Computer Chess

Here's an unlikely setting for a terrific movie: a tournament, held sometime around 1980, of computer programmers, competing to see who has the best chess program. But Andrew Bujalski, in his 2013 film Computer Chess, has made a bright, fascinating film about a subculture that basically changed the way we live.

Shot in black and white on a period analog video camera, the film takes place in some anonymous hotel, as men with clunky glasses and pornstaches lug large computer monitors around, talking code and the implications of artificial intelligence (one fellow, fairly accurately, says that the future of computers is dating). There is one woman present, who is repeatedly welcomed, as if her presence was as surprising as a dog's would be.

Slowly the film settles on few characters. There's Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige), an obstreperous independent programmer, who spends his nights wandering the hotel, since his reservation was lost. Martin Beuscher is part of the Cal Tech team (he's played by Wiley Wiggins, who was the long-haired Little League pitcher in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused), who discovers a glitch in his program and then resigns before a game even starts, and his student assistant, Peter (Patrick Reister), a glum nebbish.

Bujalski layers the film even more by adding another group at the hotel--an encounter group, who do new age things like restaging one's birth. This leads to a hilarious scene when Reister is lured into the room of a swinging couple. He ends up running out of the room, but will later have an encounter with a prostitute who has an interesting secret.

For those who love computers, this will seem like a trip to a museum. That's where they must have found the hardware, those monitors with the space-age design. One competitor doesn't even have a monitor--he plugs in the moves and then the results are printed. But beyond the computer stuff, the film reaches inside and finds the human heart of a technological pursuit.

I've seen all of Bujalski's films (they're all reviewed on this site) and I've liked them all immensely. This one is a bit different, as it can't really be called mumblecore. Well, maybe it can, as the film was largely improvised, but it is more far-reaching in its pursuit.