This is a profound film about life, creation and art and IMO one of the best from last year. It is also one of the most original and the bravest film to come out in a long time. I love this film.
This is incredibly well crafted. I suspect some of the negative comments are coming from the place of my-kid/intern-could-film-that, but it definitely takes skill to embody the characters and their social context in the films' style as well as has been done here. Filming this with a more or less conventional (professional) style - or even a standard mockumentary style - would have been so much easier, and I'm really glad that that's not the route the team took.
Presented as an early 80s indie documentary about computer programs playing against one another in a tournament, Computer Chess is a dry, awkward comedy that only seldom betrays its fictional nature by putting the camera where it shouldn't be. You can almost believe it was a relatively prescient piece made 30 years before it actually was, and I found myself interested in it as if it actually were a documentary (at least, the chess bits). I'm not sure it really earns its very weird endings, devolving into lo-fi phantasmagoria at too steep an angle, but it does have some intriguing themes, like the birth of something that could supplant us (more relevant today than in 2013), and the loops A.I. can get trapped into not that dissimilar to our own problematic behaviors. In the real world, glitches abound. Why do we expect any better from our machines? Computer Chess is a little cursory with some of its story elements, but there's enough there for a recommendation and I'd have spent more time with its characters.
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Thorkell
This is a profound film about life, creation and art and IMO one of the best from last year. It is also one of the most original and the bravest film to come out in a long time. I love this film.CSSCHNEIDER
I love the concept but I don't love the movie.Larkspire
This is incredibly well crafted. I suspect some of the negative comments are coming from the place of my-kid/intern-could-film-that, but it definitely takes skill to embody the characters and their social context in the films' style as well as has been done here. Filming this with a more or less conventional (professional) style - or even a standard mockumentary style - would have been so much easier, and I'm really glad that that's not the route the team took.Siskoid
Presented as an early 80s indie documentary about computer programs playing against one another in a tournament, Computer Chess is a dry, awkward comedy that only seldom betrays its fictional nature by putting the camera where it shouldn't be. You can almost believe it was a relatively prescient piece made 30 years before it actually was, and I found myself interested in it as if it actually were a documentary (at least, the chess bits). I'm not sure it really earns its very weird endings, devolving into lo-fi phantasmagoria at too steep an angle, but it does have some intriguing themes, like the birth of something that could supplant us (more relevant today than in 2013), and the loops A.I. can get trapped into not that dissimilar to our own problematic behaviors. In the real world, glitches abound. Why do we expect any better from our machines? Computer Chess is a little cursory with some of its story elements, but there's enough there for a recommendation and I'd have spent more time with its characters.mjb0123
Concept good. Movie just bad. Feel it could be better if you gave it to the guys that did Best in Show or Spinal Tap.Film Noir World
Looks and feels like a geeky vintage black&white documentary about a computer chess tournament in 1982, but there's probably more to it.http://rickatthemovies.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/computer-chess-andrew-bujalski-2013-english/