CIPC #105: The bone collector
The bone collector. With a title like that, who can blame me that I was expecting a thrilling tale of ruthless rivalry, fierce competition, and enormous piles of bones in a nice Victorian setting, in short, that I was expecting an in-depth documentary about the Marsh and Cope bone wars? But, alas, it was not to be. There are no triceratopses, no allosauruses, in fact, no palaeontological digs at all. There is just a dime-a-dollar giallo knock-of with a magnificently stupid plot centred around Denzel Washington playing a quadriplegic ex-police detective who guides a rather clueless patrol officer (Angelina Jolie) through crime scene after crime scene in search for the murderer du jour because he thinks she’s talented, for a reason which remains more of a mystery than who the killer is.1 At the beginning of the film, before the bodies start hitting the floor (or river, as the case may be), Denzel spends his time playing chess with his voice controlled computer.
CIPC #103: Bertina Henrichs, Die Schachspielerin
The long-time readers of this blog might remember how, quite a while ago, I made a few blog posts about my impressions while watching movies which heavily feature chess. I have also made some others about books. Why not combine both types of blog post? Why not read a book in which chess plays an important role an write down my thoughts while reading? There a few such books, but the most famous ones, like Nabokov’s Luzhin Defense and Zweig’s Schachnovelle carefully avoid the sort of ridiculousness which makes for good blog posts. This is probably not going to be a problem in today’s subject, Bertina Henrichs Die Schachspielerin.1 It was translated by Claudia Steinitz, whose name is probably the closest connection this book has to actual chess. Let’s see what happens. Apart from spoilers, that is.