The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters
Opens Friday at the Cedar-Lee Theatre

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters' amusing narrative, often laugh-out-loud fun if a bit thin over the long haul, portrays a rivalry every bit as epic as Schwarzenegger vs. Ferrigno. The film traces the history of competitive video gaming to a 1982 Life photo spread that gathered all the adolescent masters in Galaga, Defender, Centipede, Frogger, Pac Man, etc. (kind of like Art Kane's immortal 1958 Esquire mass portrait of every jazzman in NYC), then follows them up today. A certain Walter Day - whose bearded, beady stare and intensity reminds you of Tobin Bell from Saw and assorted other B-movie psychos - has since founded Twin Galaxies, a Guinness-recognized organization keeping track of high scorers worldwide on the great old arcade-game consoles.

Another kid pictured, Billy Mitchell, continues to style himself today as the master of Donkey Kong. With his long, slicked-back hair, sartorial splendor, buxom wife and high-profile chicken BBQ sauce and restaurant, Mitchell exudes Gordon Gekko ruthlessness and arrogance, keyed to his all-time record score of 874,000 points in making that little low-rez Mario character leap over barrels and fireballs to save the princess from the giant gorilla. Walter Day compares him to a Jedi. But wait! Steve Wiebe, a doughy, mildly sadsack of a husband and father, emerges from Washington state to challenge Mitchell's lordly dominance, with videotaped evidence of a game on his personal Donkey Kong console racking up a higher score. This makes news even outside the esoteric twingalaxies.com readership. The laid-off Wiebe is a hero. Briefly. Closer scrutiny into the integrity of his game console casts a shadow on Steve's Donkey Kong score. Turns out there's an underground of men who would stop at nothing to quash Billy Mitchell, and they might have deviously set up poor Wiebe as a false champion. The humble, unassertive Steve journeys to a tournament to prove himself in open play, before witnesses - and potentially face a showdown with the haughty Mitchell - while the soundtrack plays the '80s kitsch fanfare music from The Karate Kid.

Billy Mitchell here is so over the top (think Ben Stiller in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story), the cameras always in position to get reaction shots and both sides of phone conversations, that it's hard not to think King of Kong, like Steve Wiebe's game console, wasn't partially finagled. Still, it's generally more entertaining than most scripted comedies out there, and filmmaker Seth Gordon's examining the Byzantine layers of intrigue and back-stabbing in the upper echelons of Missile Command is a scream. A somewhat weak ending (but you are strongly advised to sit out the closing credits), ironically, is the narrative's strongest claim to verisimilitude. Still, in the recent microgenre of unlikely sports documentaries, I'd still give the high score instead to Word Wars, the one about the professional Scrabble champs. But this will assure some viewers (you know who you are) that days of your lives spent on Robotron were, in some weird way, not in vain.

- Charles Cassady Jr.

Anger Me ***

Anger Me begins with Jonas Mekas giving a character reference for mythic avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger: he's really a nice guy. As if viewers must be reassured, before a feature-length klatsch with the Aleister Crowley-fixated, oft-censored cinematic iconographer of eroticized sailors, bikers and the sexually licentious, author of the scabrous Hollywood Babylon (an acid-etched scandal-as-art book), artistic collaborator with Manson Family associate Bobby Beausoleil, and worst of all a Former Child Actor. Assured that Kenneth Anger won't use his occult magick mojo to rip through the screen and rape you as a sacrifice to Baal or Cthulu. And, looking well preserved at 80, he does seem like a nice guy. Of course, he does all the talking, with no other viewpoints in this Look-Back-With-Anger docu-portrait. Anger Me tells how the scion of a conservative SoCal family became a lifelong enfant terrible film "poet." With a career ride like that, you do wish additional voices had been heard.

