Rating: 14/20
Plot: Computer nerds gather to have their programs face off in a chess tournament.
Note: This movie lost a full point because a knight was moved from D3 to D2. That's not possible. The rest of the chess looked fine, so it surprises me that they would have such an obvious blunder in the final cut.
I was led astray by this one. I thought it was going to be a mockumentary about chess. I figured that it would be kind of stupid but funny and chessy enough to be worth a watch. It ended up not being all that funny and about a lot more than chess, but it also wasn't stupid at all. In fact, it went a little over my head. It's also not a mockumentary although it does have a style that makes it seem like it was actually filmed during the early 80s, the time when it was supposed to take place. Maybe the black and white fools people into thinking it's a mockumentary. I enjoyed the movie. It's a quiet one, more peppered with humorous moments and some quirky characters more than it is flat-out funny. There are the chess guys or programmers and a group meeting for some kind of sex therapy or self-help thing, and I was never sure what the point was by having these two groups clash. I thought the acting was fantastic, and along with the dialogue and raw style, this did manage to feel very real even though director Andrew Bujalski added a few more experimental moments and ended the story with a moment of raunchy surrealism. I'd really have to see this again to get a better grasp on what it's about.
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