Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (85 mins, PG) Directed by Vikram Jayanti; featuring Garry Kasparov
Big Fish (125 mins, 15) Directed by Tim Burton; starring Albert Finney, Jessica Lange, Ewan McGregor, Billy Crudup, Helena Bonham Carter
Scary Movie 3 (84 mins, 15) Directed by David Zucker; starring Anna Faris, Leslie Nielsen, Charlie Sheen, Anthony Anderson
Khakee (174 mins, 15) Directed by Rajkumar Santoshi; starring Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Aishwarya Rai
For such a sedentary, cerebral game, chess has provided some riveting cinematic entertainment, the latest being the fascinating documentary, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, a co-production between the BBC, the UK Film Council, the National Film Board of Canada and Alliance Atlantic, the American company that made Bowling for Columbine.
Like Raymond Bernard's silent epic of 1927, The Chess Player, about Baron von Kempelen's eighteenth-century chess-playing automaton, it concerns a man taking on a machine. Like Satyajit Ray's 1977 tale of chess-obsessed aristocrats in nineteenth-century India, The Chess Players, it's a political fable. Using existing TV footage, new interviews and artfully suggestive clips from Bernard's film, it looks at the two contests of 1995 and 1996 between Garry Kasparov and the IBM computer, Deep Blue, devised by a team of boffins and American grand masters.
He won the first, the machine won the second and, though we may know the result, the film comes over like a thriller with a plausible hero in Kasparov and a fascinating supporting cast of computer engineers and people from the chess subculture. The question it raises is: was there something conspiratorial involved in IBM's highly secretive activities? The company supervised both games, didn't allow anyone to inspect Deep Blue or see printouts from it, and guarded the venue as if it was the Pentagon or a summit conference. Its smug team was not to smile when it achieved the victory that boosted IBM's share price and changed its corporate image.
When Kasparov confronted Anatoly Karpov in 1985 for the world title, he believed that he was up against the Soviet establishment which looked down on him as an Armenian Jew and used dirty tricks in an attempt to defeat him. In 1996, it seemed as if the capitalist system in the form of IBM was out to beat him because he was an individual human being as well as an Eastern European. The term paranoid is bandied about on both sides, and Kasparov's reference at the time to Maradona and the hand of God made his suspicions plain.
Tim Burton has a rare gift for spinning fantastical tales and his two Batman movies, Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood are minor classics. But his last film, a lumbering remake of Planet of the Apes, was a grave disappointment, and in Big Fish he takes us wading through a swamp of Southern whimsy. A cross between It's a Wonderful Life and Forrest Gump, it switches between so-called real life and the tall tales told throughout his life by Edward Bloom (Albert Finney), a travelling salesman who never left his Alabama home town. His son, Will (Billy Crudup), accompanied by his pregnant French wife, returns home for a final meeting with his estranged father. His aim is to get behind Dad's fantasies and find the real man.
Apparently, everybody in town loves Edward, who, in flashbacks to his youth, is played by Ewan McGregor. Will is the only person not entranced by these magical, self-aggrandising stories about travelling with a giant, circus life, a one-eyed witch, parachuting into China during the Korean War, abducting a singing duo of conjoined Chinese twins, visiting a mystical town where people live forever and so on. In fact, a little of Edward's folksy narratives goes a very long way, and the movie is as phoney on the subject of family life as it is on the recent history of Alabama, where the only black appears to be the lovable old family doctor.
There are two flashbacks in Big Fish to a young man having a heart attack as he masturbates over a copy of Playboy. Permission to feature Hugh Hefner's magazine is gratefully acknowledged in the end credits. Scary Movie 3, a send-up of recent horror and SF pictures, uses, with only slight variations, scenes from The Ring, The Sixth Sense, Signs and The Matrix without any sort of acknowledgement. But then this is a comedy, more affectionate homage than meaningful satire.
To fill out its brief running time, the movie also includes an extended variation on the rap competition from the Eminem movie 8 Mile, and some less than innocent fun at the expense of Michael Jackson.
The vogue for this kind of mindless pastiche (a word that Hollywood seems to regard as a conflation of 'paste' and 'itch') was created in 1980 by Airplane!, a very funny movie that featured targets worthy of satirical attention. Airplane! was co-directed by David Zucker, who was also involved in various follow-ups, most notably the Naked Gun series. Instead of finding something worthy of his talent, Zucker has taken over the helm of the Scary Movie franchise from Keenen Ivory Wayans, and his only contribution has been to bring to the project one of the Airplane! stars, the deadpan Leslie Nielsen, who here appears as a dimwitted US President. Sadly, he's followed his predecessor's wilful crudity with jokes about vomiting, urination, farting, defecation and menstruation. This is not one of those occasions when you feel like giving Zucker an even break.
Rajkumar Santoshi's Khakee is a politically hard-hitting, physically pulverising Bollywood thriller starring the charismatic Amitabh Bachchan. He plays Anant, an ageing police inspector charged with escorting a supposed Muslim terrorist and a beautiful female witness (the gorgeous Aishwarya Rai) several hundred miles across hazardous terrain to appear in court in Bombay. The plot and characters are familiar, as are the true villains (corrupt politicians and bent policemen) and the hero's principal motive (duty and redemption).
There are violent shoot-outs in the Peckinpah manner and a score much indebted to Ennio Morricone, and the resemblance to The Gauntlet is such that the film might have been called Eastwood Ho! Santoshi manages to pack in three extravagant dance numbers, one of them cheekily inspired by having the cops drive past a movie crew shooting a musical in the desert. A combination of the knowing and the naïve, Khakee is a good deal of fun and offers a lot of footage for your money.
