COMPUTER CHESS (Andrew Bujalski) Rating: NNNN
Shot on repellent black-and-white video to better replicate its early-80s setting, Computer Chess is strangely of a piece with writer/director Andrew Bujalski’s previous thorny romantic dramedies. This one just happens to play out between men and their machines.
Over a long weekend, a small army of nerdy men (and one woman) descend on a remote hotel for a computer chess competition and proceed to screw up each other’s lives and careers with gusto.
Shooting the desolate setting with terrible period video cameras, Bujalski spins out a series of vignettes that gradually coalesce into a larger narrative about smart people trying to understand things that don’t want to be understood, from cranky computers that insist on throwing matches to the possibility of deeper connections with their human rivals.
And, yes, that is indeed Dazed And Confused’s Wiley Wiggins as one of the more frustrated programmers.
