Bobby Fischer Against the World

2011 documentary

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A look at the life and too-brief professional career of the titular chess player with a focus on his 1972 world championship match against Boris Spassky. [Spoiler Alert!] He loses his mind.

I think most people know the basics of the Bobby Fischer story, a story about a chess genius with a very troubled mind who wasn't very pleasant. People probably know all about the Cold War implications and how that 1972 match was a lot more than a series of games. And they might know what happened with Fischer following that match with Spassky in Iceland, how he alienated a lot of people, withdrew from society, made more than his fair share of racist comments, and seemed a little too happy about the terrorist attack on 9/11. This documentary on the guy isn't going to make anybody like him more, but it does deepen your understand about the guy as a human being, especially when describing his younger days growing up in New York with his mother and sister. This starts with an Albert Einstein quote that I hadn't heard:

"Chess holds its master in its own bonds, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom of the very strongest must suffer."

And for the first part of the story, you get a portrait of a young artist at work, a picture colored with a ton of hard work and shaded with paranoia. Oh, and a little cockiness, cockiness that seems at odds with the real Bobby Fischer that we think we discover in this thing. The hard work aspect can be appreciated in the description of Fischer's athletic trainer (yes, this was a real thing) of the chess player working with a dynamometer and wanting to strengthen his grip so that "that little Russian" will be able to feel his handshake. And yes, ladies, there is a naked shot (from behind) of the chess master.

You know, I want to pause here to brag about my own chess abilities a little bit. I had a friend growing up named John, and like a lot of my friends, John had a father. His dad was a professor in the English department at Indiana State University, and I had a couple classes with him later on. John and I played chess, and I played a game with his dad once. It was a tight game that ended in a draw. The remarkable thing about that--and the thing that will more than likely impress my 4 1/2 readers--is that John's dad once played a game against Bobby Fischer, a game that also ended in a draw. Sure, that game was one of at least forty that Fischer was playing simultaneously as some exhibition of his prowess, but I don't think this changes the fact that I was just as good as Bobby Fischer.

But I digress. Back to the documentary. This is one of those documentaries where you know exactly how things end up but there still manages to be all this suspense in the little things. I've played over every game from the Fischer/Spassky match, some more than once, but I was still on the edge of my seat wondering if America was going to get Fischer to Iceland to even start the match. As a chess player, I almost wish there was more of an emphasis on the games and what happened even though that would have been frustrating for people who don't know or like the game. The match was described in a way to help you feel the psychological stuff that these players must have been going through. Of course, Fischer said famously, "I don't believe in psychology. I believe in good moves," but you can see how uneasy he is with everything that is happening around him during his stay in Iceland. And then Spassky spazzes out over chair and lights and radiation, and it just goes to show you how evil this board game can be. Fischer's story is one of the great "What if?" stories, and although it will likely make you ask the same sorts of questions, it will also help you understand his damaged mind and disagreeable personality a little more. I went in a little angry at the guy for his racist rants and wasted potential. By the end, I felt a little sorry for the guy. The details of his early life, a simple description (and some photographs) of how he enjoyed being around animals, and his last words were all touching. Those last words, although I find it almost impossible to believe: "Nothing is so healing as the human touch." Wow.

Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine

2003 documentary

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Garry Kasparov, possibly the greatest chess player ever to play the game, returns to the scene of what he believes is a crime, discussing the details of his 1997 match with IBM's Deep Blue which he lost 3 1/2 - 2 1/2. It's basically an hour and a half of Kasparov yelling, "Shenanigans!" while Deep Blue retorts, "Blurp blurp. I am a robot. Blurp. Blurp. Blurp!"

First, let me cover what I didn't like about this documentary, quibbles that nearly forced me to drop this a few more points. There's an annoying amount of stylistic touches with this documentary--whispered narration, some troublesome music, a few pretentious semi-reconstructed shots, and a few too many shots of the chess-playing automaton called The Turk. No, let me take that last one back. The Turk is cool. Overall, I would have liked more documentary and less dressing for that documentary. The good stuff in this far outweighs the stuff that annoyed me, however. Chief among those good things is Garry Kasparov's charisma. His recollections are fascinating, and I loved watching him ponder moves, squirm agonizingly, and gesticulate while facing his opponents. He's a guy who wears his emotions on his sleeve. And it's possible that he might as well have a post-it note that says "I'm paranoid!" slapped on his forehead. Still, he's so likable, and you want to believe him when he talks about how the IBM people cheated in the match. The documentary is objective although the multitudinous shots of The Turk almost hint that the filmmakers support a conspiracy theory of some kind. There was likely more in this one for me, a fan and terrible player of the game, than for people who don't play. I really liked the insight on the psychology of the game, probably the main difference between a human chess player and a machine like Deep Blue. As a chess player, I would have liked a little more detail on the games themselves, especially a clearer description of the controversial move in game two, but I think the games (with analysis) are included as a special feature on the dvd.

