I Praise You: Darkon

Hail Laconia! Hail Tharros, betches!

I write to you in praise of Darkon, which I rented and returned overdue in my ongoing attempt to watch random movies at sporadic intervals and inform the public.

I remembered Darkon from South by Southwest 2006, when it won the audience award, probably because it has lots of artsy tilted verité battle sequences and broad-spectrum nerd appeal: it's not ironic, but it's detached enough from its milieu to be safe for indie kids; meanwhile, it's sincere enough to be meaningful to medieval fantasy wargamers, who are after all its topic. So of course I couldn't get over to see it, and I had to rent it last week, which puts me about two years behind everybody else as usual.

After the jump: Clash of the Nerds! Enchanted broccoli!

I am not a gamer, except at the behest of my six-year-old, who has bestowed upon me a persona called Superhero Trash Girl. But Darkon lays out how working in a supermarket Starbucks and being afraid to talk to girls could make a person want to dress up in muzzily Tolkiensque armor and with padded sticks beat the stuffing out of retail managers and white-collar flunkies on a weekend in the woods. And if you win, you get a bigger piece of the imaginary territory on a made-up map! And you can call part of it the Enchanted Broccoli Forest if you want to because you won!

Of course there's documentary gold to be mined. There's an underdog--the impossibly named Skip Lipman, a stay-at-home-dad who moonlights as Bannor of Laconia. His enemy is Keldar of Mordom, a floppy-haired guy who's kind of a smarmy corporate executive in real life. Keldar is an imperialist swine. Can he be stopped? Perhaps with the help of the so-called Dark Elves, who wear blackface and chain mail?
There's probably a little too much kewl action and not enough of the people, especially the supporting players. (One guy plays Darkon to unwind, in a sense, from the Iraq war.) But I keep thinking about the movie, imagining that here pretty soon we'll all be living in ragtag nation-states with charismatic leaders and carrying halberds.

Comments

[Amy]

Oh. My. GOD!!!

I so need to see this.

The biggest reason? I have a cousin named Darkon.

Seriously.

[E in MD]

I was there one of the days during filming playing my character Eire but I doubt I was in frame anywhere. I didn't pay much attention to the crew mostly because I was trying not to get beat down. As I recall i didn't do very well that day either.

To all those people who think this is stupid or 'nerdy', to bad. If you don't like it, don't play. Not everything appeals to everyone. But before you start pointing and laughing remember the funny costumes that football players wear when chasing each other around the field after a oddly shaped ball and trying to score. Darkon is no different in spirit at least than that.

It's fun. It's relaxing. It works out both aggression and the imagination at the same time. Best of all it's a hell of an aerobic exercise. Which is more than we can say for video games.

If if does appeal to you, look them up. You're pretty much guaranteed to have a good time.

Oh and as a side note, guys? Seriously... Bring a cup. You'll regret it if you don't. Nobody aims deliberately for the head or the goonies but just like in football accidents happen.

[Trish]

Awesome! my husband can be seen in a few of the battle scenes fighting for Elidor (blink and you'll miss him though), and we cheered to see his name in the credits. it's really fun to watch in person, too.

[Amy]

E in MD:

Of course it's nerdy. I consider myself a nerd too so I would never dream of pointing or laughing just because I choose to express my "nerdiness" in a different way.

Although now that I think about it, maybe we should exclude anything that requires a cup from being nerdy.

So never mind, I guess. :)

[Martha]

I think this looks cool, and am totally glad that you posted about it, because now I can add it to my netflix :D It's something I can watch while I wait for Monster Camp to come out, which is about my own LARP I play, NERO. *sigh* Still waiting...