I'm sure true appreciators of documentaries are irritated by this trend, but as someone who doesn't enjoy being bummed out for 90 minutes with depressing "messages," I'm all for the trend of documentaries that focus on the peculiar passions and infatuations of mundane or otherwise insignificant people. Spellbound, Wordplay, Scrabylon, and maybe most obviously, The King of Kong were all pretty fascinating to me, so it's of little surprise that I'm pretty intrigued by Ian Cofino's documentary about the people whose lives revolve around hardcore competitive fighting games, I Got Next.
What started as a short-form documentary senior project for Mr. Cofino has since turned into a feature-length documentary, though it looks more interesting than you typical student film. The focus of the documentary appears to be on the upper echelons of the professional US fighting game scene and the East Coast/West Coast rivalry that exists within it. He gets access to a number of the top players, most prominently Ryan "Gootecks" Gutierrez, and while I can't say I get much from the talking-head bits in the trailer, the combination of The Go! Team and rooms packed full of dudes ABSOLUTELY FLIPPING OUT over video games is enough to get me excited.
So how can you see I Got Next? Well, the film already had an online "premiere" on UFragTV earlier this week, though if you missed that, you'll be able to download it straight from the official I Got Next website in the near future.