Belgian Chess History

After amusing ourselves with some light-weight television series and some comedies, we now turn to more serious matters once again. The serious matter at hand is a 1935 film Boris Karloff  in the double role of twin brothers Gregor and Anton de Berghman. They are members of an old noble family, and the subjects of a prophecy that foretells that when twins will be born in the family again, one of them will murder the other in the eponymical black room, a room in the old family castle that, because of this prophecy, has been walled off. Gregor rules over the local village, his brother Anton has recently come back at the request of his brother.

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We’ve had Tintin already on this blog, we’ve had Hercule Poirot, we’ve had Lucky Luke, we’ve had Devereaux. It’s time knock another famous fictional Belgian off the list: dr. Evil! He is the antagonist of the Austin Powers movies, a series of parodical films from the late nineties and the early nillies, starring Mike Myers in the title role, that of dr. Evil, and that of Fat Bastard as well. Today’s subject is the second instalment of the series. The plot is that Austin Powers’s famous mojo, which is irresistible to women, has been stolen. He has to go back in time to save it.

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For a brief period of time a the very end of the eighties and in the beginning of the nineties, Bill & Ted were big. Very, very big. The highly popular first movie, which we talk about more in a bit, appeared in 1989 and sparked two television series, a 1991 sequel and a second sequel this very year, almost three decades after the original. That original one is about two high school kids who are about to flunk their history class. As this would irreparably damage the spacetime-continuum, they get help from time travellers to collect some significant figures from all through history.

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Let’s continue this strange trend of recent movies appearing on this blog. Today’s victim is Thoroughbreds, a 2017 film starring Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy. It is about two teenage girls, from rich families but deprived of both redeeming characters and natural speech inflections, who are plotting to kill the step-father of one of them. Before their plotting has gotten very far, they can be seen in the garden at a stone chessboard:

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Is chess in terrible kids movies with talking pets a trend? First there was the horrendous Alvin and the chipmunks: The Squeakquel from 2009 and now there is the only marginally better Think like a dog from this very year. It is the story of a boy genius who wants to prevent his parents’ divorce by making them think more like a dog. Its most remarkable feature is that it manages to be both contrived beyond believe and, at the same time, as bland as McDonald’s fries.

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