A Movie Making Nerd

A few months ago a review from the "Angry Video Game Nerd" popped up in my YouTube recommendations, and I figured it must be an old video or a retrospective or something because I used to watch his funny reviews more than a decade before. But it turns out he's still at it. James Rolfe, the titular Nerd, is still, to this day, subjecting himself to retro video games until he loses his temper and literally beats the game cartridges into pieces (or burns them, or shoots them, or dumps fake poo or vomit on them, or sometimes all of these things). And he's thriving — he's got a huge audience and a semi-regular release schedule. I've always lumped this guy in with other mid-aughts internet sensations like Homestar Runner or Shockwave, so it was kinda wild to see that he's still going. He's been doing this for almost 20 years now.I followed that YouTube recommendation, and then I watched some of his other recent episodes, and then I watched all of them, all 200+, the same way I would binge any other TV show. I play board games with a group of guys once a month and I remember explaining AVGN to them when I was knee-deep in his videos. I said, "You know, it's this guy, and he dresses like someone from an IT department, and he plays poorly made video games from the '80s and '90s, and he swears a lot and sometimes performs skits where one of the game's characters will show up in a cheap costume and they'll fight to the death. Sometimes he breaks the games with a hammer or uses a prosthetic rear end to—" And then I stopped because one guy at the table was looking at me like I was having a stroke. He said that sounded absolutely awful. He smiled and shook his head in disbelief and repeated himself.And well, yeah, fine, I get that. If I hadn't seen AVGN videos when I was in my early 20s, present-day-late-30s me probably wouldn't have seen the appeal. But as a young adult I'd never seen something so irreverent, never seen anything so crude and silly. Someone cussing up a storm and fighting five-and-dime Bugs Bunnies was novel for the low-budget spectacle that it was. I can't even invoke that old trope where someone is caught reading a tawdry magazine and insists they just read it for the articles, because even though I've learned an awful lot of honest-to-God fascinating video-game-related history and trivia from AVGN, I can get all of that and more from watching The Gaming Historian. I try to explain the appeal to people sometimes but I end up sounding like an overgrown basement dweller. What can I say, it's a guilty pleasure. I like him. He makes me laugh.What's really wild is that in the almost two decades he's been doing this, he's blown up (albeit in an underground sorta way). His videos have been organized into discreet seasons you can buy on DVD at Wal-Mart. Gilbert Gottfried made a cameo appearance in one episode. There are two real, genuine, bona fide video games starring James Rolfe as his Nerd persona fighting legendary game glitches and his made-up characters. Seriously, you can buy a physical, licensed Nintendo Switch cartridge with his face on it. Rolfe even raised money and made a feature-length AVGN film, with a limited theatrical release (!), where his character reviews E.T. for the Atari and unwittingly uncovers an Area-51-related conspiracy. He has merchandise, for crying out loud.I have approximately zero interest in any of these things but I'm delighted that this guy has been able to cultivate such an audience and remain so relevant for so long.There is also another video series by James Rolfe where he reviews movies, typically classic horror movies. It was the weirdest thing watching one of these reviews for the first time. After seeing Rolfe dressed as a doofus for so many years, chugging beer and cursing and performing various bodily functions all over anything and everything, the idea of him in a t-shirt and jeans, calmly explaining why he enjoys Mel Brooks movies was almost its own form of comedy. It was like that gag from Wayne's World where Alice Cooper turns out to be a mild-mannered history buff. No antics, no prop comedy, just a mellow Rolfe talking about his favorite flicks. I hadn't seen this side of him before, this passionate film aficionado. It was fascinating and informative. The dude has clearly watched a ton of movies, and he really loves them.This is mostly the tone of Rolfe's memoir, A Movie Making Nerd. Just a mellow film buff talking about home movies and the events that led to his internet popularity. Among the most interesting nuggets: He was in special education for most of his childhood (and returned to public high school as a sophomore without any academic issues), he was suspended from college because he and his roommates absolutely trashed their dorm over the course of his freshman year (though as he tells it, he never participated in the destruction, only filmed it), and he honed his craft creating workplace safety videos that, apparently, no one ever saw except for his boss. He created the first few AVGN episodes in between editing wedding videos, and they were just meant for him and his close friends, passed around on VHS tapes.A large portion of the book focuses on his feature-length AVGN film. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, he temporarily moved to L.A. and did the whole Hollywood thing. If you've ever run a Kickstarter or something similar, you'll surely wince when you read that he received his funds near the end of the calendar year, before he had a chance to do anything with them. All that money he raised, therefore, was considered normal, taxable income, and a third of the budget went up in smoke. Poof. It put James in a different tax bracket. He ended up dumping his savings into the project.His Hollywood experience was a disaster and sucked all the fun out of everything (though, spoiler alert, he obviously got his film made and he's happy with the result). His family camcorder and captive childhood cast had been replaced with a real cast and crew, a mountain of red tape and fees and L.A. phonies and crazies and swindlers. Nothing went according to plan, and chapter 5 is a genuinely entertaining, wacky, jaw-dropping account of what went down. Despite this he speaks highly of nearly everyone he worked with and goes out of his way to thank most of them by name. (For us normies, this means an avalanche of Mikes and Kyles and Kevins, none of whom you will remember.)One of my favorite bits is when, on the last day of filming, with their money depleted, Rolfe is tied to a chair and he's barely managing to hold himself together. Stephen Mendel notices that Rolfe is down in the dumps and, in his wheelchair made to look like a tank, his arms made to look like they'd been ripped off, leans in close and whispers, "You know I was Splinter on Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation?" And it was so random that it cheered Rolfe right up. They finished filming and went home.The final chapter focuses on his extended efforts to finish editing the film, its eventual release, and fatherhood. What he went through to wrap up post-production is worth the price of the book. His wife's birth story is BANANAS. And the film's long-awaited premier lifted his spirits into the stratosphere.There is surprisingly little said about his AVGN series. In fact, I kinda got the impression it's just a means to an end for him. He seems delighted with the fandom and loves connecting with people but expresses some mild regret that AVGN has kept him from pursuing a traditional filmmaking career. It's just a job sometimes, not too dissimilar from workplace safety videos or wedding mementos. I was reminded of an episode of The X-Files that follows the elusive Cigarette Smoking Man as he tries, and fails, over the course of his career to get his short stories published in pulpy sci-fi magazines. It comes as a complete surprise very late in the series — he's a high ranking government official doing work most of us would kill for, but all he wants is a little slice of recognition and the freedom to chase his passion projects.In the end he seems to gain a renewed enthusiasm for AVGN, just tempered by his responsibilities as a husband and father.Rolfe does, admittedly, engage in a fair amount of preening throughout his memoir. In the first few pages he references King Kong and follows it up with the year 1933 in parentheses. I figured he did this to clarify which version of the film he watched, but then a few paragraphs later, he explains how it led him to record his first home movie, Escape from Monster Island, and he follows the title with "(1991)." And I laughed, thinking the year was some kind of gag, as if the reader needed any clarification. But he takes this stuff seriously. He counts it among his works the same way a famous painter might count whatever his parents pinned to the fridge in his childhood home. It would be like if I listed this review in my bibliography. Every ludicrous movie plot, every homegrown advancement in editing includes a moment where he steps back and admires what he's done. One of his films is a documentary about himself where he covers his first hundred films. "I felt like I was reaching awkwardly to pat myself on the back," he says. Years later, he modified that documentary to cover his first 200 films and re-released it.This was jarring at first, perhaps a little silly, and the writing often straddles the fence between humble and self-absorbed. But his enthusiasm is infectious, and his stories are undeniably interesting. I didn't particularly enjoy any of his early home movies (any of which you can easily find by googling Cinemassacre + the title) but I sincerely enjoy his director commentary in this book. During his formative years he taught himself to make films with whatever resources he had, and he kind of stumbled into doing things the right way. He realized much later that he'd created a Foley and made story boards just by throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. It's a fun trip to go on.In Dan Simmons's Hyperion, the poet Martin Silenus at one point frets over his new book and his agent compares it to Pilgrim's Progress. She says Martin's a famous poet and that it doesn't actually matter whether the book is good because it's basically just a decoration for the mantlepiece at home. It'll sell millions of copies but good heavens, no one is going to read it.I initially viewed A Movie Making Nerd through a similarly cynical lens; that the target market was not necessarily “readers” but super-fans eager to have an AVGN-branded book for their coffee tables, where they would remain unread forever and ever and ever amen. The book is not particularly well written. It's often awkward and meandering (though mostly free of typos) and took so long to write that he had drafts of it stored on floppy disks. His writing style over this extended period is all over the place, and some chapters are better than others. But you don't need good prose to tell a good story, and thankfully James Rolfe is a good storyteller. And he’s funny. Either he’s funny or I’m a child.Just a month ago he released a video where he reviews all the various Doom ports. He pops the disk into his Commodore 64 and the console tries so hard to load it but then just lets out this teeny-tiny little fart, and it made me laugh. He’s still got it.Anyway, if you've ever watched one of his goofy videos and wondered what he's like, or how he got into this gig, then chances are you'll find a lot to love in his memoir. Don’t let the early Kindle reviews get you down; yes, it was bungled, but he fixed it with a less-bungled version, and soon after fixed that version with an almost completely un-bungled version. Reading the book honestly puts this very minor debacle in perspective, in a weird way. It turns out Rolfe often takes the long way around, even if the long way is covered with nails and broken glass. It's a great read.

