This originally appeared as part of Zoom In Online's weekly "I'd Really Like to See..." blog series on March 26, 2009.
Documentaries often have a stigma for being dry and boring. Although reality programs pass themselves off as a form of the documentary medium, they’re overly stylized, mostly scripted and forged to bring more entertainment value to the piece. Unfortunately, this often prevents people from giving docs a chance to open them up to worlds, often quirky, unbeknownst to them.
My personal favorite documentary is one that completely shatters these stereotypes of documentaries. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters peers into the world of competitive Donkey Kong. While the concept seems silly and does not seem like a compelling subject for a documentary - there is, after all, a whole world ripe with socially, politically, emotionally relevant topics waiting to be discovered - the characters and their interactions turn out to be absolutely riveting.
