In one of the extras on the DVD release of Computer Chess, director Andrew Bujalski explains that the film came about after he realised how to marry two ideas which he had been conjuring with for a while: a then undeveloped interest in the period when computers were programmed to play chess, and a yen to make a film with vintage black-and-white video technology.
An exercise then, Computer Chess is hardly about the film itself. Making it was a means to enact these ideas. It’s a knowingly meta film. It looks amazing and comes over as an authentic-seeming archive resurrection, with all who appear looking appropriate for the early Eighties setting. All of which is jolly clever, but it is tough to engage with and is no fun at all. The film is dull and feels endless. Quirky elements like the hotel hosting the chess competition being overrun with cats, an encounter/rebirthing group and a maverick programmer who scams and schemes are charmless, clunky and unfunny.
Bujalski’s last film, 2009’s Beeswax, was charming and had a human side which took him beyond the stilted characterisations and settings of his first two films proper, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation. With Computer Chess, he appears to have returned to focusing on execution and form to the detriment of the end product.
The home video release, though, is a stunning package with a fat book and two discs featuring the film itself, earnest interviews with those in and involved with the film, two separate commentaries (one of which – credited to “an enthusiastic stoner” - is as interesting as a speak-and-spell machine and is probably a premature try at giving the film cult status) and short films on the camera technology and the vintage computers seen in the film. Sadly, these are more interesting than the laboured main feature.
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