DVD Fight: Gamers vs. A Great Disturbance
By Lisa Fary
I’m really sick of mockumentaries. Yes, I liked Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and the rest of the mockumentaries from Christopher Guest et al (with the exception of For Your Consideration, which wasn’t so great). Sure, I pushed Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon on this very site many times. However, in some cases, the mockumentary seems to be the answer to making a movie on a small budget. With a mockumentary, you can have grainy film and spend a good deal of time driving around in cars while the “subject” pontificates.
It’s still no substitute for wit, which is something Chris Folino’s mockumentary, Gamers, lacks.
Gamers follows Dungeons, Nymphs, and Dragons (DND) RPG players as they attempt to break the record for most hours played. Predictably, the guys are all socially awkward, have awful jobs, and live at home even though they should be almost forty.
The guys in Gamers are losers, and they don’t have to be. I’m no stranger to RPG. Sci-fi geek that I am, I played BattleTech growing up instead of D&D, but I still spent too much time creating my characters and painting my mechs (OK, I only played when my older brother wanted to practice for his “real” games - it was still fun. Shut up). I think as a group, gamers are idiosyncratic enough that a lot of dramatization isn’t really necessary.
Gamers takes what could have been a clever and witty mockumentary and packs it with the kind of middle school humor that a thirteen year old boy would find funny: anti-gay jokes, sex jokes, jokes about bodily functions, and anti-gay jokes (yes, it deserves to be said twice - there was a lot of anti-gay humor in Gamers).
Overall, Gamers says nothing about its subject and nothing about its characters. It’s unfunny and tasteless. So, why does Gamers make it into Hollywood Video while A Great Disturbance limps from festival to festival? Because Gamers - I can’t imagine how - got John Heard, Beverly D’Angelo, William Katt, and Kelly LeBrock to show up.
A Great Disturbance follows five Star Wars fans through the 2005 Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis: an obnoxious tech guy, an overly aggressive Star Wars Minis gamer, a socially awkward guy who seems like he has Aspberger’s Syndrome, and two college buddies looking to pick up girls. They all embody different levels of SW fandom, and they’re all people we know.
That’s where Gamers failed and A Great Disturbance succeeded: the characters feel like real people. They’re people you’ve seen at conventions before. You’ll probably see yourself in some of them.
A Great Disturbance also, while poking fun at its subject, shows a lot of love for it. That concept seems to confuse some people, and I don’t understand why. Loving something, whether it’s Star Wars or RPG or Battlestar Galactica, sometimes entails skewering it. You’ve got to love it enough to see the flaws and the absurdity in the subject and in yourself.
Gamers sees the flaws and the absurdity, but it feels like the filmmaker is either not a gamer himself, or is and he harbors a lot of self-loathing about it. A Great Disturbance unabashedly embraces it’s nature, and that make it a winner.
The winners’ circle so far. . .
Never miss an update. Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email or subscribe via RSS
Lisa Fary is a graduate of the creative writing program at Florida State University and holds an advanced degree in Special Education. Her early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl.
Stumble it!