Alex Bailey
Verbeke dots Bernal.
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Dot the I
Runs Fri., March 25–Thurs., March 31, at Varsity
A funny thing happens in the middle of a "hen party" at a snazzy French restaurant in London. The bride-to-be being feted, Carmen (Natalia Verbeke), is instructed by the snooty headwaiter that, according to French tradition, she is obliged to find the handsomest man in the place and plant a big fat kiss on him, to bid formal farewell to her swinging single life. She scans the place and chooses Kit (Gael García Bernal). The whole place applauds. But as their kiss goes on and on, it gets downright awkward. People quit clapping and start staring. Aghast at her unexpected passion, Carmen pulls free of Kit's lips and flees into the street, with him in hot pursuit. As Carmen tells Kit later, where she comes from (Spain), they have a saying: A kiss is the dot on the "i" of love (cariño). These two start dotting with a vengeance.
Her proper English fiancé, Barnaby (James D'Arcy), senses something's amiss. D'Arcy's kindly, faunlike face was perfect when he played Jack Aubrey's first lieutenant in Master and Commander, and it's good for his spindly rich-kid role here. Barnaby means well for Carmen, but all the money in the world can't make up for the drabness of her banging Barnaby in his blingy boudoir out of premarital duty versus hitting the orgasm jackpot after sneaking to Kit's starving-actor garret. That's why Mary McCarthy stayed married, after all—so she could have someone to cheat on.
Except that Carmen gets no pleasure from it, only guilt. She's just a passionate, flamenco-dancing girl. She never asked to be named after an opera tart! How could her life ever get so complicated?
Then she discovers that the men in her life are keeping dark secrets—even Kit's Wayne and Garth–like stoner cohorts are in on the mazelike nest of conspiracies. Yet true hearts are mixed up in all this, too. An exceedingly complicated but more or less comprehensible series of chases, betrayals, and switcheroos ensues, jauntily shot by Almodóvar's and Ghost World'scinematographer, Affonso Beato.
Alas, Dot's contrived plot goes over the top, leaving emotion behind. Verbeke (Jump Tomorrow) can't act and speak English at the same time. Her passionate Spanish nature just looks silly, even when she's off the flamenco stage. At least she's killer cute; Bernal has somehow lost his looks since Bad Education, and his animal magnetism. D'Arcy comes off like a teenager in the school play—he's not acting, he's trying to act like he's acting. In all, first-time writer/director Matthew Parkhill gets a passing grade on this technical exercise—more like a C-minus than an I. (R) TIM APPELO
Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
Runs Fri., March 25–Thurs., March 31, at Varsity
Arriving by coincidence just after chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov announced his retirement from the game, this 2003 documentary finds the rueful world champion obsessing over a 1997 match he wishes he'd never played. Why make a movie about a contest that, even six years later, was old news? Director Vikram Jayanti is basically trying to weave a conspiracy flick out of Kasparov's embarrassing loss to the IBM-designed "Deep Blue" supercomputer. And Kasparov—obviously a man still holding a grudge inside that enormous brain of his—is only too willing to play the part of the hero caught up in a dark net of corporate intrigue and under-the-table trickery.
None of the movie's insinuations and vague allegations is remotely convincing, but that never stopped Oliver Stone. It's even possible to imagine that Stone could've used crazy camera techniques, baroque re-enactments, and probably the music of the Doors to rewrite chess history in an entertainingly fraudulent fashion. I can see Nick Nolte, Tommy Lee Jones, and maybe Kevin Bacon as the evil IBM engineers messing with the head of Kasparov (played perhaps by Kevin Costner or Charlie Sheen or Colin Farrell). Their scheme to raise the company's stock price—as actually happened—by winning the rigged match would involve gay prostitutes, drug-smuggling contras, Indian shamans, the JFK assassination, insider trading, the war in Vietnam, professional football, and Alexander the Great. In other words, ride the snake.
Alas, Game Over is not that snake. The IBM guys all seem nerdy and decent. A sympathetic Kasparov mutters that he was pitted against "this terrible, faceless monster." Talking heads and "chess journalists"— a new field to me—comment on the match. There are some low-quality video clips of the event, held in a New York hotel. But why bother? Eight years later, the game is now over for Kasparov (who's apparently going into Russian politics as a fierce opponent of Putin), as it is for IBM, which is getting out of the PC business and is nobody's idea of a good stock pick.
It's still possible that a great movie about chess, or Kasparov, could be made, but it will take a better mind than Jayanti's, or Stone's, to create it. Hey, what's Deep Blue doing these days anyway? (NR) BRIAN MILLER
