Computer Chess (**1/2)

I like low-budget films that make a virtue of necessity, and this one does that. Setting his story almost entirely in a middle-budget hotel, Andrew Bujalski follows a group of computer programmers pitting their skills against each other in a machine-on-machine tournament. Also, it’s 1982, 15 years before IBM’s Deep Blue would defeat champion Garry Kasparov in a match, and around the same length of time before geek was used as a compliment. The lone female programmer is a novelty.

Bujalski used old video equipment to make the film in black and white and even includes what look like technical glitches. It somewhat resembles an old shot-on-video documentary, though without actual interview segments and with brief flashbacks and other things a documentary wouldn’t have. So, it’s a pretty clever film that vividly recalls the pre-Internet era of technology. Ostensibly, it’s a comedy, but it wasn’t funny enough that I heard laughter in the audience I saw it with. About the most chuckle-producing incident is a college kid’s awkward encounter with a middle-aged couple attending some kind of New Age-y spiritual retreat being held simultaneously with the tournament. When the wife says that the 64 squares on a chess board is so limiting, he points out that, actually, the number of possible plays it allows is more than 10 to the 120th power.

The college kid is perhaps the most prominent character, along with an older programmer who hasn’t reserved a room and spends his evenings trying to find somewhere to sleep. However, no character is on screen more than 25 minutes or so. (It’s doubtful you’ll recognize any of the actors either, which further helps this seem like an old film that someone found.) The movie is so faithful to its premise that in fact it seems only about as interesting as it would have been were it truly a 30-year-old documentary from an old convention. It’s of little consequence who wins the tournament and there are no other major storylines. So, while the movie was original, it left me wanting a little more.

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viewed 7/31/13 7:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/31/13

Kenny (***1/4)

If you know the word mockumentary, you probably associate it with the films of Christopher Guest, of Best in Show/A Mighty Wind fame, or maybe Borat, or the Woody Allen film Zelig. But the one I probably would most be able to believe was a about a real person would be this Aussie film by brothers Clayton and Shane Jacobson. Clayton is the credited director, while Shane gives an utterly natural performance as the title character, a plumber who leads a crew of port-a-potty installers in the Melbourne area. You probably never thought about portable toilets, but Kenny thinks about them all the time. For example, when determining how many toilets you need for a particular event, it’s not enough to just know the number of people. You need to know whether food’s being served, and in particular whether there will be curry, which can significantly impact the piss-and-shit ratio.

Yeah, there’s some literal toilet humor here, but not the obvious (i.e., no fart jokes). For a movie about portable toilets, it’s much less crude than Borat—wisely, the Jacobsons avoid showing actual human waste, even if its presence is frequently implied. Most of the laughs come from the way Kenny speaks, whether it’s about a smell that will “outlast religion” or something “as silly as a bum full of Smarties.” (The version I saw had subtitles, which definitely helped between the Aussie accent and Kenny’s unusual turns of phrase.)

With Guest’s semi-improvised comedies, I sometimes have the feeling that the dialogue is forced. But here, I never once felt like Kenny/Jacobson was trying to be funny. The character may be unusually fascinated by plumbing, but he’s not at all a buffoon, and proves quite likeable. If anything may put people off, other than Kenny’s job, it’s that there is not really an overall plot. Whereas Borat is a travelogue, and Guest’s movies are mostly built around particular events like a dog show or a TV concert, Kenny is more like a year in the life of its main character, and so is episodic. Still, the festival audience I saw it with clearly found it very funny. In Kenny’s relationships with his father and with a woman he meets on a trip to America, it’s even a little bit touching. Fair dinkum, as the Aussies say.

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viewed 4/14/08; reviewed 4/19/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival

Surf's Up (***)

Another animated movie about penguins, but actually something different. The story is told as a faux documentary, ostensibly being filmed set to air on the fictive sports SPEN network, about an underdog (underbird?), voiced by Shia LaBeouf, who heads for a big surfing championship, hoping to follow in the shoes of his idol, the late Big Z. Along the way he meets a hot female penguin (Zooey Deschanel) and her laid-back dad (Jeff Bridges, perhaps channeling his Big Lebowski character). The result is more often clever than funny, but it avoids most of the cloying sentimentality of family fare. However, the format, with its quick cuts and style reminiscent of actual surf movies like Riding Giants, means that younger kids won’t really follow it, and even older kids might miss some of the parody aspects of the story, which actually makes few jokes that have anything to do with penguins, and more to do with the clichés spouted by athletes being interviewed.

