The Best Chess Movies (and TV Show)?
Here's one person's top ten list. (HT: Marginal Revolution.) (Disregard the author's wildly false title, "Every Chess Movie, Ranked".)
Here's one person's top ten list. (HT: Marginal Revolution.) (Disregard the author's wildly false title, "Every Chess Movie, Ranked".)
I've seen most of these movies and they're not bad, but if this (HT: Tyler Cowen) is our top ten list it's a pretty lame genre. Can you think of some other, hopefully better movies? "Chess Fever" belongs there, and I think the documentary on Boris Gelfand's world championship battle with Viswanathan Anand probably does, too. And of course, the greatest chess movie of all time was the Cal-Tech short film with Stephen Hawking, Paul Rudd, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, if only for the two-second fragment from 4:08 to 4:10. This, my friends, is not up for dispute.
There are also movies where there are significant chess scenes, even if they're not technically "chess movies". (Hmm, this seems a bit like the ridiculous debate about whether "Die Hard" is a Christmas movie. You're all welcome to weigh in on that pressing issue as well.) For instance, there's "The Seventh Seal", "The Thomas Crown Affair", "To Russia With Love", "2001: A Space Odyssey", etc.
Thoughts and recommendations?
The old Walter Tevis novel, "The Queen's Gambit", has been adapted by Netflix. I'm old enough to remember the endless discussions about whether Bobby Fischer was crazy or emotionally disturbed, and you can get more of this in "Luzhin's Defense", so I don't exactly feel a burning desire to see further portrayals of chess players whose sanity is in on the edge.
For those of you who have seen it, what do you think? (Please don't include spoilers.) Here are some essentially spoiler-free comments by Tyler Cowen, primarily on the chess elements.
I didn't watch the movie when it was in theaters, but had a look now that it's on DVD. It's based on the story of the young Ugandan player Phiona Mutesi, who, while not a prodigy in any conventional sense (her FIDE rating is 1628), was able to perform remarkably well given an environment that didn't conduce to success in chess or any other overtly intellectual pursuit.
It's a formula movie, but a well-done entrant in the genre. Moreover, it's good publicity for chess, and not only because it presents chess players presented as human beings rather than collections of neuroses straight out of the DSM-5. (Well, Mutesi is presented that way. Her opponents tend to be a somewhat haughty lot, puffed up before the game and distraught afterward. There's probably a rule somewhere that Hollywood can only dispense with one stereotype at a time; perhaps they think audiences are so simple-minded that making everyone in a movie three-dimensional would be too confusing.)
Anyway, while it's not a must-see it's a decent movie, especially for kids and our "civilian" (i.e. non-chess-playing) friends.
That is the enigmatic title of a Dutch documentary from 1979, filmed mostly in and around that year's Dutch chess championships, and features mostly Jan Timman, Hans Ree, Ulf Andersson, Jan Hein Donner and Max Euwe. You can watch it below - just make sure to switch on the English subtitles (unless of course you understand Dutch).
A number of games are shown or referred to, and I've done my best to compile them for you, here.
Here's a bonus of sorts. Early on in the film Donner says that "[i]n the split second you touch the piece you'll see more than you have seen in the past 30 minutes or hour in which you have been thinking." This is of course an exaggeration, but it is true that players very often recognize their move (or their intended move) to have been a mistake the instant after they touch the piece or worse, release it and hit the clock. As if on cue, I had paused the film above shortly after seeing Donner's comment, and then before having the chance to return to the documentary watched the following blitz game online:
At 2:10 Alexander Morozevich, with Black, plays ...a5, and after thinking for 24 seconds his fellow GM, Vladimir Belous, plays the queen from d1 to d2, and only then recognizes that it's a blunder - Black will play ...g5 winning a piece. At least that's what I assumed. It makes sense of the move he finally does play another 20 seconds later, Qc1. Ironically, though, three moves later Belous plays e3, allowing ...g5 anyway. I'm not completely sure he intended it as a piece sacrifice, both because his compensation dries up pretty quickly and because I think I detected a tiny expression of surprise/shock right after he made his move - but I could be wrong, and will leave it to you to decide. At any rate, I suspect that many of you could share horror stories of moves recognized as blunders a moment after it is too late.
There's a new, widely praised movie about chess called "The Dark Horse" that was released in New Zealand last year and is scheduled for worldwide release very soon. It's about a real person named Genesis Potini (1964-2011), apparently a speed chess specialist, who in spite of his own psychological struggles formed a chess club to work with underprivileged youth. (If any New Zealanders reading this have seen it, please offer your reviews.)
It looks promising, and it's nice to see chess treated respectfully. It is ironic that this is yet one more movie where the protagonist is a mentally unstable chess player, but thankfully it doesn't look as if chess is going to be portrayed as at all related to Potini's illness.
HT: Marc Beishon
The documentary film Chess: A State of Mind came out in 1986 and was written by British IM William Hartston. This (almost) 30-minute piece offers a recap of the world championship from Paul Morphy (not an official champion) through the beginning of the Garry Kasparov era. It goes from Morphy through Boris Spassky pretty quickly, and then takes its time with Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov. Viktor Korchnoi gets a lot of air time in the Karpov segment, and both Korchnoi and Spassky have a bit of fun at Karpov's expense.
Young whippersnappers should watch for the history lesson, and oldsters should watch for the nostalgia.