Mud Songs

Searching for Bobby Fischer became one of my favourites when I first saw it in a theatre in 1993. I was hooked after the opening narration by 8-year-old Max Pomeranc that recounts Bobby Fischer’s rise to fame as one of the best chess players in the world and ends with the whispered words: “He disappeared.” Then we discover the narrator is a child prodigy, a genius chess player who some call a young Bobby Fischer. But where Bobby Fischer was a nut, this kid stays on a path that keeps him sane. He plays baseball and goes fishing and doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. It’s a good story.

I saw Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine last night, a documentary about the 1997 chess match between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue. Kasparov lost and then claimed IBM cheated. IBM’s behaviour was indeed suspicious. They had something like 30 grand masters as “consultants,” but you have wonder if some of these guys were in a back room somewhere over-riding some of Deep Blue’s moves. It’s an intriguing subject for a documentary, but the approach to it is stupid. Instead of letting the facts stand on their own, a variety of techniques are used to dramatize the events. An inaudible voice-over narration where two guys whisper the whole time as if they’re watching a chess match. Interviews where the camera is constantly going in and out of focus, moving all over the place, or filming from behind an office plant (like a hidden camera?). Music that sounds like it was written for Darth Vader. After-the-fact slow-motion close-ups of Kasparov’s eyes. All of this is done so badly, it makes the subject laughable and distracts from the real drama of the events. Too bad. If they’d just done a straightforward documentary, it could have been good. (More research about chess would have helped too.) If you want to watch good movie about chess, check out Searching for Bobby Fischer instead.