Disclaimer: if it has “James Rolfe” or “AVGN” on it, I am there, wearing the t-shirt. Say what you will about his writing and acting skills, the concept he had (a foul-mouthed nerd plays and critiques “shitty games that suck ass”) made him one of the original Youtube viral successes, and he never had to lip-sync an embarrassing europop song to do it.

That said, here comes the pain.

What can I say about the long-awaited AVGN movie? It isn’t funny. It consumed a quarter of a million dollars, several years of James’ life, and deprived us of countless AVGN episodes…and I sat in my seat, waiting nearly two hours for it to get good. I laughed about three times. Mostly because the movie was trying so damn hard that I didn’t want to hurt its feelings. It uses the “two people sound like they’re having sex but they’re actually doing something different” gag. That’s the kind of screenplay-level desperation we’re dealing with here.

The concept behind the movie is the notoriously bad Extra-Terrestrial videogame for the Atari 2600 (which killed the early videogame industry, was mass-buried in landfill, blah blah, everyone knows the story). Remember how it became a running joke that James would refuse to review that game? Well, he’s finally doing it. But why the chickenshit renaming of “ET” to a fictionalised game called “Eee-Tee”? It’s not as if isn’t selling DVDs full of copyrighted game footage already.

The film’s surprisingly talky and elaborate for a character normally associated with scatological profanity and temper tantrums. Soon we learn about government conspiracies and Area 51 and alien baddies. Is there a need for this stuff? We just want to see James doing his thing: ripping on shitty games. Instead we’ve got him uncomfortably acting out weird, not especially funny scenarios with a cast of characters we don’t care much about.

The problem isn’t the small budget – Blair Witch was made for less. The problem is James: and his comedic limitations. Here’s the harsh truth: he isn’t a jack of all trades, able to sing and dance and conjugate sixteen versions of “shitwaffle”. He lucked his way into a format that he was well-suited for (10-20 minute web shorts)…but that’s pretty much where his talents end. I have no desire to see him in full-length movies with actual storylines. And the moments in his AVGN videos that get high-flown and pretentious (the R.O.B. video, anyone?) are the precise moments when I set Youtube’s playback to 2x speed.

The movie winds to its conclusion, and we get to the high point: the review of ET…Or “Eee-Tee”, I guess. It’s kind of quiet and dispirited, low on rage and profanity, but it’s the best part of the movie, because it’s honest. James comes to the realisation that ET isn’t the worst game ever made, and that the problem is with us, and how we manage our expectations. One feels justified in thinking he might be talking about the movie, too – how some people expect the moon on a fucking stick, when sometimes you have to enjoy something for what it is.

That’s what I think he’s saying, anyway. But I took a different lesson from it: know your limits. James is a great web comedian. But he’s never going to be a movie star, and this movie writes “QED” on that statement with permanent ink.

I like this. It’s frequently funny, and has some good acting. It’s flaws are the “good” kind of flaws, in that they are thought provoking more than irritating.

The movie consists of various Tucker Max stories merged into a single plot. If you’ve never read Tucker Max, imagine Hunter S Thompson minus all that tiresome journalism crap. A typical Tucker Max story involves him getting drunk, variously charming and insulting people, and otherwise avoiding his inner emotional issues. His stories aren’t great literature – they’re frequently much better.

The movie revolves around three characters: Tucker, Drew (based on SlingBlade) and Dan (a composite of various Tucker Max friends), who go to a stripclub in Salem, lying to Dan’s fiancee in the process. Then begins a series of tragic misadventures where Tucker learns valuable lessons about how to…well, see for yourself. I’ll say this: the film avoids the classic ending where Tucker Max renounces his crazy ways and learns to be a nice guy. It does something more subversive and clever, while still allowing hope for the character.

The acting’s great. Matt Czuchry’s Tucker almost bounces with a likable energy – which he needs, because his role requires him to do very unlikeable stuff. The SlingBlade character is a misanthropic Napoleon Dynamite who sells every line of dialogue like he’s earning a commission. The interesting part of the movie isn’t the story, it’s the energy generated by the three male leads. IHTSBIH makes me feel the same way I feel about South Park – I don’t care much for its supposedly brilliant satire and social commentary, I just like seeing the four kids fooling around.