The Turk:

The Magic Blade

1976 kung-fu movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Yen Nan-Fei arrives to battle master swordsman Fu Hung-Hsieh to settle a dispute over who is the better sword fighter. While they're fighting, they are attacked by professional assassins. They decide to have lunch instead and are attacked by more assassins. They have to work together, procure some exploding Peacock Darts, and figure out who's behind the plot to get rid of them.

Everybody was kung-fu fightin' in this one from the first minute to the last. And these cats, with their assortment of swords and other cool weapons (fans, Peacock Darts, explosives, a loaf of bread), are fast as lightnin'. The sword play, as good as you'd expect from a Shaw Brothers production, is seasoned with just the right amount of fantasy elements. You get impossible acrobatics, swords that can cut the branches off tree from a distance, doors and windows that close with the wave of magical hands. It's over the top, but it's never over over the top. The main character (Fu Hung) is a typical kung-fu action hero but there's a sprinkling of Clint Eastwood and Sherlock Holmes in him that gives him some depth. The antagonists are also interesting, mystical and mysterious, and the fight scenes are ingeniously fast and furious. I especially liked the cannibalistic and acrobatic Devil's Granny and the guy who made the good guys play Chinese chess. The Magic Blade has a story that only gets complicated at the very end, and I imagine its wall-to-wall action scenes would please aficionados of kung-fu fantasy flicks.

Breaker! Breaker!

1977 truckdriver kung-fu movie

Rating: 5/20

Plot: Chuck Norris, truckdrivin' tough guy, puts his ears on and gets word that his brother is lost in Texas City, California, a town run by a corrupt judge. Chuck, his roundhouse kick, a yellow t-shirt, and a tacky blue van with a giant eagle painted on the side go looking for him. Unfortunately for the citizens of Texas City, California, they're not smart enough to realize that the best way to get rid of Chuck Norris is just to shoot him.

Seriously, I'm with the Judge Trimmings (that's his name) on this one. "He was unarmed." When an action hero gets by on ingenuity, resourcefulness, or something else, I can accept it. But when he's walking out in the open in broad daylight, and the bad guys can't figure out a way to kill him, there's a problem. And speaking of Judge Trimmings (that's his name), what a character you've got here. George Murdock plays the character like he's in a Shakespearean production. He's Acting with a capital A. His lines clash incongruously with everybody else's in Texas City, California, things like "I'm gonna stick ya! I'm gonna stick ya!" repeated by a guy with a pitchfork and another hick whining, "The guy's a bad dude!" Texas City and its occupants reminded me a bit of the locale and characters in Deliverance, so imagine Hamlet replying to "Squeal like a pig!" This doesn't seem like an authentic representation of the profession of truck driving. At the end (SPOILER ALERT!), a bunch of unseen truckers, including one named Mudflapper, come to the rescue after easily locating this dump town (Texas City, California) sans modern technology and crash into buildings in their manic search for Chuck, all while taking turns crackin' wise on their CB's. Their CB banter sounded like the type of thing that was improvised, possibly by some of the dumbest people on earth. At one point, a trucker (maybe Mudflapper) says, "I haven't had this much fun since I broke my shoulder." I had to rewind that to make sure I heard it correctly. Without context (did I miss a prequel to this?), that makes no sense. This also has one of the most terrible musical montages I've seen in a long time with this insipid pop song accompanying scenes of Chuck Norris and Arlene just standing in various places. And there's a stutterer with a stutter that, just like the representation of truck driving, doesn't seem like an accurate representation of stuttering. Chuck Norris says, "I had a brother but I lost him," to him. There's also a wonderfully poignant moment when the stuttering character says, "I'm-I-I-I-I'mma, I-I'm m-m-m-m-m-ma-ma-m-mad at y-y-y-you," leading to one of the bad guys, the stutterer's brother, doing a little soul searching. Oh, and there's a scene where the stuttering guy makes love to a stuffed lion in a barn. But you can't talk about a Chuck Norris movie without discussing the fight scenes. They're nearly nonstop, but they aren't entertaining at all. I couldn't understand why a kick to the abdomen seems to finish off anybody. Maybe that's because Chuck Norris was the fight coordinator for Breaker! Breaker! I've never been roundhouse-kicked in the stomach by Chuck Norris though, so I'm not exactly an expert. I do know that if I was to remake this movie, I'd have anybody who is roundhouse-kicked in the stomach to violently explode in a CGI fireball. That would totally rule and oddly wouldn't really affect the believability of Breaker! Breaker! It all builds to a climactic fight scene where the hero, right after he's been shot, survives having hay and a tire hurled at him, fights off a man attacking him with a hook and later a bottle, and ends up killing the guy with a roundhouse kick to the abdomen. All while a horse watches!

