believe that Mitchell and others are just one step away from posing on Wheaties boxes alongside legendary basketball and football stars. And as condescending as I'm being right now, and will no doubt continue to be for the rest of the review, one thing this film makes very clear is that not just any average person can gain this level of skill on these arcade games. It takes a person of extremely high intelligence and coordination. And just like virginity, that's something that nobody will ever be able to take away from you, "gamers".

Some critics have claimed that this is a one-sided film. And believe me, it is. In the best possible way. It's very obvious that director Seth Rogan set out from jump street to turn this almost laughable situation of obsessive gamers competing for bragging rights on the internet into the classic underdog story, complete with suspense and emotion and a villain. It really works, maybe better even than the large majority of scripted fictions released this year.

But hey, you gotta give credit where credit is due. This dramatic "battle" only flies because Weibe truly is a decent and mature person, and Billy Mitchell truly is a larger than life douchebag. The only way I can describe him to you accurately enough is.....just imagine Ernie "Big Ern" McCracken from Kingpin, with a mullet and less acne scars (amazingly, *rimshot*). The "referee" team at Twin Galaxies are given a little more slack in the movie, but still they are mostly shown in the middle of enormous nerd-style delusions of grandeur. Which, to be fair, is how most people (and by that, I mean me) would see them even without fancy editing or direction from any filmmaker.

Yes, this is Billy Mitchell.

The climax of the film starts to really build when the good people at Guinness Book of World Records contact Twin Galaxies and announce that they are taking submissions for top scores on classic arcade games like Donkey Kong. Mitchell and Weibe both make a pilgrimage to another famous arcade called, and I quote, "FunStop", where they will spend 4 days attempting to out-Kong eachother.

This film was a million times more entertaining than it had any damn right to be. It's easily one of my favorites of the year, and if you look hard enough you might still be able to catch it at the smaller arthouse theaters in your city. Go see it. Rent it. Whatever you have to do.

Deliver us from Evil

2006
Directed by Amy Berg

"Remember, the only time Christ ever got angry is when he went to church."

This next amazing documentary film from last year's pile of great ones is nothing like King of Kong. It's not uplifting, or suspenseful, or funny in any way. Frankly, it's horrific and infuriating.

Deliver us from Evil tells the story of Oliver O'Grady, a priest in California who (let's just get it out of the way now) screwed more little boys and girls than No Child Left Behind. Over a 30-year career in the church beginning in the 1970's, it's believed that he molested and raped literally hundreds of children. I won't go into details, but when they begin to (tastefully) lay out the worst of O'Grady's offenses, it's almost unthinkable what this man did.

Many of the victims of O'Grady's abuse are interviewed in depth as adults, and just the scenes with those men and women alone make this as heartbreaking a movie as I've ever seen. As one psychologist explains in the film, worse even than the basic trauma of sexual abuse itself is the "spiritual trauma" that comes from being abused by a priest, someone who to a child represents God in the flesh. These now-grown victims will never be fully stable or mentally healthy.

If you are religious to any extent, perhaps what may frighten you most in this film is that a few "bad apples" could thrive within an institution of faith. And that is certainly a fair and optimistic outlook. But if you are not religious, what might frighten you most (as it did for me) is the fact that there is this second power structure inside American society that is, for lack of a better word, allowed to handle it's own "problems", even when those problems are serial child molesters like O'grady. Predictably, if you give any such power structure an option, it's going to protect itself before anyone else, including children. And that's exactly what happened. All of the bishops and cardinals supervising O'Grady during his two decade-long rape fest chose time after time not to report him to the police, or even to do so much as warn the local authorities that there might just be a semi-sorta-kinda-maybe dangerous man living in the neighborhood. Not even the smallest amount of precaution was taken to keep him away from children. On the contrary, O'Grady's is one of the classic cases of the catholic church moving a known sexual predator from one parish to the next, with much more intention to prevent bad publicity than to promote public safety. In this movie we see clip after clip after excruciating clip of bishops and cardinals lying in police investigations and court depositions, claiming that they had no knowledge of this......no recollection of that.....never knew the extent of this...... all of which is proven to be complete bullshit through court documents and even letters written by the priests themselves to O'Grady and others.

Less than halfway through the movie it becomes painfully clear that even with his monstrous past, O'Grady is the most honest priest we will see in the film. And make no mistake, he is VERY honest about his past, treating the camera as an impromptu confessional booth.

O'Grady crying and apologizing for years of..........naw I'm just
playing, in this scene he's joking about being aroused by little boys in swimsuits.

Technically speaking, of the two documentaries I'm reviewing, this is by far the more well-crafted (weller-crafted?) one. The music score, the graphics, the pacing. It is beautifully made, which makes it all the more disturbing. The most discomforting scenes in the movie are not with the victims describing what happened to them, but with O'Grady himself walking the streets of Ireland (he was deported to his home country after serving only 7 years in prison) standing next to children in the park and on street corners, and he's just smiling and enjoying life. You can almost see his head turn to catch a glimpse of a young boy walking with his mother in one scene, and you think, "If these cameras weren't here right now....."

It makes you want to punch the closest person.

That being said, I'm not recommending this movie on entertainment value. I'm recommending it for it's importance. I think everyone should see it and share it. We all think we know enough about this topic, but there is a huge difference between reading an article in the paper or hearing it out of a comedian's mouth, and actually following the trail of despondent victims, sacrificial lambs left in the wake of a seemingly remorseless pedophile-priest and his near endorsement from church superiors. If I owned a video store I would keep this in the horror section.