Studies in Ridonculousness: Always Be Going Out On an Explosion

 King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, 2007)

The documentary King of Kong remains a favorite of mine. It’s about a battle for Donkey Kong arcade game supremacy, waged between Billy Mitchell, whose high score has stood for decades, and Steve Wiebe, challenger to the throne. This pursuit is certainly strange, like everything about this subculture. Take arcade game scorekeeping: one man volunteers to spend numberless hours of his life watching tapes of video game record submissions. (To maintain the integrity of the system, someone must be responsible for making sure the gamer didn’t cheat or doctor the tape.) Strange but not ridonculous.

The first couple of times I watched it, I only picked up on the comedy, which is abundant. This time I admired a quieter part of the movie, the filmmaker’s sketch of Wiebe: Husband. Father of two. Laid off the day his family moves into a new home. Later he becomes a high school biology teacher. Intelligent, unassuming, softspoken, with a varied skill set and friends and family that cheer him on. But he’s also somewhat fragile, thwarted, having struggled to meet expectations in some ways: a modern day George Eliot character. He’s decent, doesn’t appear to be the least inclined to use dirty tricks to get ahead. He perfects his Donkey Kong game honestly.

And when he finally achieves his high score, can finally say his hours of work? have led to an indisputable success, however small, he slowly comes to learn that he isn’t dealing with an altogether fair system run by professionals operating with the utmost scrupulousness. As his score gets attention, some arcade gamer goons break into his house and take apart his Donkey Kong machine, to inspect it. Finding no definitive proof that he cheated somehow, his score is ultimately rejected simply because he sent in a tape. A decision is reached partly due to the influence of the record holder himself, Billy Mitchell, the superstar of this world. However, Wiebe is offered the chance to “redeem himself” by spending time and money flying across the country to achieve the same high score on a public machine, amongst witnesses. He makes the trip. (Meanwhile, his wife is stressed because she has to take care of the kids alone for the weekend.) Another goon is there and tries to psych him out. I thought, charitably, of basketball: part of the game involves taunting and trashtalking and worming into an opponent’s head. It’s not a dirty tactic. It can add to the fun. And it’s another challenge for the baller to overcome. And there’s yet more fun to be had when it backfires and the trashtalker goes sliding across the court and into a player’s highlight reel. Then the counterthought: This isn’t basketball. I doubt I could watch Mario jumping over barrels for four quarters. Still, when Steve Wiebe gets a kill screen (…no explanation forthcoming), I laughed to see the goon swallowing the shame of failing to get a kill screen before him. But Weibe’s efforts (and time and money) are worth little after Billy Mitchell sends in a tape of himself achieving the highest score and is roundly applauded.

A snapshot of Steve Wiebe, near the documentary’s close: Splashing around in a pool with his kids on his shoulders. Wherever he ends up ranking in Donkey Kong, he’s not ridonculous (or no more than most of us, anyway). He’s won even if he’s lost.

It's Billy Mitchell specifically who proves with every moment he’s onscreen that he belongs in this column. Unapologetically admitting that he’s a controversial figure, he compares himself to the abortion debate. An elderly woman tasked with delivering his high score tape describes him as “devious.” At the airport, Mitchell tells her the tape is more important than her luggage and it’s probably not a joke. When he eventually appears in person, hovering in the background, Wiebe politely greets him and he maintains stony silence: mustn’t greet a rival in the Donkey Kong game. When asked what initials he inputs into the machine after getting a high score, he tells the person to guess by looking at him. The offscreen wag says: “TIE?” (Mitchell likes his loud ties.) Without cracking a smile, Mitchell gives the answer: to thumb his nose at his “Canadian and Latin” friends, he always inputs the letters USA.

He has one peer: Vanilla ICE. Both based in Florida, incidentally.

 

 

Fate of the Furious (F. Gary Gray, 2017)

The eighth entry in the FF series is comparable to Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1: a franchise-killer that inspires one to shout as the credits roll that the filmmakers need to WRAP THIS UP! Both movies revel in ridonculousness. Both perfunctorily dispatch women characters that hardly had a place in the universe of the franchises to begin with merely to give the male hero a reason to fight evil once more, spoiling any fun one might have been having up to that point. Both are too long. Both wear out their formulas, devolving into self-parody. Both feature none too compelling technology-run-amok plots. Both are humorless (though not for lack of trying). The difference in Fate is that it features a twist out of a wrestling script: the good guy goes bad. And this time there’s a submarine. What was it all for? Doing my best worst Vin Diesel, I’ll state what the concluding message of the next seven movies (including spinoffs) in the FF franchise is going to be: FAMILY (which will include, by the end of the series, all the clones of star fleet captain Dominic Toretto, President of Earth).

