Quotability is rarely used as a critical yardstick, but sometimes the shoe just fits. Films like The Big Lebowski, The Blues Brothers, or Office Space achieved their hallowed fandom aura so easily because of the way they become instantly portable. “Ah, ah, I almost forgot…I’m also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too…” or “That rug really tied the room together.” Inside jokes like these can condense entire films into one offhand reference, fluid and immediate points of nostalgia that are perhaps one of the most intense forms of pop culture in the information age.
Of course this can get annoying in a hurry. Chances are that if you audibly reference one iota of Monthy Python and The Holy Grail in public, there is going to be somebody nearby that will instantly launch into the “Knights who say Ni!” bit. But I suppose that is a necessary evil for a kind of filmmaking that celebrates the way that language, comedic dialogue, speech stripped of the commonplace, makes it easy for people to relate out there in the real world.
So I was thrilled to find that after watching Chris Grega’s new mockumentary Game of The Year, everyone else had the same response I did: “clip clop.”
That and a litany of other perfectly quotable bits and scenes that make the film such an unexpectedly engrossing experience. The film contains a documentary being made about a bunch middle aged guys, all old friends, that play lengthy and involved role playing games in someone’s basement. Think: The Office with Dungeons and Dragons in south county St. Louis. As the cameras roll, a supercilious Brit ex-pat leads each team member through the agonies and victories of their ongoing role playing game – meanwhile the documentary begins to leak out into their actual lives with unintended results. The cast of characters runs the gamut from archetypal geek, to self-hating geek, to ADD guy, and eventually the sound person (a girl!) even gets tossed into the mix when they need an additional player.
But there is a lot at stake. If they can successfully dominate an upcoming RPG challenge, they will win the opportunity to run a new gaming company for a year. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Amidst the hilariously obscure tangents and arguments that cascade from attempts to prepare for the tournament of champions, jealousies and long held resentments begin to surface. We watch this group of friends break up and scatter, a marriage teetering in the balance. At a loss for a game, two of them actually begin prowling the streets like junkies, looking for a loremaster to guide them, and end up at the butt end of jokes delivered in a dwarvish/Klingon dialect. They then stumble across someone even more problematically related to the game than they are. It is a startling moment.
But they all kind of get their act together and make it to the tournament. By this time, Game of The Year has long hit its stride, and the mockumentary payoff is as hysterical (clip clop) as it is reflective about the way the game has affected all these people. It has become a way for them to collectively avoid the nitty gritty of life, and Grega charts their way out of this mess with equal parts joy and dignity. There are a lot of these RPG and LARP (live action role playing) mockumentaries and documentaries out there. Darkon’s take on LARP, for example, sometimes has a hard time hiding its smirk while dealing with the public perception of people that get so immersed in these kinds of hobbies. But Game of The Year seems more interested in its cast of characters than the fact that they are gamers. In fact, it is gratifying to see how quickly their passion for it evaporates when faced with more substantial alternatives.
I have enjoyed people’s response to this film almost as much as the film itself. It is hard to pull off a mockumentary, but Grega does it with quotable flair. Let’s see this one get St. Louis independent filmmaking on the map with its wonderful batch of inside jokes.
