Please God, no Sudoku movie, I beg you.

The new crossword puzzle documentary Wordplay appears to exemplify a trend in docs that may officially be getting out of hand: movies about some sort of obscure or unlikely competition or pseudo-sport. Notable examples include Murderball ("wheelchair rugby"); A League of Ordinary Gentlemen (bowling); Spellbound (spelling bees), and Word Wars (Scrabble). Those last two actually form a nice bookend, as in Spellbound you get to see the fledgling nerds when they're young and full of promise, then in Word Wars you glimpse their future in 25 years or so, when they're paunchier, smellier, financially struggling, emotionally unfulfilled and suffering from gastrointestinal ailments. It's the circle of life, I tells ye.

Intending to make this docu-genre the subject of parody, I googled "competitive eating documentary" and lo and behlod, there's a film called Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating, which apparently isn't on dvd. I'm afraid to google "competitive masturbating" (although apparently not unwilling to make my own blog a search result for it), but I'm betting that's at least been covered on an episode of HBO's "Real Sex." It's too bad other documentarians didn't capitalize on this trend earlier; The Mayles Brothers, for instance, could've had the women from Grey Gardens enter a series of home decorating shows, or turned Gimme Shelter into an acid-drenched version of Japan's "Extreme Elimination Challenge," with added emphasis on the eliminating.