Special note: Jack Nance followed his award-worthy performance in Eraserhead with a performance as a truck driver in this one. Maybe that's why Cory recommended it to me.

This trucker movie was recommended by Cory!

Time after Time

1979 time travel movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: H.G. Wells chases Jack the Ripper, a former friend, to late-70s San Francisco after the latter steals his time machine. He meets Mary Steenburgen, later typecast as a love interest in time travel movies. She helps him acclimate. He tries to keep her safe from the Ripper. They meet Cyndi Lauper who immortalizes their love story in a pop song.

I'm not going to think too deeply about this one because I'm fairly confident thinking about it too deeply would be just like spinning it around really fast while giant chunks of plot fly off and get all over the walls. Not to focus on the negative, but this has the look of a television movie, and the special effects are likely to be the worst I see all year. What's the best way to show that a time machine is actually working and not just sitting there? Sparkly things! It's 1950s Disney special effects, and it's kind of embarrassing. This also has one of my movie pet peeves--bad chess. And there was an unfortunate scene in a discotheque. However, this definitely has more goods than bads. I always like Malcolm McDowell, and here, he's a very good H.G. Wells, not necessarily a historically accurate version of H.G. Wells but a character named H.G. Wells with a very similar biography. I enjoyed hearing him talk about things like vaporizing equalizers, and I really liked how the man-out-of-his-elements motif was used. Watching McDowell confused by escalators, taxis, and toothbrushes was humorous, and I nearly laughed every time he said the word "motor car" or whenever he used a telephone. But I also like what this movie says about modern society, the futile dream of utopia, and about violence ("The first man to raise a fist is the man who's run out of ideas.". This movie has a dark humor (when the detectives walk into a hotel room where a murder has taken place and there's a severed hand on the floor, that is supposed to be funny, right?) and a fun, although predictable, story.

Recommended by Cory.

First Spaceship on Venus

1960 science fiction movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Some space taffy is found at an excavation site, and following examination, it's decided that the space taffy actually contains a message from the planet Venus. A rocket ship with an international crew is sent to figure out what the Venusians want. On the way, the crew discovers that the message is actually all about plans to invade our planet.

I really sort of liked this movie. Sure, it's choppy and has terrible acting. Sure, it is overly verbose, and, to make that verbosity worse, has really poorly written dialogue. But there's an artistic quality to this cheap science fiction movie that makes it all worth it. There's great imaginative set design with some odd special effects that give this some charm. Popcorn meteor showers, great moogy sound effects, superimposed drifting fog, syrupy lava flows, hopping spidery Venus inhabitants. Venus has a really nice texture, gnarled and weather-beaten and kinda Seussian, and the designs for the space vehicles are pretty good. There are some space craft details that push this ahead of the typical flat B-movie science fiction ships. There's also a funky little chess-playing robot that rolls around like a tank and occasionally mumbles something about the weather. I even liked the bizarre wardrobe choices--uniforms with seemingly random letters on them, odd spacesuits that looked almost like chipmunk costumes, rubbery planet-exploration suits. And even though it's a little too talky, there are some nice themes about persevering through tragedy and fear and possibly even about the importance of Earthlings uniting in order to overcome the problems we face. Good 50's sci-fi drama!

The Fire Within

1963 bummer

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Alain is separated from his American wife and recovering from alcoholism at a hospital. One day, he decides to kill himself. First, he hitches a ride to Paris to meet up with some old friends and search for some reason to live.

