YARDS OF GRAPEVINE | Movies, TV, Oscars & S'more

Andrew Bujalski’s whispery, tiny-budget films are, to some, representations of a predominantly white, late-20’s, well-educated perspective on a nation that’s become equal parts pacifying and challenging to that exact demographic. Perhaps the expectations of such films come less from the realities of the works themselves and more from their shoestring budgets. In general, less money equals more reality, or at least an attempt to capture reality. That these films, formerly known by the now dirty term “mumblecore,” are steeped in artifice and projection only adds to the difficulty of classifying them. I tend to find these films to be spawned on the ideals of lazy dreams and parentally-funded lifestyles, thus making them suitably exemplifying of a generation that has too many options and too little data on smart decisions.

It’s fitting then that Bujalski’s first venture away from his patented aesthetic would be about a group of white nerds (and one white woman) pontificating on chess and the nature of artifice. People, it seems Bujalski might be saying, have become as much an artificial construction as the computers they create. As a cinematic experience, Computer Chess fails to engage on almost every basic level, and most often becomes watchable only when resorting to the exact tropes it pushes away, yet it succeeds with gusto at capturing the delusional confusion at the precipice of a computer-driven world. There’s a direct line between these nerds in an Austin hotel room and the Harvard-trained nerds who would soon populate Austin coffee shops on their personal computers.

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