Burl to Queen’s Bishop five! Ha ha, checkmate! Yes, it’s
Burl here to review a chess movie – except it’s not a chess movie so much as a
computer movie, or maybe a nerd movie, or maybe something that’s all of those
things but also something better! The picture is called Computer Chess, and it’s one of those rare feature films shot in
black and white on old video cameras!
The picture stars a bunch of people who, with the exception
of my old pal Wiley Wiggins from Dazed and Confused, and movie reviewer Gerald Peary, I’d never heard of before; but their
performances are uniformly excellent! Ha ha, and the setup is a weekend
competition taking place in a hotel somewhere in Texas, where tech
organizations have brought their latest and greatest playing programs to pit
them against one another! It’s nerds abounding, ha ha!
There are other groups in the hotel as well, including some
kind of culty encounter workshop and a bunch of swingers! The computer guys’
interaction with these parties account for a great deal of the dramatic tension
found in the picture! We also follow a self-important “independent programmer”
as he tries to find a room to stay in, and the travails of one group whose
program appears to be suiciding itself more quickly with every game! There are
hints of shady backroom practices and sinister, Kubrickian implications that
some of these computers are simply sick of being told what to do all the time!
The picture is part of what I think of as the same Texas
tradition responsible for movies like Last Night at the Alamo and Slacker,
and of course Future-Kill! A nice
little corner on eccentric indie movies asserts itself every once in a while,
and Computer Chess fits right in!
It’s a funny picture but nevertheless not a comedy, and that’s usually my
favourite kind of comedy, ha ha! And though I usually don’t gravitate toward
the awkwardness movies, the extremely awkward scenes in this picture didn’t
bother me – they worked as a bizarre admixture of comedy and suspense! The
scene with the glasses nerd and the swingers is a particularly good example!
There’s also a terrific scene involving the roomless guy,
Papageorge, and his mother and another fellow! This sequence is shot on colour
16mm film, and feels like a scene out of Demon
Lover Diary or American Movie or
something along that line! Like the rest of the picture, the scene uses its
medium with elegance and wit, and hints at great insights about technology and
human behavior and the intersection between the two; and somehow that the film
never deigns to reveal these insights, at least not completely, feels like the
greatest unrevealed insight of them all!
The ending of the movie is where some might throw up their
hands and declare this some kind of Cronenberg-Lynch-Tsukamoto coattail rider,
but I thought it worked very well! It’s handled with great competence, and
really, of all the pictures you might expect to see a naked lady in the closing
moments, this one is about the last! But still, there she is, and what happens
next will invite a slight but definite mindboggling!
I enjoyed this picture a great deal, and for excellent
ensemble acting, the courage of its formal convictions, the wit and restraint
it showed in playing with the technology and era with which it concerns itself,
I give Computer Chess three and a
half fluffy ghost cats!
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