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Computer Chess (2013)
Frequently funny if deeply episodic film.
Films about sport tend to suffer from the fact that it's extremely difficult to adequately recreate sporting action, as most actors play sports about as well as most sportspeople act. This can't be said about chess, which presents another problem for the filmmaker: Films about chess tend to suffer greatly from the fact that chess dosn't really work as a spectator sport. Whilst field games can be convincingly condensed into action set-pieces, chess games go on for days with little obvious progression or tactics to those not deeply versed in it. The more successful attempts have thus tended to have very little chess in them, focusing instead on the personalities involved (Bobby Fischer Vs. The World) or the sacrifices involved in making it in any sport (Searching For Bobby Fischer). Computer Chess instead chooses to see the humour in it, intentionally coming across as a VHS-era oddity found in a skip in Omaha.
Much like any good chess film, this film isn't really about chess. Instead, it pivots around a very brief and particular moment in the early 1980s when the prospect of a computer beating a grandmaster was cause for alarm rather than a quiz question as a group of computer scientists convene on a nondescript hotel for a computer chess tournament. The modern tech revolution was born in such enthusiasms, not that anyone cared at the time. The main joy of the film comes from how it sidesteps the problems involved in trying to make a compelling film about chess by avoiding chess scenes for the most part. It's more so an off-kilter ensemble comedy about very intelligent people battling with the limitations of state-of-the-art computer technology (a comedic highlight is the programmer whose computer constantly plays to lose in seeming rebellion against its master), their own social skills and a coldly indifferent outside world that won't let them use the hotel's conference room.
The film is shot in grainy black and white so as to look like a cheap documentary from the period, which makes the massive computers and mustaches look a lot more believable. Unfortunately, it's too believable at times, with intentional jump cuts and out-of-sync audio drawing too much attention to the self-consciously "quirky" nature of the film at the expense of cohesion, giving the film an episodic structure. Some of these episodes are brilliant, whereas others are just bemusing. Scenes where characters discuss questions in artificial intelligence and the possibilities of their giant computers are juxtaposed with computer programmers unintentionally participating in self-help seminars and endless shots of cats. Maybe this is intended as some sort of comment on the origins of the internet and what it eventually became. But when watching Computer Chess, these differing elements tend to cross over one another and leave any viewers without a very deadpan sense of humour feeling very lost.
On the whole it's a fascinating take on a moment in time: funny and frequently brilliant but also difficult and obscure. It's worth watching, but will probably be loved by a small core of people, liked by a few more and leave many others cold.
Captain Phillips (2013)
One of the better thrillers of the year.
The word "realistic" is one of the most misused in all of film criticism, being attributed even to CGI spectacles such as Gravity. Early reviews of Paul Greengrass' Captain Philips have praised it for its realism, but a more accurate term to explain the film's appeal would be "believability". The film is very much a Hollywood thriller (down to text on the screen informing us as to the differing locations of various scenes), but is to the credit of Greengrass and his cast that it manages to be genuinely exciting whilst remaining within genre parameters.
The film casts Tom Hanks as Richard Philips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama-the first US cargo ship to be hijacked in over 200 years. Hanks proves an excellent choice for the role, with his familiar screen persona of normality making it easy to see Philips as an ordinary man forced into a nightmarish situation through no fault of his own. It's easier to believe that a middle-aged man with grey hair and beard might be terrified and fear for his life in the face of Somali pirates. The casting of unknown Somali American actors as the pirates hijacking the ship adds to this sense of believability, with Barkhad Adbi being particularly impressive as their leader Muse. Adbi does an excellent job with a role that could easily be a caricature, hinting at the desperation which drives the poor into piracy. This desperation is mirrored on the American side, with the film wisely maintaining a focus on the claustrophobia and paranoia which develop from being trapped on a ship hundreds of miles from civilization. The dynamic between Philips and Muse is what makes this film compelling, with their mutual dedication to their thankless tasks being visible throughout and hinting at the similarities between how the two captains handle their crews in crises.
