James Rolfe & Kevin Finn | Angry Independent Movie Nerds

Movies are starting to look more like video games…and the cut scenes in video games look like the action scenes in movies.

 

 

The day before my phone interview with James Rolfe and Kevin Finn, the writer/directors of the new feature film Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, the online code to screen the movie wasn’t working. After some futzing around trying to get it to work, I went into a rage alone in my bedroom, stomping around and cussing a stream of obscenities that would make a Tourette’s patient blush. Then came the realization that my generation’s tendency to be short-tempered with minor obstacles might be why the Angry Video Game Nerd came to be so popular in the first place.

If you don’t know, the AVGN is a character played by Rolfe, who has 10 years and upward of 100 videos behind him. His greatest following comes from YouTube, where his channel, Cinemassacre, has over 1.5 million subscribers. In these videos, the AVGN plays a retro game and basically reviews it, but these reviews lean toward negative reviews of crappy games, or at least the dwelling on of questionable aspects of otherwise good games. There’s lots of angry mugging and Wesley Willis–like creative obscenity.

And now the Nerd has a movie, still starring Rolfe and produced by Sean Keegan’s Skinny Ugly Pilgrim, which is coming off of a run of sold-out screenings around the country (including one in St. Louis at the Tivoli a few weeks ago) and hitting VOD today.

But wait—a movie made by a YouTube celebrity? That sounds horrible. As it happens, though, both Rolfe and Finn have film degrees from their college days, and lots of experience in all the videos they’ve already made. “I’m not sure how many people started with YouTube,” says Rolfe. “Nowadays, younger people have YouTube available to them, but back then there wasn’t any such thing, or any way to upload videos on the internet, so we were making movies, and just showing our friends and stuff. We basically had a lot of practice before YouTube came out.”

“James and I were making films together through the ’90s and into college; we actually went to the same art school in Philedelphia,” says Finn, who has known Rolfe since high school. “Anyone that was working on the set that we built were professionals, and we really lucked out by getting a lot of superstars like Bear McCreary,” the film’s composer, who is known for his work on stuff like Battlestar Galactica and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Another superstar you might recognize in the film is Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, who not only makes a cameo here, but also did in an AVGN short where he reviewed The Toxic Crusaders games for the Nintendo, Genesis, and Game Boy. Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie seems to aspire to a Troma-like level of intentional unprofessionalism (though no one can do it like Uncle Lloyd can), so it comes as no surprise that Kaufman is an influence. “One of my biggest encouragements, I think, is I read his book [All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned From the Toxic Avenger] when I was in college; that’s when I first started becoming aware of Troma,” Rolfe enthuses. “It’s such a fun book and it’s so inspiring, but it’s also very self-deprecating.” [Side note: The co-writer on All I Need to Know is the Guardians of the Galaxy helmer and native St. Louisan James Gunn, and I wholeheartedly agree with Rolfe about the book’s greatness.]

AVGN: The Movie is a pretty traditionally structured narrative film, as opposed to the review-based shorts on which the character became famous. Some of these shorts are over a half-hour long anyway, so it wouldn’t have seemed unreasonable to make a feature-length equivalent to the types of videos in the series. Instead, the filmmakers formulate a plot for the film, which concerns the Nerd trying to debunk the myth of all of the Atari E.T. games that were supposedly dumped in a New Mexico landfill. While the movie contains one review of the type for which the Nerd is known, most of the video game connection in the movie is in the form of homage, rather than direct address. So why did they decide to go the narrative route, instead of their old bread-and-butter reviews? Finn: “A marathon AVGN movie would be a little boring.” Well, that settles that, then.

For quite a while now, there’s been a debate in the entertainment industry as to whether or not video games count as art. For example, Roger Ebert was fairly outspoken on this issue, taking the stance that video games are not, in fact, art. As for me, I’ve been of the opinion that video games are art, but the vast majority of them are bad art, and the medium as a whole could benefit greatly from the influence of, say, movies. As it happens, though, the past 15 or so years has seen movies become more influenced by video games, and not the other way around. Finn and Rolfe are in a unique position to weigh in on this question, given that Rolfe has made his career on being a video game critic; also, now they’ve also made a movie, and of course are toting around those film degrees. So, are video games art? Rolfe: “I almost feel like they’re going to become the same exact thing eventually, because movies are starting to look more like video games…and the cut scenes in video games look like the action scenes in movies nowadays, and at a certain point I feel like the two mediums are just combining.” Finn: “I think the lines are completely blurred; any time there is new art, people are going to say it’s not art. I think that’s a signposting of the fact that it’s something brand new, and that people just don’t understand or recognize yet.” As Rolfe says in closing, “The one thing that I do know is that Tiger Electronics wrist games aren’t art.” | Pete Timmermann