Even in cagey authorized-bio shape, it's pretty informative anger management. Santa Monica-born Anger took up 16mm filmmaking at a young age, though his own roll-call of projects prior to his 1947 breakthrough Fireworks is not listed. Shot in 72 hours at his family home on a budget that did not allow for retakes, Fireworks depicted a youth (played by Anger) roughed up homoerotically by a gang of sailors. With the famous image (digitally enhanced here) of a sparking Roman candle where a penis would be, Fireworks made a fan of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, but not out of the old Navy man who ran the film processing lab, who nearly set the FBI on Anger. Anger went to Europe, working at the legendary Cinematheque in Paris, dealing with Henri Langlois, Jean Cocteau, Francois Truffaut, Anais Nin, Fellini, Jagger and Genet. He regrets arriving there too late to meet deceased devil-worshipper Crowley, whose pagan pansexuality and ritual pageantry has obsessed Anger ever since, feeding into Lucifer Rising, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and others. He eventually moved to San Francisco, where his Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos riffed on imagery of motor vehicles, mysticism, sex and death (Scorpio Rising caught a bike fatality on camera). Today, Anger gets dubiously credited as the inventor of the music video, even though he doesn't seem comfortable with that mantle and music-rights clearance apparently wasn't available to the documentarians. - CC

Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall
At 7 p.m. Friday, September 21 and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, September 23

In the Valley of Elah ***

This somber drama was written and directed by Paul Haggis, whose Crash, an emotionally intense exploration of racism, was a surprise Academy Award winner. Like Crash, Elah is a message movie, but its antiwar theme gets buried beneath a conventional police procedural. Based on the 2003 murder near Fort Benning, Georgia, of Richard Davis, a soldier just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, the movie follows the efforts of the soldier's dad (Tommy Lee Jones) to find out what happened to his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), who's been reported as AWOL. Jones, his face a deeply etched relief map of concern, is Hank Deerfield, a demanding career Army officer whose rigid patriotism is shaken by what he learns - through his investigations and video clips downloaded from his son's cell phone - about Mike's experiences in Iraq.

Elements of the story are ripped from today's headlines: accounts by soldiers of the brutal treatment of Iraqi civilians factor into the story, albeit rather murkily. Haggis clearly wants to say something about war and how it changes those who fight, but the story focuses almost entirely on Hank, who inserts himself into the investigation alongside embattled police detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron, in unglamorous mode). The ambiguity of the real-life murder makes it difficult for Haggis to connect the dots; it isn't clear how the soldier's fate is related to the war in Iraq. Even so, the movie is absorbing; Jones' acting is superb, and the atmospherics are effective - you get a palpable sense of the banality of life around an American army base, with its strip joints, greasy-spoon restaurants, gun shops and casual violence. Susan Sarandon, who plays Deerfield's wife, has a couple of powerful scenes, but like many military wives, one suspects, is mostly relegated to the background. - Pamela Zoslov

Opens Friday areawide

Sydney White ***

This college-campus comedy, directed by Joe Nussbaum, was conceived as a modern Snow White; it was originally titled Sydney White and the Seven Dorks. It also recycles the themes of more comedies than you can count: Animal House (outlaw fraternity causes mayhem); Revenge of the Nerds (persecuted outcasts prevail over cool students); Legally Blonde (sorority consisting exclusively of spoiled blondes); Election (ruthless girl will do anything to win a student-council race); and so on. Still, the movie has a winsome charm of its own, owing in no small part to Amanda Bynes, who is likeable as Sydney, a spunky plumber's daughter who earns a scholarship to her late mom's alma mater, a generic Florida university where Greek culture reigns. Her nemesis is Rachel (Sara Paxton), the pretty, pampered president of the all-blonde sorority Kappa Phi Nu, where Sydney is a "legacy," despite her non-blondeness and blue-collar roots. Sydney earns Rachel's wrath by sparking the interest of her sometime boyfriend, handsome frat boy Tyler (Matt Long).

When Rachel humiliates Sydney and ejects her from the sorority, the beleaguered freshman moves into the Vortex, a dangerously dilapidated house where seven campus outcasts live. (Is there no housing office at this school?) Sydney's dorky housemates live for video games, comic books, fantasy and sci-fi, and don't know what to do with a girl in their midst. Sydney becomes their beloved Snow White, helping them become more socially acceptable and organizing them into a political party to challenge Rachel's bid to become student council president. In the campaign, Sydney enlists the help of every outcast group on campus (what are those Hasidic Jews doing there?) and raises the level of tolerance everywhere. The college doesn't resemble anything seen in real life, but this is, after all, a fairy tale aimed at younger audiences - who, judging from the peals of girlish laughter heard at a recent screening, are likely to enjoy it. - PZ

Opens Friday areawide