MovieBabe Blog

Looks like I've got some catching up to do

MovieBabe — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 05:07:37 GMT

Sorry to all my readers (hello?) for neglecting this blog...it's been a rough season. I have manage to finally update my website, letsnotlisten.com, though, so for now you can kindly head there if you're interested in seeing what I had to say the past couple of months.

Hope to get back in the groove with this after the holidays, and at least post my top-10 in a timely fashion.

Until then, happy moviegoing. It's a great time of the year!

The Jane Austen Book Club

MovieBabe — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 03:49:00 GMT

By Tricia Olszewski

Hello. I'd like to trade in my testicles, please.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a movie in possession of a title such as The Jane Austen Book Club will be in want of a male audience. Based on a novel of the same name, the Robin Swicord-written and -directed film is exactly what you'd expect it to be: It's breezy one moment, somber the next, and, of course, full of women, sentimentality, and reaction shots of dogs. And when each showing lets out, it's likely there won't be a long line at the men's room.

The somewhat interesting idea of Karen Joy Fowler's novel is that real people can find in Austen parallels to and guidance for their own lives. But it's a gimmick that was set up to fail. Go too deep with the theory, and you risk alienating viewers who aren't Janeites. Skimp on it, and there's little else to differentiate the story from countless other romantic comedies. Swicord, a first-time feature director, decided on the latter, offering characters and plot turns whose resemblances to Austen are often too superficial to be recognizable.

Five women and one man comprise the titular Sacramento book club, and each is a shameless type. Bernadette (Kathy Baker) is the organizer of the group and its eldest member, a currently single, freewheeling sort who's been married as often as Austen published. (That'd be six times.) Sylvia (Amy Brenneman) has just been dumped by her husband (Jimmy Smits) of two decades. Sylvia's daughter, Allegra (Maggie Grace), is a lesbian and extreme-sport enthusiast who immediately clashes with Prudie (Emily Blunt), a young, snooty high-school-French teacher with a severe black bob and an unhappy marriage. And Jocelyn (Maria Bello), the arguable focus of the story, is Sylvia's best friend, a never-married dog breeder who impulsively invites the handsome, chick-flick-ready Grigg (Hugh Dancy) to join the club when he hits on her at a conference.

Grigg agrees, with a caveat: He'll give Austen a chance if she'll try science fiction. The chemistry between them as they argue the merits of each of their preferred styles of literature is obvious, and when Jocelyn asks Grigg how he feels about older women, it seems clear where this is going. But Jocelyn doesn't want Grigg for herself. Instead, she means to set up him with Sylvia, and in this case the unforeseen plot turn is irritating: Jocelyn never lets either of them know about her intentions, leaving both the characters and the audience baffled when she switches from being sly to getting angry at Grigg for not asking Sylvia out. "You need to dance with Sylvia tonight!" she admonishes him before they all meet for a library benefit. But wouldn't you know it, as soon as Grigg shows the slightest interest in her friend, Jocelyn turns pouty. And yet later yells at Grigg for not sufficiently appreciating what a great person Sylvia is. It's a back-and-forth even Elizabeth Bennett would find exhausting.

Swicord's script is woefully underdeveloped, with the passage of time marked with montages of the members reading each book and only cursory subplots for most of the characters. Prudie's may be as hole-y as the others – you can't imagine how the buttoned-down, romantic teacher ended up with a distant, jockish husband – but because of Blunt, this story is the most compelling: Quite the opposite of Blunt's outspoken, nearly boorish character in her breakout movie, The Devil Wears Prada, her Prudie is quiet and mannered, peppering her speech French phrases that make her seem arrogant. But she speaks slowly and avoids eye contact, often running her hands down her bob as if to squeeze out a clear thought from a brain noisy with thoughts of her miserable home life. One of the movie's most realistic and raw moments involves a fight between Prudie and her husband when she thinks he was flirting with another woman at a party, a blonde "with those ridiculous plastic boobs," she cries. "Is that what you go for?" Unfortunately, any credibility in that story line is wiped out with the suggestion that a caveman need only spend an afternoon reading Austen aloud to undergo a Mr. Darcy transformation.