It is when the film moves away from this to include events happening away from the hijacking that it lags,with cutaways to Navy bases distracting from the tension of the main plot and the frequently thrilling action sequences(the boarding of the ship by the pirates merits particular praise, with the ingenuity of the pirates making clear why the Americans fear them so). Whilst some sense of the bigger picture about piracy is probably necessary to grasp the context the events of the film take place in, it's not what makes the film work. What lingers in the memory instead is the sense that both sides were as scared and vulnerable in real life as depicted here,making this film one of the better thrillers of the year.
World Trade Center (2006)
Disaster Movie in every possible sense
As part of RTE's excellent coverage of the 9/11 anniversary, they showed World Trade Center as the Midweek Movie. I normally love to slaughter terrible films, but the subject manner of this and the presence of World's Greatest Actor Nicolas Cage meant I went into this hoping to be moved by it. Sadly this was not to be the case. 9/11 may be the most important event of the last 20 years but this felt like a made-for-TV disaster movie from the early 80's starring Paul Newman, whose expressions throughout the film manage to convey both the boredom of "contractual obligation" and fear of "career suicide".
The film starts promisingly enough,with the calm before the storm of the morning on 9/11 being conveyed with an appealing sense of menace(planes flying overhead, a rundown of the firemen so you can guess who will be dead by the end, family lives established). However, the disaster is fairly poorly handled, with the insertion of archive footage of the attack making it look more like a 50's B-Movie than Oliver Stone probably intended.
Once the firefighters are trapped under, the film takes a horrible turn for the melodramatic, with Nicolas Cage's gloriously entertaining overacting style being a terrible fit to the character of an ordinary man in a nightmarish situation. His shrieking and shouting bring to mind the infamous "THE BEES" scene from the 2006 "The Wicker Man" remake (possibly the best film I've ever seen remade as possibly the worst film I've ever seen.) rather than any actual fear or pain.
The family lives of the two men are every bit as ridiculous, with the obligatory small-child-makes-the-parent-see-the-truth scene, which is so badly handled here that it makes your skin crawl. Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal do what they can with the characters, who are so underwritten as to be cast-offs from US daytime soaps with dialogue to match, with every line written to maximise hysterics and manipulate emotions. I find it hard to believe that the firemen's wives on 9/11 went through the whole day with perfect hair and make-up.
As well as this,the film's attempts to convey the scale of the attacks are cringeworthy, with CGI shots pulling away to indicate the smoke from Ground Zero billowing into space having the feeling of a music video. The film's main redeeming characteristic comes in noticing the smaller details of the chaos of the day,such as deserted supermarkets and people covered in dust in police station waiting rooms. Had it focused more on this, it could well have been a better film ,rather than the schizoid mess of disaster movie blockbuster and serious drama we ended up with, with the worst aspects of both and none of the best. It's like a 70's disaster movie but not even fun. In fact "TERRORIST!" starring George Kennedy would probably have been a better film. In fact if you'd edited 9/11 footage into The Towering Inferno starring the now-dead Steve McQueen and Paul Newman it'd be a better film.
There is one film that gets what 9/11 must have been like for those there on the day. It's from 2006 as well, and it's called United 93, focusing on the passengers of the United 93 flight which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. It has none of the gloss which so disastrously mars World Trade Center, and is all the better for not using recognisable actors, CGI or attempting to give the audience any spectacle. 9/11 is a lot better served by such fare than nonsense like this.
Cool Dog (2010)
What a Cool Dog.
Cool Dog - a triumph of the Nietzchean superman over New York's social inequalities that celebrates rural life in the Deep South yet nevertheless asks the viewer some PRETTY TROUBLING post-colonial questions.
I did come out of this film in awe of just how cool the dog was. He's even cooler than other prominent dogs, such as Snoopy, the Hound Of The Baskervilles, Ghost Dog, and Snoop Doggy Dogg. In addition to this, this film has inspired me in life, and I am currently working on a screenplay of my own. I'm working on a screenplay called "Uncool Dog", in which a dog does things that dogs typically do.It's 90 minutes of a dog scratching himself,urinating on the ground,lying down,jumping on people, sleeping heavily, being taken for walks and scaring sheep. Whilst this is a key work for the 21st century, I do still think we must bear in mind that it does raise some pretty troubling questions about the nature of cool, and may not be suitable for small children.