Unfortunately, the movie has issues. To be fair, so does Tucker Max, and those issues make him attractive to women. Doesn’t really work here, though. This movie’s issues don’t entice me towards buying it a drink, unless it’s a drink of acetone.

A lot of the lighting is pretty terrible. SOME scenes look good (like ones in the school). Others (such as the opening scene) look like they were shot by college kids on a rented Arri. How’d they fuck it up this badly?

But the main problem is the writing.

The dialogue doesn’t sound like something a person would say. It all sounds “written”. The road trip is a good example. SlingBlade gets hungry and goes on a monologue about the wonders of an American fast food chain (“…if you EVER speak ill of the Pancakewich again I will personally force-feed you one while I fuck you in the butt using the wrapper as a condom and then donkey punch you when the infused syrup nuggets explode in your mouth!”). Tucker Max fans will recognize this rant as a word-for-word recreation of a post the real-life Slingblade left on the Tucker Max Message Board. It’s funny in written form, but having an actor deliver it via monologue just sucks all the life from it. People don’t talk like that.

At one stage, Slingblade says Tucker will probably get AIDS, to which he replies “it’s basically curable. It doesn’t even show up in Magic Johnson’s blood any more.” Slingblade skips a beat and replies “so you’re saying Magic Johnson’s black…and has AIDS…and has it better than me?” …but Tucker didn’t say that. The quip wasn’t set up.

This movie made basically no money, which is a shame. At least Tucker stuck to his guns and retained creative control. I recall him saying in an interview that he would never give it to a Hollywood flack to make, because “there’s no chance he would do anything except fuck it up”. So instead, he kind of fucked it up himself. But would anything else be the Tucker Max way?

In one of his books Neil Strauss says something about male psychology. You can take literally any task in the world, give it grades, rankings, and scores, and men will become obsessed with it. What’s the point of martial arts? To learn how to defend yourself? Probably. Most of the guys at your local McDojo are there to attain a higher belt level.

Donkey Kong is an arcade game released in 1981. It runs on a 3MHz CPU, a 224×256 resolution, and the game mostly involves dodging barrels thrown by a gorilla. But because there’s a world record at stake, grown men play it obsessively.

This documentary covers the war to set the top score in Donkey Kong. For many years, the highest score was held by a hot sauce entrepreneur called Billy Mitchell. Then, in 2007, an unemployed schlub called Steve Wiebe set a new record, causing a scandal in the community.

I mistrust King of Kong as a documentary. Its events seems too perfect, too movie-like, too different to real life. But it’s interesting. Lots of battling egos. I liked the way it captures the exhaustion of extended gaming marathons, with the players’ brains grinding themselves to mush. It’s not barrels or fireballs that kill the players at this level, it’s their own fatiguing mental circuits.

Wheels spin within wheels. How do you verify a high score in a videogame? Is a videotape enough, or do you need to perform it live at a “meet”? Is it possible that Steve Wiebe is playing on a “fixed” board that makes it easier to score? Is he being shafted by Twin Galaxies, the organisation that verifies videogame scores?

This movie could cause a psychoanalyst to start climbing the walls. Billy Mitchell in particular seems to have missed his true calling as a cult leader. He’s creepy, charismatic. He doesn’t speak, he asserts. Steve Wiebe seems much more down to earth, but his obsession with the game is only slightly less odd. There’s other memorable characters, like Walter Day, the incongruous head of Twin Galaxies, and Brian Kuh, a weird yes-man in Billy Mitchell’s corner. He doesn’t seem like a guy who has ever spoken to a girl, although he might not be a virgin if you take my meaning.

Probably the most bizarre person in this movie is Roy Schilt, “Captain Awesome”, who talks about his world record in Missile Command like it’s the Pulitzer Prize, and wonders why he hasn’t appeared on any TV shows yet.

And it does seem like a peculiarly male obsession. What’s one of the most popular games among women? The Sims, which has no goals, no scores, no competition. You win when you decide you’ve won. But men seem to need an element of contest in their games. Put them in suburban homes, put them in suits, give them haircuts (a poor one, in Billy’s case), and it doesn’t matter. Only the dead have seen the end of war.