Blunt may be the standout in this terrific ensemble, but it's because no one else is given material worthy of their talents -- Brenneman cries a lot, Baker tosses off bon mots, and the typically intense Bello is reduced to romantic-comedy giddiness and embarrassing dialogue such as, "Reading Jane Austen is a freakin' minefield!" Dancy gets a pass: Not only is his character supposed to be little more than charming window dressing, the unthreateningly handsome actor is a much better fit as Grigg than in serious leading roles such as in last year's Beyond the Gates. The cast is ultimately wasted on a film that, at best, might have been a Cliffs Notes version of Austen, but more closely resembles a bargain-bin romance.

King of California

MovieBabe — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 03:47:35 GMT

By Tricia Olszewski

Michael Douglas is looking for spare change...I mean buried treasure

If you saw Michael Douglas' King of California character on the street, you'd avoid eye contact and walk quickly past. Having just spent the past two years in an institution, Douglas' Charlie is disheveled and wild-eyed, oblivious to the ideas of authority or boundaries, and talks of little but finding an ancient treasure buried somewhere in West Coast suburbia. But this is a movie, so Charlie isn't mentally ill, he's magical. His unkempt hair and bushy beard are charming. And his eyes aren't rheumy from manic, sleepless nights, they sparkle with life.

Charlie's 16-year-old daughter, Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood), seems to understand that her father is perhaps not yet fit to leave the hospital as she moans in voiceover about how the relatively stable life she's made for herself, trading school for a full-time job at McDonald's to pay the bills, is about to be upended when he comes home. (Mom, who we're told is a hand model for no reason other than to ratchet up quirk value, left a while ago.) Miranda sounds a little selfish, but, of course, that's all going to change – she may have become so distant from her father that she calls him Charlie, but really, as she says, "Who doesn't want to believe in buried treasure?"

You can imagine how it all goes down. Charlie does something kooky, like sells Miranda's car to buy excavating equipment – yep, committed one day, given access to a back hoe the next -- and shrugs adorably when he gets caught. Miranda acts exasperated and even stern, but inevitably rolls her eyes in a sitcommy, "Oh, Dad!" kind of way. The surprising part about writer-director Mike Cahill's debut is that it's not nearly as wacky as its plot should rightly dictate – it's actually rather dull. Miranda's narration is incessant, covering everything from her family's background to purple excerpts from the journal of a Spanish explorer that Charlie's been studying to find clues about lost gold. It's a lot of information that Wood often delivers too quickly to grasp, relegating it to lulling background noise.

And though while what we hear may get complicated, what we see is anything but. Here's Miranda at work, taking calls from Charlie as he further tries to convince her of the treasure's existence. Now they're in some off-limits area, say a private golf course, with Charlie manipulating his GPS device and Miranda looking vaguely concerned. Then they're at their run-down Victorian home, father and daughter gently butting heads over stuff such as whether he's eaten and how she's got too many responsibilities to go off digging for loot in the middle of the night. Golden-tinged flashbacks show poor wee Miranda (Allisyn Ashley Arm) washing dishes as her musician dad (of course he's a musician) plays upright bass with a bunch of other layabouts. The most memorable moments are also the creepiest, involving unattractive, middle-aged swingers in tiny bathing suits at a barbecue, slowly gyrating to Seals & Crofts' "Summer Breeze" and trying to get Miranda into a thong. It's an integral scene, but yikes.