 

Madame Web (SJ Clarkson, 2024)

A high-profile bomb, so infamous that it fascinated people outside the circle of aficionados. Going back to my elementary school years and drawing on my memories of the Spiderman cartoon (and, to a lesser extent, the comics), the title character, played understandably without full commitment, and a trace of confusion, by Dakota Johnson, is obscure in the Marvel Universe. An odd choice for a potential franchise, although it provides a number of starring roles for women. The movie is about Madame Web’s origin: gaining the power to see into the future and becoming the boss of a squad of teen superheroes.

Bland, clunky, nonsensical, not easy on the eyes—promising, in other words. In one baffling scene, the girls disobey an order to hide in a forest, for their safety, and wander into a nearby restaurant. Without ordering anything, they head over to meet a group of boys and within moments are dancing on their table. No manager asks them to please stop. The other patrons barely even seem to notice. It isn’t amusing. It isn’t plausible. This is just what the movie thinks teen girls, practically strangers to each other, would do in this life-threatening situation.

In gathering these girls, Madame Web is wanted for kidnapping. First of all, it’s another reason why the table dance makes no sense: they’re drawing attention to themselves while on the run from the law. But soon, Web has to leave the country, alone. Despite her face being in the newspaper for a major crime, she gets out – meeting a man who pops out of some bushes in the Amazon – and back in with such ease that there isn’t a single scene in the airport.

Above all, a superhero movie is supposed to have action and, on that basis alone, this one deeply underwhelms. The supervillain is about as generic as he can possibly be without wearing jeans and a white t-shirt that reads “supervillain,” written in Sharpie. He dresses sort of like Spiderman only with muddier coloring, moves around basically like Spiderman, but is devoid of personality. He has one henchwoman, an assistant with no superpowers (and also no personality) who monitors the entire city for him by herself using a bank of screens, seemingly without rest for weeks, to locate the girls amid, I’m guessing, hundreds of thousands of people. To give a sense of the quality of his dialogue, during the final battle, as the supervillain is about to die, he says: I’m not even going to type it. I know you know what he says. One word, not vulgar. Come on.

No matter how bad these superhero movies are, they’ll always end on the hopeful note of a potential sequel. If I was left somewhat disappointed, it’s because, while consistently terrible, in every conceivable way, it doesn’t go over the top enough. I couldn’t laugh off my turkey-induced headache.

 

Under Paris (Xavier Jens, 2024)

The lesson I learned with this one is to doublecheck the Rotten Tomatoes score before viewing. I could’ve sworn this was in the 80s. So when I decided to watch it, it was with the vague understanding that it was supposed to be good. With more reviews tallied, however, it wound up in the 60s. And even that’s too generous. In hindsight, I should have been more skeptical that there can be much more to add to the shark monster movie subgenre after Jaws besides absurdity. In any case, it has its moments, at least.

An unintentional warning is provided in the opening set piece, involving the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A group of scientists diving underneath it are mauled by a giant shark that looks too digital to elicit any real scare, the lack of suspense or visual flair further highlighting the artificiality. Years later, back in Paris, one of the survivors, Sophie, played by Bérénice Bejo, continues to suffer from the trauma of that day. She’s leading a tour at an aquarium. In this scene, the movie’s crude characterization, its low opinion of humanity, is made clear: A suspiciously well-informed boy jeers her about her dead colleagues, prompting laughter among the other kids. Then he goes so far as to delight in her tears. And no teacher or chaperone attempts to intervene, hisses a single word. Combined with the opening, I thought I was safe to forget the Charles Darwin quotation that starts the movie.

…I suppose I went ahead and tossed out even more while I was at it, since I can’t remember why her old nemesis, the giant shark, finds its way to Paris, to take up residence in and around the Seine. But it’s there and a tracker placed on it by the scientist still works, so she can monitor its movements on her laptop. Not that it does anything to stop the shark’s rampage. The movie implies that it somehow kills an entire group of homeless men standing near the water. They all fell into the water? An incredibly stupid activist is so sure that she can direct the shark to the ocean before the authorities hunt it down that she gathers a group of people in the shark’s lair to watch her make contact and document it for promotional purposes. Her screaming death, a goofy overhead shot of her halfway down the shark’s gullet, is worth a hearty laugh, and again when the shot is repeated near the end. The incredibly stupid, callous mayor, busy planning a triathlon with a swimming section to be held in the Seine, shows nothing but contempt for the experts and their warnings just because some people were slaughtered there recently. The triathlon continues as planned.

The one surprise disappointment with the final massacre is that the mayor falls into the water but apparently is spared. The very end, though, patient viewer, compensates for that missed opportunity with another surprise: it’s not enough that the shark just attacks and feeds. There are live explosives in the water, left from WWII. Gunmen fire their machine guns at the shark. Since the general rule for movie machine guns is that they almost never hit the intended target, the shark slips away to prepare for the sequel while the bullets hit the explosives, causing a chain reaction that blows up the Seine and leaves Paris underwater. 