James Rolfe opens his heart here, any fan of Cinemassacre, the AVGN, Monster Madness, Board James, James and Mike Monday’s and basically all of his content will surely read this book with James’s voice in their heads as if you were hearing his narration. The book is highly unusual for me in the sense that it’s an in depth autobiography that covers his own childhood and adolescence extensively, I wasn’t expecting so much about those years, some parts of it seriously made me laugh, others I actually found them way too private, and no, I’m not talking about his sex life, James’s tells us about his time in Special Ed when he was in elementary school, he reveals glimpses of suicidal depression, both in his childhood and later in life after a horrible break up, and also mentions how fatherhood changed him, his first daughter’s childbirth was horrible and traumatic.The whole production process of the AVGN movie is also detailed in the book, it was almost a development hell, not in the traditional sense, but on a personal level for James and even his family. James never gave up until that was finished.His life story, covered in this book all the way up to the Covid-19 pandemic, is a magnificent exposition about his passion for movies, James was born to make films and write scripts, create scenography, use good old practical effects, and even use puppets, to go along the sequences and dialogues in his head. He is a man with an endless drive for movie making, not having a budget never stopped him. The book also explains his love for childish, scatological humor and why he is so good at it, why his delivery is simply natural, his trials and tribulations narrated from the point of a movie lover, turned film student, later content creator and movie director.The book does indeed inspire you to achieve your own goals and not to give up. As a long time fan, going as far back as 2008, during the old GameTrailers/Screwattack days, I wholeheartedly recommend this book for fans of James Rolfe and other content creators.Like I said, he opened his heart and put in text for all of us fans to read. You can also tell this is exactly what his Cinemassacre scripts look like, longtime fan will immediately recognize his usual language and style. Fans shouldn’t miss out on this book, it’s a page turner, for us.