One imagines that Cahill intended all manner of meaning to flow from his script, not only about the specialness of the parent-child bond but also about chasing dreams, believing in people, the existence of treasure just beneath the surface of our junk society. (The spot with which Charlie finally marks his X is in a Costco, which, along with McDonald's, gets as much screen time as the characters.) But the director is too focused on nurturing Douglas' show-pony performance to develop the most important element of story, the relationship between Charlie and Miranda – if you can't feel the love, you can't believe that this otherwise smart and responsible girl would go along with Charlie's ridiculous, usually felonious actions. When, during one of their fights, she yells, "You never listen!" the line seems like it belongs in a different movie. By the time Charlie shows up in the middle of Costco in a wet suit, you'll wish you were in a different movie, too.

The Hunting Party

MovieBabe — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:37:38 GMT

The Hunting Party

If Kent Brockman came to life...

The Three Stooges Go to Bosnia could have been an alternate title for The Hunting Party, an odd political thriller/comedy hybrid mined by writer-director Richard Shepard from a 2000 Esquire article. Naturally, the short piece about a handful of journalists and their attempt to find a war criminal required some tarting to be movie-ready, and Shepard isn't bashful about his embellishments; the end credits, in a rather fun touch, do a quick revisit of the film and point out who and what was real. But "fun" may not be what most people are looking for in a story about an ethnic cleanser and one man's need for revenge.

It all starts out earnestly enough. Network cameraman Duck (Terrence Howard) is in Sarajevo with a just-out-of-J-school reporter, Ben (Jesse Eisenberg), for an easy assignment when he's tracked down by his former partner, Simon (Richard Gere). Simon has become a journalistic cliché – scruffy, drunk, crazed – since an on-air meltdown left him unemployable some 10 years back. But he's got a scoop, and he wants Duck to help him report the story he's sure will get him back in the game: Even though the United Nations have been looking for him for years, Simon knows where to find the Fox (Ljubomir Kerekes), the person responsible for the rape, torture, and slaughter of thousands of Bosnian Muslims. So the three travel to the country's mountains, where they're immediately threatened and shot at – and as Duck and Benjamin shit their pants, Simon admits that he doesn't really want to interview the Fox, he wants to capture him. OK, not really: It's all about a girl, and Simon wants to kill the guy who took her away from him. And, by the way, he never actually got any tips on his location.

Bumbling and weaponless aren't good things to be in this situation, and the movie does offer some tense, gasp-inducing moments due to the sheer lunacy of these characters' choices. Its light side can be enjoyable as well, particularly the teasing, best-bud chemistry between Gere (doing a more rumpled version on his manic role in The Hoax) and Howard (who's charming as always, if excessively laid-back). With the Fox's real-life counterpart, Radovan Karadzic, still at large, The Hunting Party isn't only trying to compelling, it's begging to be talked about. But chances are you'll be less inclined to discuss world affairs than how in the world a pregnant woman's bloodied corpse could be shown in the same film that brings out a midget in a pink track suit for laughs.

December Boys

MovieBabe — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:36:40 GMT

Daniel Radcliffe hasn't exactly taken a huge leap in December Boys, his first cinematic turn outside of the Harry Potter franchise. He's gone from playing a British orphan to an Australian one. Radcliffe isn't the first Potter kid to try on a new character; Rupert Grint costarred in 2006's Driving Lessons. And both films are dull, treacly affairs that, if not for their value as trivia, won't likely be remembered at all.

Radcliffe plays Maps, the eldest of four friends who live in an outback orphanage in the 1960s. They share December birthdays, and when the orphanage gets an unexpected donation, the staff decides to send them on a holiday to "a special place on the sea." They'll be heading off to Lady Star Cove, an idyllic spot whose beaches are blindingly white and laced with rock formations that are far more interesting than the movie itself. The boys are naturally excited, even though it turns out that the couple they're staying with, Bandy McAnsh (Jack Thompson) and his wife, "the Skipper" (Kris McQuade), are as religious and strict as the orphanage's nuns.