Under the Volcano

     Among all the writers whose biographies I’ve looked into, I’d nominate Malcolm Lowry as least likely to get a fucking thing done. He drank to scary excess, went through a doomed marriage, lived precariously (though without supporting himself financially), and more than once wound up in a mental hospital. The documentary Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry (1976) is mostly devoted to the gruesome side, with readings from his work interspersed, and visual choices and dour musical accompaniment that occasionally strain to achieve a grotesque effect. And though it benefits from being filmed early enough to include people who knew him in different stages of his life, it doesn’t make use of the quite helpful convention of identifying them by displaying their names and some words on their relationship to the writer, so that one has to figure it out or accept accounts from nameless witnesses. But most of all it fails to give equal attention to his inspirations and the work he must have put in to write his masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947), that is the only reason this documentary exists in the first place. Not salacious enough, perhaps. Nevertheless, with him I’m particularly interested in how he managed it. We learn something crucial about the process: his second wife, Margerie Bonner, to whom the book is dedicated, deserves more recognition for her involvement. It wasn’t just invaluable companionship and encouragement that continued after the novel was initially rejected by 12 publishers. She edited the book alongside him. She even saved the manuscript when their home burnt down. Still, I wasn’t satisfied. Finally seeing a modest novel in print would have been enough to qualify as a success. A few good reviews would have seasoned it. This man, who was at constant risk of damaging his mind irreparably with alcohol and endless self-flagellation, who might have died under a moldering heap of notes, drafts, diaries, and bottles in one foul setting or another practically unknown, writes a brilliant, all-encompassing novel, the power of which is sustained over close to 400 pages without letup, that’s never been out of print and that makes him a legend.

It takes place in Quauhnahuac, Mexico, on the Day of the Dead, 1938. Lowry’s method is to pour his own life in, more or less: the main character is the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, a man destroying himself with alcohol. He has bouts of madness. Somewhere there’s a manuscript lying around. He’s visited by his estranged wife, who’s there to save the marriage. This would suggest support for the trite notion that we all have at least one book in us, which in my experience hasn’t died. Actually reading a book like this should dispel it: Under the Volcano is Lowry’s dissolute, tumultuous life coupled with a rare, dazzling command of an array of literary techniques. The smooth flow between internal and external, mental babel and immediate surroundings. A fine-grained, expansive vision of Mexico that avoids both the simple foreigner’s distance and horror and the temptation to narrowly focus on one man’s disastrous life. His feel for the resonance of a scene, for the morsel of an image or detail. (No life is enough if one doesn’t remember or know what to select or how to embellish.) His ear for voices, including broken English that doesn’t travesty the speaker. His language: vigorous, multilingual, maximalist—in sentence and paragraph length, metaphor, lexicon, allusions, sources (advertisements, menus, letters).

And his humor! Which caught me by surprise at first because I thought that, given his subject, he’d be sure to shed a few too many tears in his mescal. Not so.

The Consul, who had waked a moment or two ago on the porch and remembered everything immediately, was almost running. He was also lurching. In vain he tried to check himself, plunging his hands, with an extraordinary attempt at nonchalance, in which he hoped might appear more than a hint of consular majesty, deeper into the sweat-soaked pockets of his dress trousers.

In the bathroom the Consul became aware he still had with him half a glass of slightly flat beer; his hand was fairly steady, but numbed holding the glass, he drank cautiously, carefully postponing the problem soon to be raised by its emptiness.

What have I got out of my life? Contacts with famous men…The occasion Einstein asked me the time, for instance.

Don Quixote is namedropped throughout. At turns wry and grim, Lowry is capable of laughter even in the middle of his most nightmarish scene without unsettling it.

Lowry achieves a unique balance in tone: authentically ominous (not lugubrious) and authentically playful (not arch). A continually striking contrast between the deepest despair of a life, the human being as little more than rotten meat destined for the abyss, and an intense zeal for life, as evidenced in his voracious appetite for every aspect of it. Mood swings. Frightening dark, rousing light.

And finally, strangely and wonderfully, absorbing everything on offer in Under the Volcano is challenging but not forbidding. Clearly Lowry doesn’t shy away from difficulty. But his theme is transparent, acting as a firm thread for the reader to grip no matter where the book goes.

The best answer to the question of how Lowry pulled off his grand novel is a metaphor he took to heart: He built a pier in the pond outside his home in Dollarton, British Columbia, where the novel was largely written. It was flimsy, unprepossessing. But, when a storm came and went, it was still standing. 

It was still standing.

The story of his rapid upward trajectory would be funny, or funnier, if it ended there. Success, however, proved to be yet another hell. So I can’t say whether Malcolm Lowry would have appreciated my appreciation.