"The King of Kong" - Billy Mitchell is the grestest movie villain EVER

[The Borgified Corpse]

This weekend I watched the excellent documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It's about 2 men--suburban family man Steve Wiebe and world-renowned video game expert (and hot sauce mogul) Billy Mitchell--vying for the world record high score on Donkey Kong. This is movie making at its finest; taking an obscure blip on the pop culture radar and turning it into an epic struggle of good vs. evil. The movie presents the kind of black & white conflict usually reserved for fictional movies. Steve Wiebe is a textbook underdog movie hero.

But really, the star of the movie is Billy Mitchell. Move over, Gordon Gecko. See ya later, Vader! Billy Mitchell is my vote for greatest movie villain of all time! No hero is worth anything without a great villain to clash with. Wiebe is a nice enough guy but by the end you're not so much rooting for him to win as you are just praying that someone will put that smarmy Mitchell in his place. From his impeccably groomed black mullet to his army of sycophantic disciples to his seeming conviction that he's bigger than Jesus, fiction could not create someone as deliciously vile as Billy Mitchell. You'll boo and hiss at him like he's some old timey mustache twirler in a cheesy melodrama.

Now, I will agree that the movie is something of an unfair hatchet job toward Mitchell. He seems like a somewhat nicer (if still self-important) guy in the extended interview footage on the bonus features. This isn't the first time that the movies have besmirched the reputation of a real person for the sake of making its chosen hero look better. (Billy Mitchell fares a lot better here than Max Baer did in Cinderella Man.)

But still, for a movie, what a ride! This movie replaces Grizzly Man as my new favorite documentary of all time.

Has anyone else seen this movie? I wasn't able to find any other threads on it.

 

[CommodoreKong]

Re: "The King of Kong" - Billy Mitchell is the grestest movie villain

I've seen King of Kong and I really love it. It's definitely very biased against Mitchell but the movie is so well done that I don't mind.

 

[Aragorn]

Re: "The King of Kong" - Billy Mitchell is the grestest movie villain

I figure I'd just bump this thread instead of start a new one since I just saw it recently. Plus I couldn't find any other threads that dealt with this movie.

Obviously, the movie paints the picture of Steve the underdog and Billy the villain. But at the same time it's not like they forced Billy to make those "Helen of Troy" or "abortion" comments. He seems like someone whose entire identity depends on those high video game scores.

However, I don't think Billy comes across nearly as bad as his two underlings who worship the ground he walks on and would be willing to bend over for him. Worst is that younger guy (who was like a little kid despite being 30) -- Brian Kuh? -- who really wasn't the video game master he thought he was. The way he was going around trying to get people to watch Steve play -- in his voice it sounded like he was desperate to try and sabotage Steve any way he could for his beloved master Billy.

And henchman No. 2's phone call to Billy about Steve just showed up at this public restaurant uninvited was a total joke.

I also wonder about the integrity of the Twin Galaxies people -- how they threw out Steve's record based on the smudge on the motherboard (and that the motherboard game from Roy Shildt) yet had no problems with the poor quality of Billy's tape.

And then in one of the special features where they talk about Billy resetting the record with witness and how the judge -- Walter Day? -- was there to see it, they changed the rules so that the judge had to be there to witness all record scores. That seems rather fishy that such a rule came into effect after Billy's new record.

Supposedly, they want to turn this story into a feature but I don't see it happening. If it does, don't you think Nathan Fillion should play Steve?