Though Radcliffe would seem to be a main draw for the film, Maps isn't terribly significant. Considering that the actor can't seem to shake the stiffness that is adequately disguised by all the bells and whistles of the Potter films, it's a blessing in disguise. His fellow December boys are just as bland, with nicknames instead of personalities. Sparks (Christian Byers) and Spit (James Fraser) hardly register at all. The clichéd narration, though, tells us that we're supposed to focus on Misty (Lee Cormie), a freckled kid with glasses who's known for crying and really, really wants to be adopted. "They say the best place to start is at the beginning," says Max Cullen, who later appears as the adult Misty. He goes on to say the trip "was like destiny."

A lot of similarly trite pronouncements follow, but you never get a firm grasp of what's going to happen or whose life is going to be altered in Lady Star Cove. And then the reason becomes clear: there's just not much of a story in this script, based on a Michael Noonan novel and written by Marc Rosenberg (whose previous film is a succubus-themed thriller from 1995 called Serpent's Lair). Instead, it's a series of loosely connected moments of forced wonder and adolescent eye-opening as the boys run around the beach during the day and sneak cigarettes at night. Director Rod Hardy isn't exactly subtle in his presentation of them: Look, a wild horse! It's keeping a Frenchwoman company as she swims topless! And there's Lucy, that sultry blond teenager who keeps staring, pillowy lips parted, at Maps!

Most of the boys' golly-gee experiences involve sneaking peaks at women, though the most exciting development during the trip is a conversation Misty overhears between the town's local daredevil, "Fearless" (Sullivan Stapleton), and a priest. Fearless admits frustration that he and his wife, the aforementioned skinnydipper, Teresa (Victoria Hill), can't have children. The minister suggests adoption. Misty's eyes light up, and the next day he's Dippity Do-ing his hair and serving the McAnshes breakfast to prove he's a catch.

There's a religious undercurrent here -– Misty's a Virgin Mary fan –- but it's often weirdly served up as a source of gentle humor, such as when Misty fantasizes about the orphanage's nuns telling him he's been adopted… and then cart-wheeling away toward the surf. Of course, no lessons would be learned if all the good stuff weren't balanced out with some bad, and the boys get tastes of death and disappointment as well. But just like its tries at whimsy fall flat, the film's serious developments are too contrived and predictable to be affecting.

Especially unfortunate are Radcliffe's big calls to emote. Although his go-to expression, gaping, may be an appropriate reaction as Maps gets to know the supremely confident Lucy (Teresa Palmer), the script doesn't do the actor any favors by asking him to yell out lines like "Stop lying!" under stupid circumstances near the film's end. As eager as Radcliffe probably is to get out of Harry's shadow, it wasn't a great career move to pick a project that completely lacks magic.

Dedication

MovieBabe — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:34:54 GMT

It's so cool how tortured we are

Justin Theroux's Dedication is aching to be an edgy Garden State. The actor's directorial debut, written by first-timer David Bromberg, premiered at Sundance and reeks of the festival's hipster-courting preciousness, telling a love story that's freighted with the angst of its protagonist and the messiness of life in general. Reality bites, and all that.

But instead of insight, Dedication offers a world in which artists don't comb their hair and a headache in one scene means a brain tumor in the next. And although you're not necessarily supposed to like the film's central character, his trials might have been worth caring about if he hadn't walked right out of a Staind song. Henry (Billy Crudup) is an obsessive-compulsive, self-loathing children's-book author who tells kids there's no Santa Claus. He's in his early 30s, but still talks about how his father screwed him up. His friendship with a much-older illustrator, Rudy (Tom Wilkinson), helps fill that void, though even Rudy refers to his partner as "a miserable shit." When Rudy dies suddenly, Henry mourns by going into full-asshole mode. Wait, he's not an asshole: He's complicated.