More Louis Malle but this one is a very exhausting and cynical movie. The tone is set very early on and is unrelenting. There's a great scene in the hospital at the beginning where the protagonist is alone with his thoughts. He moves about the room, adjusts things, studies knickknacks, paddywacks, doodles. There's such an attention to little details in that scene and it really pulls you into the mind of this guy who, once the gun appears on screen, you know is planning to off himself. Maurice Ronet stars. As in Elevator to the Gallows, he's terrific in this, a quiet performance that has this terrific tension boiling just beneath the surface. Just a pitch perfect performance. The direction isn't heavy-handed, mostly passively eavesdropping on conversations Alain has with his friends. However, there is a lot of symbolism, and I don't understand one symbol--a round-headed wooden toy that is shown a few times and locked in a briefcase at the end. I really like the music, Erik Satie's bleak piano score that sounded really familiar. Poignant and depressing stuff, a very gray movie. It's very interesting to watch this movie so close to My Dinner with Andre. They're very different in tone and theme, but there are definitely some connections between the two.

Note: There are a lot of slug bugs (aka punch buggies) in this movie. Enjoy it with a friend!

Becket

1964 historical drama

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Sad times in 11th-Century England as two homosexual lovers split up.

Love the dynamic between a randy and spiralling-out-of-control O'Toole as Henry II and Burton as the calmer more contemplative Becket. Both characters have a passion though, and it comes across through some great dialogue. Like The Lion in Winter, the script seems to be written by a person who realizes that every word matters, and while watching, I felt that it was important not to miss a single word of the dialogue. Henry's got some of the bile and bite of The Lion in Winter Henry, but there's also a strange repressed tenderness and hurt in the character as well that makes him even more interesting. The developing conflict is very real and very tragic because there's a heart to the characters. I must say that I was a little bored whenever O'Toole wasn't on the screen although one of my favorite and most powerful scenes is when Becket excommunicates the guy. But O'Toole has a way of taking a character you're really supposed to hate (he's abusive to everybody including his mother, he's power hungry, he's too much the coward to come out of the closet, his facial hair is a little wacky, he whines) and making him not only immensely entertaining but somebody you sort of like and want to see more of. I think I like his Henry II in The Lion in Winter a little better maybe, but I like the sets better in this one. It's a very good-looking movie with vibrant colors and period textures. I also liked John Gielgud who plays the (also gay) French king.

This was recommended by Cory.

Monkey Business

1931 Marx Brothers silliness

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Grumpy, Bilbo, Dildo, and Flippo are stowaways on a ship heading for America. Between evading the ship's crew and being as obnoxious as possible, they are hired as body guards by rival gangsters. Despite the promise, monkeys have nothing to do with anything.

Pure, out-of-control zaniness abounds in this nearly plotless wankathon. The boys seem to thrive in this spontaneity, and it's great watching them have so much fun running around a boat, slowing down only to deliver some non-sequiturs or puns that nearly knock the wind out of you. I'd imagine that if a person likes the Marx Brothers, they'd like this movie even though it's not as great as A Night at the Opera or Duck Soup. The lack of musical numbers was a genuine relief after watching the last two which had too much singing. It is always great to see Harpo and Chico attack the harp and piano respectively though. Harpo gets the funniest bits (as usual?), the best dealing with his involvement with a puppet show. Chico, as my friend Anne McInslop would agree, is by far the sexiest of the Marx Brothers, however. I had a near religious experience (i.e. uncontrollable fits of giggling) while watching this, but I can't recall what I would have been laughing at.

The Luzhin Defense

2000 drama

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Aleksandr [sic] Luzhin is a brilliant and passionate chess player but has almost no ability to live any semblance of a normal life beyond the 64 squares of a chessboard or interact with anybody not made of wood. That is until he meets Natalia, the eccentric-lovin' daughter of wealthy parents, during the preliminaries of a chess tournament in Italy. She's attracted to his erratic genius; he wants to get in her pants. Or nudge her with his bishop, promote his pawn, exploit her flanks, have her mount his knight, etc. Will his obsessions get in the way of his newfound happiness and his ability to win the tournament? And what about the bearded guy?

I had to give a bonus point because the chess was real. The play of the grandmasters might not have looked real. They played awfully fast, but of course, nobody wants to sit around watching characters pondering moves over a chess board for the time it would take to make it realistic. I almost always enjoy Turturro, and I like him here as the obsessive genius type he plays so well (see, Barton Fink). The other characters are all pretty flat, and the antagonist's motivation doesn't make a lick of sense to me. The ending was unexpected, but not necessarily in a good way. Actually, the last fourth of the movie was a flurry of plot twists and silliness that butted heads with the reflective tone of the first three-fourths. I should admit that I did at least like the characters enough to get a little emotional and tear up a little at the end.