« Clockers | Main | Stupid Flash Games »
February 25, 2005
The Luzhin Defense
The Luzhin Defense (2000), Marleen Gorris:
First off, Marleen Gorris is one of the best names in directing I've ever heard.
John Turturro plays the title chess grandmaster well, even though it's the same socially incompetant genius. Emily Watson is really cute, as always, playing the socialite that loves him.
Movies about chess really are just sports movies, and this is no exception, clothed as it is in Nabokov's Victorian (Victorian?) trappings. It builds the conflict well enough, but the resolution is both ludicrous and anti-climactic.
The other half is just as bad. Can just say that I'm really sick of the overbearing mother? It must be so easy just to throw a character up on the screen and hope it sticks without any regard to making her interesting or human or the very least non-two-dimensional. That's the movie. It's well-crafted only because it doesn't try to do anything that hasn't been done before. I'm sure Nabokov wasn't this banal (who knows, he might have been) so the movie ruins its one genuine asset.
6/15
Posted by bing at February 25, 2005 11:50 PM