Or that's what we're supposed to glean when Lucy (Mandy Moore) is forced into his life. Henry's publisher (Bob Balaban, a dim highlight) hires the struggling Lucy to replace Rudy, but first she's gotta convince the writer that she's worthy – a battle that nearly makes her give up the promise of a $200,000 bonus upon completion of a Christmas project. They meet in a diner, where Henry proceeds to make up a wretched backstory about their waitress – down to the number of eggs left in her ovaries, because he's just that thorough and clever – and concludes it with, "You're much more pathetic than she is." They meet in his apartment, and Henry suggests they exchange brief bios. His includes an unending list of quirks and the quite serious declaration, "Life is pain." Hers includes a syllable or two before he basically tells her to shut the **** up.

Worse than Henry's grating character, however, is Dedication's bait-and-switch: Its invasive, too-cool soundtrack is dominated by the indie rock band Deerhoof. Its characters spout psychobabble like, "We communicate through damage." And Theroux adds flashes, static, and jitters to his camerawork to reflect Henry's jagged psyche. But at its unpleasant heart, Dedication is nothing more than a by-the-numbers romantic comedy that is sure to alienate anyone who does dig its depressive vibe. That's right, the pair fall in love, and the only thing more difficult to believe than their attraction is the story's abrupt switch to Hollywood conventions – particularly the Big Gesture, which in this case is arguably more ludicrous than you might expect from even a typical Moore movie.

As usual, though, the actress isn't nearly as bad as the scripts she chooses. Her Lucy may be mussed and kohl-eyed to a cliche, but the performance itself is relatively even and refreshingly adult. Crudup's is naturally more attention-grabbing, full of tics and mood changes that in a lesser actor's hands might seem gimmicky. But a skillful portrayal doesn't count for much when your character is too ridiculous to even hate.

Sydney White

MovieBabe — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:34:21 GMT

Amanda Bynes may not have decided to follow the Lindsay Lohan path to self-destruction, but that doesn't mean her career's in any better shape. After a rather impressive supporting turn in this summer's Hairspray, Bynes is back to clunkers like Sydney White, a spin on the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs fairy tale that posits her earnest sorority pledge as the unlikely leader of a group of male misfits one day, campus conquerer the next.

Sydney (Bynes) isn't at all like the blond, size 2 girls that flock to Kappa, but her dead mom was a sister, which should make her a sure thing. Until she dares talk to the sorority head's ex and commits enough various other no-nos to get turned down. Needing a place to stay, Sydney ends up at the Vortex, a forgotten building where approximately seven "misfits" crash. She's a queen to these guys, who aren't merely stammering nerds, they're infantile – and you're too busy wondering what the hell is wrong with these characters to feel sympathy.

Sydney White is ridden with bad dialogue, strained humor, and eye-rolling cliches, including Sydney's "perfect" love interest who is not only a quarterback, he's nice to the nerds and feeds the homeless. There's an inevitable backstabbing involved, with never any doubt as to whom will come out on top. But when Sydney gives a triumphant, "Let's hear it for the dorks!" you'll be heading for the exit instead of cheering.

I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

MovieBabe — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:47:36 GMT

By Tricia Olszewski

Cheese: The new Brussels sprouts

At one point in I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, a struggling Chicago actor named James is giving a career-day talk at an elementary school when he starts rambling. "Get this," he tells the stone-faced kids about his latest job. "It was supposed to be a funny show, but I made people cry. Isn't that silly?"

Curb Your Enthusiam's Jeff Garlin plays James – and also wrote and directed – and although he won't make you cry here, he'll probably make you yawn. Garlin's pet project with the unwieldy title feels terribly familiar, with its chatter about minutiae and throwback, accordion-heavy soundtrack making it seem like a Curb episode directed by Woody Allen. But instead of neuroses that are black-tinged and deep-seated, most of Cheese's navel-gazing is genial to the point of being childlike. "Where'd the term 'dealership' come from?" James asks a receptionist when the reality show he hosts plays a joke on a mechanic. "What about tent sales? What is it about tents that make people want to buy cars?" With each scene change, you can picture Garlin cut-and-pasting riffs he's written over the years to form some semblance of a story. Occasionally they're amusing; mostly, though, it's like hanging out with someone who tediously must express every thought that comes to mind. Or a toddler who just learned how to ask questions.

