San Diego filmmaker Kevin Tostado's Under the Boardwalk: The Story of Monopoly took the top documentary prize from last October's Anaheim International Film Festival, which screened entries in UltraStar's UltraLuxe Cinemas at the Gardenwalk center near Disneyland in Anaheim.
The love letter to the board makes a curtain call at the same cineplex this Thursday.
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As I wrote about the film before its local debut, if you really, really, really love the
board game, you will really, really, really love this flick. Tostado examines the game's
history, pop-culture significance and worldwide reach against the backdrop of the 2009 Monopoly world championships in Las Vegas.
Your guide is narrator Zachary Levi of NBC's Chuck. Here's the trailer:
The film produced by Tostado and Craig Bentley uncovers the board game's unique roots which,
given international fame today, of course includes disputes over who actually created it. Legend has it Monopoly began as an anti-capitalist diversion to the headlines about greed during the Great
Depression.
If it seems like a subject that would be played out in a matter of minutes (as opposed to the hours and hours it takes to complete one freakin' game), keep in mind the doc's threads range from individual winning strategies to the various themed versions of the board game (like Star Wars Monopoly) to the world's most elaborate game pieces, including the
most expensive set in the world created by a San Francisco
jeweler who unveiled a 23-carat gold
board, diamond-studded dice and a $2 million price tag. So you actually had to live on Park Place to afford to land on that board's Park Place.
These are but three of the many avenues, Carolina and otherwise, revealed by Tostado, who is so geeked by the game he started a Facebook page dedicated to it in 2008–and he has since found 3.5
million FB friends just as geeked around the world. Also worth checking out are the Under the Boardwalk website and Facebook page . . . especially if you really, really, really love the board game and/or documentary.
If there is something the filmmaker did not cover, you can ask him about it during the Q&A sessions after each screening during Thursday's one-day engagement. Showtimes are: 10:30 a.m. and 12:40, 3, 5:10 and 7:30 p.m. All attendees receive a collectible Monopoly token made for
the film. For tickets, visit UltraLuxe's online box office.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.