chess films

So this past week I recently saw Searching For Bobby Fischer and Fresh (Which I often call "Searching for Bobby Fischer in tha Hood". They are both good movies, they are both about chess, and they are both screaming to be compared to one another.

Searching for Bobby Fischer is the story of real-life chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, a young middle-class white kid who enters the world of competitive chess. (Certain aspects of the movie are fictional even though many of the characters correspond to real people). For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the film is the fact that so much of it is actually set up like a chessboard, in the sense of being composed of adjacent black and white squares. For most characters, there are several other characters who are their "opposite" according to some point of view.

In Fresh, the action of the plot also mirrors the game of chess but in a different way; several of the characters are clearly meant to correspond to chess pieces. And so even though the main character Michael (nicknamed Fresh) is a chess prodigy who learned how to play the game from his father (played by Samuel Jackson), the most important "game" in the movie the very real struggle of Fresh to against himself and the forces which conspire to overwhelm him. So where Josh is a real person watching an unreal game, Fresh is a fictional character but he is "playing" in the real world. But like watching a chess game, we never see Fresh explaining to us the ultimate plan behind his actions. All we see are a series of moves. Drugs are swapped. A lie is told. Pieces sacrificed. And in the end, one side or another ends up checkmated (or is it a draw?)

Either way, I would highly recommend both movies. (And it is interesting to see them together). They both have excellent casts, excellent dialogue (Chess definitely needs more trash-talking) and excellent stories.