Then again, perhaps that's fitting considering that the 39-year-old James still lives with mother. The two other things that are important to know about James is that he's fat and looking for love. (If watching the plus-size actor in every scene isn't enough to remind you about his weight, someone mentions it at what feels like five-minute intervals.) He seems to find love but not a solution to his dieting problems when he meets Beth (Sarah Silverman), a "hot girl" who gives James her practice sundae when she's watching her sister's ice-cream shop – and soon, uh, asks him to go underwear-shopping with her. (He's as incredulous as we are.)

Silverman is initially a bright spot in this exceedingly loose film, but her character is impossible to like. The same can be said of the majority of the well-connected Garlin's guest stars: Second City alumni such as Bonnie Hunt, Amy Sedaris, and Dan Castellanata show up, though their main direction was apparently to act weird so Garlin can scrunch his eyebrows together at them.

James does little but meander from rejection to rejection throughout the film. He's dumped personally, he's dumped professionally. None of these turns are given much explanation, despite the fact that, clocking in at a meager 80 minutes, the script had plenty of room for some. Every time someone tells James what a loser he is, though, he never raises more than an affable fuss over it, which makes the character's problems feel all the more contrived. Hearing about a remake of Marty for the Tiger Beat generation, in fact, seems to upset James more than the idea that his life is tanking. This sub-sub-plot at least leads to Cheese's funniest scene – which involves a secondslong upstaging by teen pop star Aaron Carter. Now that's silly.

The Brave One

MovieBabe — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:46:30 GMT

By Tricia Olszewski

Damsel no longer in distress

Erica Bain "walks the streets" of New York City and relates eloquent meditations about what she observes on her popular radio show. She loves her job, but resists when she finds out that a television station is courting her. "I'm not a face, I'm just a voice," Erica insists to her boss. More than her job, though, the storyteller loves her town, and seems deliriously happy to spend that evening with her fiance and dog at the park. Then they're assaulted, and her boyfriend is killed. Suddenly, New York doesn't seem so shiny. So Erica's new companion becomes a gun.

Neil Jordan's The Brave One is consistently and profoundly unsettling – and not just because it brings Charles Bronson to mind. But star Jodie Foster hasn't undone a career's worth of choosing smart if similarly themed female-in-peril roles to make Death Wish VI: A Woman Scorned, even this movie's plot is remarkably similar to the 1974 Bronson vehicle that kicked off a bloodthirsty franchise. (See James Wan's just-released, critically thrashed Death Sentence to get a rehashing of the story that more properly translates the series' spirit for today's zeitgeist.)

Foster's Erica is angry, yes, but she's frightened first. After awaking from a three-week coma to the news that David (Naveen Andrews) is dead, Erica returns to their apartment, still messy with life, and holes up to mourn. When it's time to reconnect with the world, Erica obviously has to not only overcome her grief, but the anxiety that inevitably envelops a crime victim. Jordan highlights this terror, if a little too dramatically: As Erica makes her way down her building's dark hallway, light harshly gleams in through the door and quietly menacing music plays. It's a scene more appropriate for a slasher film, but it's a forgivable indulgence.

Erica admits to her audience that fear is something that's foreign to her, a chosen state of being she formerly associated with "weaker" people. She knows that she's changed and refers to the "stranger" within. But one thing about her remains constant: Erica's still just a voice, not a face – and keeping the latter anonymous is now more important than ever. After being unnerved by situations as innocuous as a skateboarder passing her by on her first day out, Erica buys an unregistered gun. One presumes it's just for protection. And when she later witnesses a murder in a convenience store and shoots wildly at the gunman when he comes after her, Erica is suitably horrified. The next time there's a danger, though, she decides to kill again, later wrestling with the fact that revealing her weapon would have probably been enough to save her. She's not comfortable with what she's doing, but she doesn't stop.