I've been a fan of James Rolfe since he was The Angry Nintendo Nerd. His was probably the first Youtube channel I subscribed to. I've enjoyed most of his work since then, from his movie reviews and documentaries to his Bored James series and beyond. He always seemed like a cool and genuine guy to me, so I was excited to hear that he had written a book.He speaks open and honestly about his life, telling humorous, heart-warming and heartbreaking tales from his lifetime, speaking about the problems he had at school and the trouble he got into at college, getting to meet Ozzy, meeting girls, getting married...everything you'd expect from a biography.Though the book is full of his life stories, he focuses mostly on his love of movie making. He goes into great detail about the films he made throughout his life, from shorts recorded with his school friends, up until his feature film, Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie. He explains how he shot and edited his films, the hardships and obstacles he had to overcome, lessons learned, and the joys of finally showing the films to people.Being a fan of James, I knew I'd enjoy the book, but I was pulled in deeper as I found parallels with my own life. We are both the same age, so we played all the same games and watched the same movies. I had to laugh at him editing with two VHS recorders because I used to do the same thing. We both discovered heavy metal around the same age. And I could sympathise a lot with his struggling to fit in at school and his issues with social anxiety.The book is an uplifting and inspiring read. James comes across as a decent, calm, quiet and reserved fella from what he has written, unlike his Angry Video Game Nerd character. He comes across as grateful to all his friends and fans, and he harbours no hard feelings towards the people who have done him wrong, especially the guy who caused all the trouble on the AVGN movie set. I don't know how he didn't kick that dude in the face. Anyway, it's as open an honest as you can get for a biography, so I deffo recommend it.

Bought instantly on release but the Kindle version is formatted improperly rendering it unreadable.It appears to work on the Kindle iOS app but even there, it seems there are missing pages or sentences, and you can’t adjust font size and page layout, as if it’s just a PDF.I’ll update this review once it’s fixed!

I've been a longtime fan of James' through his videos he's been releasing on Youtube for years, like most especially his Angry Video Game Nerd series, which has give me many laughs over the years. So when I heard he was releasing an autobiography, I was very much looking forward to reading it.Having read through the book over the last few days, I'm not disappointed. His story is an interesting one and he recounts all sorts of experiences that have shaped who he is today, including some stories that don't exactly shine him in the best light, which is kind of nice to see that he's not ignoring things like that in his story.Given his obsession with film making, the act of making the various films he's made over the years and how he came to make them dominates the book, but the act of telling his own life through a lens doesn't detract from the book. There's a very detailed chapter about the making of "Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie", but given that's the biggest film project he ever undertook, this is perhaps no great surprise.My only real criticism is there are a couple of clear typo's which made the print version of the book which seemingly bypassed any proof-readers, but that's kind of nit-picking. The book was very enjoyable to read.

Having discovered James back in the summer of 2015, I connected with his content over night and was instantly hooked. Having read his memoirs, I can say that this is the personification of a nerds dream realised. James's life has had great struggles and successes, (The university dorm roommates were a particular highlight) and this book highlights all of them in James's creative words. Any fan should own this straight away!

Big fan of james, the book is very nice