Word: chess
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...then, as the din gradually subsided, Nigel Short and Gary Kasparov began to push chess pieces across a board...
...Luck Club, have four American- born girls, now in their 30s. While the daughters follow the quiet ambition fed them at birth -- to be unostentatiously extraordinary -- the mothers fret and fuss. You're not a good enough pianist; you're too proud about your gift for playing chess. "I'd rather get rectal cancer" than have you marry that Caucasian. And look at the top bedroom in this pricey home he built for you: "A million dollars, and the walls are still crooked." (In fact, the guys are relentlessly nerdy; this is a woman's movie, start to finish...
...picture often has the flashy moves of a chess patzer. Phone books are smashed and chessmen trashed. Josh plays catch in a sepulchral chess club, inhabited by a veritable cuckoo's nest of chess nuts. The movie also distorts the chess education of this bantam Rocky. It has Josh learning almost equally from Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley) and a kindly street hustler (Laurence Fishburne). In fact, Pandolfini was the boy's main teacher. Kingsley does have a charismatic gravity and the carriage of -- Fred Waitzkin's phrase -- "a ruined aristocrat." In portraying a teacher whom Josh refers to as "a great...
...love and money -- unlike their European counterparts, American chess players rarely make a living from the game -- Pandolfini agreed to be an adviser on the film. He showed actors how to grab the chess pieces ("There is a certain elegance to it," he says) and devised some 200 chess positions. For him, "The film isn't so much about trying to find the next Bobby Fischer; it is about trying to find those good times that came upon Fischer's success in 1972, when chess was suddenly important to the American public...
...brilliance. Now he must prepare for cinematic notoriety. "I hope there isn't upheaval," he says. "I like our lives." And Josh? He likes his life a lot these days, and being a movie star once removed isn't the reason. "I never understood the beauty of chess," he says. "But about two years ago, I discovered the artistic, creative side of chess, and that has given me added inspiration. I tell you, I never had such enthusiasm as I do now." Let's hope this wise child never grows...