Foster is unsurprisingly terrific as Erica, projecting her usual toughness while physically looking like a stiff breeze could snap her in half. She knows that feeling shocked doesn't mean turning frozen. Best, she never lets Erica get smug, even as the media's screaming about the vigilante they're sure is a man or as she befriends the detective investigating the case (Terrence Howard, smoothly proving that indignation can be righteous without being arrogant). As Erica finds herself increasingly mired, Foster's expression is tense but about to crumble, with tears always threatening but rarely unleashed.

Of course, The Brave One wouldn't really work if Erica didn't turn into a magnet for crime, but the parade of coincidences that accompany the character's development is a minor script weakness. More impressive is the film's ability to wring your gut. Its violence is pervasive and all the more sickening due to its presence in many forms: It can be graphic, like Erica and David's vicious attack, which included her being slammed against a concrete wall. (The assailants videotape it, a recording that finds its way back to Erica; she also has audio of confrontations that took place while she was out taping ambient sounds for work.) More often, though, violence is implied or impending: A subplot involving a girl and the stepfather who allegedly murdered her mother is heartbreaking, and each time Erica suddenly finds herself vulnerable is another occasion to hold your breath regardless of the fact that she's packing.

The story's revenge factor is undeniable, but Jordan never plays any of Erica's murders for a thrill. Her actions are the desperate grasps of a traumatized person trying to regain a sense of control. She's surprised by them, is never at peace with them, and she eventually comes to the realization that they're destroying instead of rescuing her. Still, The Brave One is likely to get a raucous response whenever a bad guy goes down. You may be disturbed by this, or you may be one of those cheering. Either way, this movie will make you react.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters - Balls of Fury

MovieBabe — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 18:21:00 GMT

By Tricia Olszewski

It’s a little hard at first to believe Billy Mitchell, the subject of the documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It’s not because the Florida restaurateur and hot-sauce shill, now in his early 40s, was once crowned “Gamer of the Century” after setting records on a number of classic video-arcade games—most notably Donkey Kong, on which he recorded a seemingly unbreakable high score of 874,300 in 1982. Nor is it because he’s still proud of those achievements and was happy to talk about the good ol’ days with Seth Gordon, the film’s director.

Rather, what’s difficult to believe is that the character of Billy Mitchell you see onscreen actually exists. Now that reality shows and mockumentaries have hardened us to the truthiness that’s out there, your natural reaction to Mitchell may be that the dude’s been coached. The hair: long but tidy and businessman-slick, accompanied by a trimmed full beard. The clothes: skinny black pants, dark shirts, and patriotic ties for a monochrome look that says “I love the ’80s.” And, finally, the attitude, which involves not only referring to himself in the third person but announcing things like, “No matter what I say, it draws controversy. Sort of like the abortion issue.” Come on.

But Mitchell persistently uses that same self-important tone whether he’s talking about the “absolute brutality” of Donkey Kong or going on about what it takes to be a winner in life and, well, it would have taken some serious craftiness on the filmmakers’ part to fashion a person who wasn’t an inherent ass into the Mitchell you meet. The King of Kong also isn’t a nostalgia trip but an update. Mitchell had been sitting pretty on his record for more than two decades when a challenger emerged in 2003. Steve Wiebe, a 35-year-old father of two, had just been laid off from what he expected would be a lifelong job at Boeing (his father had worked there) when he discovered that he was pretty good at Donkey Kong. Desperate for a purpose, he looked into the game’s best score and decided to try to beat it on his home machine. Fate was not on his side: As the film shows, Wiebe was always the frustrated-but-amiable loser, gifted in sports and music but never quite able to become the No. 1 anything. He even lost his job the same day that he and his wife bought their first house.

