Word Wars

A quirky, entertaining documentary, Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo's Word Wars follows four players in competition for the North American Scrabble Championship: three-time champion Joe Edley, aspiring standup comic Matt Graham, the pot-smoking dreadlocked Marlon Hill, and G.I. Joel Sherman (the "G.I." stands for gastrointestinal, and the film occasionally feels like an extended Maalox commercial as the poor guy fights to squash his acid reflux disorder). The four men are decidedly eccentric: Edley is a smug, bland man who seems to have left his personality at the door; Graham takes an excess of herbal supplements designed to improve brain power, though he doesn't have enough cerebral fortitude to discard frayed clothing with gaping holes in the fabric; Sherman openly proclaims he has no talent for anything beyond Scrabble and he spends much of the movie offering evidence to support that statement; and Hill, a self-proclaimed "pre-Mecca Malcolm X," takes his Afrocentrism to the extreme, playing in a tournament under the flag of Ghana--even though he is a native of Baltimore. The filmmakers also look at a parallel universe of Scrabble addicts who stake out a corner of New York's Washington Square Park for open air tournaments outside the officially sanctioned games. In fact, the reigning champ, a restaurant owner identified only as Aldo, actually beat Joe Edley in an impromptu game (Edley weakly claimed he was distracted by the park's noisy environment). Here the cliché is literal: this picture's really worth a thousand words. DVD extras include bonus footage. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)