This review originally appeared, in a slightly different form, during Sundance 2008. Bigger, Stronger, Faster* opens on six screens today.
A personal interrogative doc, more Morgan Spurlock than Doug Block, Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster uses his family’s experiences with steroids as the in point to tackle the larger roles of body perception, performance inhancement and competition in contemporary American culture. The voice of the film, delivered via Bell’s constant narration, can be hackneyed and a bit too reliant on a faux-naivete which belies some of its stronger conclusions, but on the whole Bell mounts a surprisingly sophisticated argument––surprising because he’s a first time feature-maker, surprising because it’s clearly on Bell’s agenda to please his crowd, surprising because this is a film that relies on footage from Rocky 4 to explicate its thesis argument––that steroid criminalization amounts to hating the player whilst willfully ignoring the dynamics of the game.
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A personal interrogative doc, more Morgan Spurlock than Doug Block, Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster uses his family’s experiences with steroids as the in point to tackle the larger roles of body perception, performance inhancement and competition in contemporary American culture. The voice of the film, delivered via Bell’s narration, can be hackneyed and a bit too cute, but on the whole Bell mounts a surprisingly sophisticated argument––surprising because he’s a first time feature-maker, surprising because it’s clearly on Bell’s agenda to please his crowd, surprising because this is a film that uses footage from Rocky 4 to make its thesis argument––that steroid criminalization amounts to hating the player whilst willfully ignoring the dynamics of the game.
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Last week, I followed a link from Fimoculous to Wired’s GameLife, where blogger Chris Baker attempted to quell the anti-Roger Ebert sentiment in the game community by posting a game review written by Ebert for the magazine. If you just read that sentence and immediately asked yourself, “What anti-Roger Ebert sentiment in the video game community?” … well, let me back up a bit.
In 2005, Ebert fired the first of several shots in what appears to have been an accidental battle, by admitting to never having played the video game that inspired the movie Doom. A reader named Vikram Keskar wrote in with an extremely well-articulated letter of protest:
Doom works as a tribute because it fails so utterly as a movie. There is a reason so many video game-based movies suck: They are fundamentally different forms of representation. Thus by being faithful to the game, the movie pisses off the critic and pleases the gamer.
…to which Ebert rather flippantly responded:
Seen as a moviegoing experience, [Doom] was not a good one. There are specialist sites on the Web devoted to video games, and they review movies on their terms. I review them on mine. As long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games.
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