The nerds went wild over the competition anyway. The nerve center of the gaming world is Twin Galaxies, an organization with “referees” who police the virtual world by recording game statistics and player rankings as well as creating codes of conduct. Its founder, a slightly weird and vaguely bummish man named Walter Day, is tickled by the unexpected rivalry, as are the assortment of eccentric characters—mainly refs and other record-holders—included here, most of whom pretty much admit that they’ve got nothing else going on in their lives. Again, the high degree of geekdom that Gordon presents knocks you off-balance a bit: Is this meant to be merely a let’s-laugh-at-the-freaks project, a real-life Napoleon Dynamite?

Mercifully, the answer is no. The King of Kong genuinely unfolds into a classic and very funny underdog story, yet because of the bizarre subject matter—and bizarre subjects—it never feels clichéd. Better yet, Gordon makes you understand that the competition really isn’t a joke to these guys: Wiebe submits a tape that shows him beating Mitchell’s record (and in which Wiebe’s young son repeatedly and hilariously demands, “Wipe my butt! Stop playing Dooooonkey Koooooong!”), but when his score is disqualified by Twin Galaxies, he twice travels to compete in person at a sanctioned machine. (Yes, there’s a conspiracy, and it’s strangely compelling.) But Mitchell, even after sneering about how setting a world record at home doesn’t mean a thing, well, let’s just say that the talent he shows off best here is running his mouth. The players’ motivations, and therefore their humanity, eventually trump their initial caricatures as it becomes clear that neither of them want to hold the world record just because. As with any other sports film, there’s tension and snarkiness and thrills and even, unfortunately, tears, although this bit of melodrama is kept to a flash. “It’s not even about Donkey Kong anymore,” Wiebe says as the competition is about to boil over. And you believe him.

Balls of Fury has nearly all the elements that make The King of Kong a success—a nerdy pseudo-sport, characters that can politely be described as eccentric, an obsession with the ’80s—yet the music to Donkey Kong will stick in your head longer than this disaster. Born of Reno 911! creators and stars Robert Ben Garant (writer-director) and Thomas Lennon (writer-co-star), Balls of Fury barely even counts as a one-joke movie, considering that the sloppy former table-tennis champion who serves as its main sight gag isn’t very funny.

Cringingly unsuccessful Jack Black wannabe Dan Fogler is Randy Daytona, a one-time Ping-Pong prodigy whose defeat in the 1988 Olympics resulted in his gambling father’s death. Nineteen years later, Randy is still digging Def Leppard and headbands but no longer competes, instead eking an existence out of performing Ping-Pong-related stunts at a dinner theater favored by the elderly. One day, an FBI agent (George Lopez) enlists his help in catching Feng (Christopher Walken), some kind of criminal table-tennis overlord who killed Randy’s father. In order to get close to Feng, Randy needs to be invited to his underground competition, which means receiving training at the hands of a blind Chinese man (James Hong) and his lithe-but-fierce niece (Maggie Q).

If you’re waiting to read about the funny parts, you just did. Garant and Lennon bring a vague sense of Reno 911! silliness to Balls of Fury, but set against the series’ best episodes, it feels like the first draft from a couple of guys who drunkenly slurred “Let’s make a movie!” after stumbling home from karaoke night. How else could they defend what feels like dozens of jokes about prostitutes? And a love interest—poor Maggie Q—who literally hates Randy in one go-nowhere scene and is kissing him in the next? And here’s an easy game: Guess what’s coming when the FBI guys say that a communication device needs to travel with Randy “the old-fashioned way.” Gas, groin kicks, and a random pet panda—ha ha, it’s dead!—are also dragged out for so-called laughs.

Fogler, all hair, chub, and unfunny mugging, is as unpleasant as the attempts at humor are exhausting. Even Walken can’t redeem a minute of this mess, though his contribution might have been a little amusing had the trailers not given it away. Allow me to throw one of Balls of Fury’s lines right back at it, courtesy of Randy’s boss when he gets fired: “Get your stink out of my theater.”