Darkon
An intimate and exuberant subculture
You know those guys who re-enact Civil War battles in full military regalia with realistic replicas of 1860s weapons? Geeky, right? And you know those guys who spend hours in their parents' basements playing Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing fantasy games? Total nerds.
Well, what if you combined those two groups? You'd have Darkon, a role-playing fantasy game in which the participants actually dress up as wizards and warriors and engage in mock battles with homemade medieval weaponry.
These guys (and, yes, a few girls) are the subject of "Darkon," a documentary that peers casually into the inner workings of the game and lets us laugh at -- er, with? -- the participants. Directors Andrew Neel and Luke Meyer spent several months with the players in the Baltimore area, and while the resulting footage is highly entertaining, I can't shake the feeling that Neel and Meyer are staging a freak show. But the subjects seem happy with the film -- one of them was lumbering around the South by Southwest Film Festival in his body armor to promote it -- so what do I care?
We open with some hilariously cheesy fantasy mumbo-jumbo ("It was a time of unrest in the realm of Darkon," and so forth) and soon meet the major players. Skip Lipman, a friendly bear of a man, leads the nation of Laconia under the name Bannor. Laconia is a small, peaceful land that has grown frustrated with the imperialistic superpower called Mordom, led by Keldar (whose real name is Kenyon Wells), and Keldar and Bannor frequently engage in heated discussions over the future of their countries.
Everyone has a great time in Darkon, and as the film shows them off the playing field ("out of character," as they put it), we see that they participate in Darkon for the reasons you'd expect. Real life offers very few chances to be a hero; some of the guys aren't successful socially or professionally; Darkon is a chance to explore sides of yourself that otherwise would go untapped; etc.
The best documentaries of this genre (i.e., Unusual People Who Do Unusual Things) humanize their subjects so well that we come to identify with them and realize how much we have in common. "Darkon" doesn't do that. It has a lot of good-natured fun with the players, but it keeps everything on a fairly superficial level. Someone who thinks a Darkon participant would have to be a hopeless loser isn't liable to think any differently after watching the film. On the other hand, someone who's into this sort of thing is bound to think: Awesome! Now there's a league I can join! (E. Snider, EricDSnider.com)
Darkon
Sun October 21, 2007, 7:00 only, The Film Studies Theater in ATLAS 102
USA, 2006, English, Color, 89 min, Unrated, DV-Cam (1.66:1) • official site
Tickets
10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission.
$7 w/UCB student ID,
$7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.
Parking
Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the
Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters
along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.
RTD Bus
Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus
International Film Series
(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.
First Person Cinema
(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.
C.U. Film Program
(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil
Grillo.
Celebrating Stan
Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.
C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts
Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.