(Reviewed 6/15/07)
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Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (**3/4)

? This is the big-screen debut of the TV character created by Sacha Baron Cohen as part of Da Ali G Show. In that HBO reality show, Cohen transforms himself into three outlandish characters who interact with celebrities and others who aren’t in on the joke. The movie version incorporates a plot whereby Borat, said to be a Kazakh journalist, travels from his homeland, a misogynistic, anti-Semitic backwater, to make a documentary about the USA. (Hence the mangled syntax of the title and the cheap TV-style graphics we see.) Bookended segments take place in this fictional version of Kazakhstan, where Borat jovially introduces such figures as the town rapist and we get to see the annual “running of the Jews.” Most of the movie is a quasi-travelogue, with Borat and his manager meeting Americans in red and blue states.

+ A lot of the movie is flat-out hilarious and prompted a lot of laughter at the preview screening I attended. In the “real people” segments, Borat has it both ways. It’s funny when the people are shocked by Borat’s attitudes and/or ignorance, and funny (if disturbing) when they seem to agree. In other cases, such as when he appears on a local TV news show (which apparently aired), the people are just bewildered or made uncomfortable by the “Kazakh” customs such as men kissing on the cheek. I’m sure some people would be offended by all the anti-Jewish remarks of the sort not usually seen outside a Holocaust drama, but given that they emanate from a character who’s basically a buffoon (and played by a Jew), this seems an obtuse view.

- I was a fan of Da Ali G Show, and I think I still would rather watch that. The “documentary” segments only serve to accentuate the artificiality of the part added for the movie, which is to say the plot. I would have been happy if all or nearly all of the movie was just unsuspecting people talking to Borat, without all the stuff about having his money stolen and such. Although Cohen never breaks character, Borat does engage in some Jackass-style antics that, while comical, don’t seem like anything even an ignorant, anti-Semitic misogynist would do. All that being said, there was one particularly funny (if disturbing) sequence with Borat getting into a naked altercation.

= **3/4 [original rating **1/2] Cohen’s characters make me a little uncomfortable, either because I’m embarrassed for him or for the people he’s fooling, not all of whom deserve it. If you like this kind of humor, which is really a variation on shows like Candid Camera, that might not bother you, nor will the uneven plot.

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Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (**)

A farcical “making of” documentary about the nonexistent movie version of a classic novel. Star Steve Coogan is likeable and often funny, but the concept quickly wears thin.

This movie bears a bit of explaining. The short version is, it’s a fake “making of” documentary about a movie that wasn’t actually made. We see parts of that movie, an adaptation of the “unfilmable” 18th-century (real) literary classic The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. In these scenes, Steve Coogan plays the title character (and his father). Like his counterpart in the novel, Coogan as Shandy narrates his own life. In one funny bit, he disparages the performance of the child actor playing his younger self. But for most of the movie, Coogan plays Coogan. Should you see this film, it will help you to know that in the UK he is well known for playing a fake TV talk-show host called Alan Partridge who has real guests (akin to Martin Short’s Jiminy Glick). Here he’s a fake Steve Coogan in a real movie. (An Alan Partridge movie looms on the horizon.) Other people, such as Yank Gillian Anderson, play themselves too in the mockumentary portion, but others don’t. For instance, Kelly McDonald, as the mother of Coogan’s child, is called Jenny. This all sounds very clever, and it is, even if the funniest scene echoes There’s Something About Mary. If this sounds like your thing, I shouldn’t dissuade you from seeing it. But whenever I saw Coogan acting pompous on screen, I was reminded that it was actually Coogan modestly poking fun at himself, and pretty soon, for me, the lack of a real storyline wore thin.

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