I recently watched two movies using Netflix’s WatchNow streaming video, which finally works on the Mac. The movies are very different, but they both have interesting aspects for geeks.

The first movie is Primer.  This is one of the most amazing yet confusing movies that I’ve watched in years. What I found most compelling is how hard they work to make the situations believable. It starts off with engineers trying to start up a company, while still performing their day jobs at a big engineering firm. The movie soon veers into the realm of sci-fi, but the characters continue to act in the most believable way possible through unusual circumstances, whereas many sci-fi movies start spouting platitudes or indulge in childish what-if scenarios. Towards the end, the movie becomes very confusing, since the writer only lets you see things that the characters see, but there is a forum where obsessed fans provide their detailed analyses.

The second movie is The King of Kong. It is a documentary of a fairly normal middle-school science teacher who takes on a quest to beat the world record score in Donkey Kong. Not only is Donkey Kong considered the hardest of all the classic arcade games, the record has been held for years by an almost mythic and definitely narcissistic hero of video game addicts. Though this is a documentary, some of the people in the classic video game culture appear as absurd as the characters from Napoleon Dynamite. There are some similarities between this movie and American Movie, but I find the people in The King of Kong to be much more endearing, not to mention the fact that I still have doubts that American Movie really could be a documentary and not a hoax like the Blair Witch Project.