It Seems That Most People Who Saw Revolver Really, Really Hated It

I'm just saying that as a warning: I like the movie very much, but most people hated it. So don't take my positive review as a guarantee that you would like it. Don't go see it because of what I'm saying and then come back angrily to me because you hated it, because I warned you: most people hated it.

I've mentioned the film a few times already in this blog, in connection with chess: watching the movie has significantly improved my chess game.

Okay, as long as I'm warning you about the movie, I should mention that it contains lots of violence, nudity and vulgar language. Lots and lots and lots of all three, so if those are things which make you not like a movie, then there's no point in you watching this movie.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to stop reading this blog post, because violence, nudity and vulgar language are not the interesting things to me about Revolver, and those interesting things can be looked into without seeing the movie, if it's not your kind of movie. The interesting things are: Kabbalah, and overcoming the ego.

Let's take the 2nd one first. This may be something that many or even most people are already familiar with, but it had eluded me until I watched Revolver: the concept of the ego as an enemy of the true self, the ego as an obstacle.

One of the things which the movie relates to the ego is the game of chess. Jake Green, the film's protagonist, played by Jason Statham, is released from prison at the beginning of the movie. He had done part of his time in solitary confinement in a cell between a chess Grandmaster and a con-man. Jake never saw either of them, but he did intercept many of the notes they passed back and forth, and he learned a little about chess. After his release, he becomes mixed up with a couple of loan sharks, Zach (Vincent Pastore) and Avi (André Benjamin), and plays some games of chess with Avi.

Before I ever saw Revolver, I had already noticed some of the ways in which ego interferes with playing chess. In some of my blog posts about chess I noted that over-confidence in my ability as a chess player leads directly to disastrously poor chess play. In Revolver, this interference is addressed much more directly. In the film, chess is one of the things which teach Jake about the ego. For example, the ego resists playing stronger players. It wants to win all of the time. Even though it's very plain to see that a chess player (or, as the chess players in the movie point out, a player in any sort of game) can only improve by playing stronger players -- which of course will involve a lot of losing, which offends the ego. In his games with Avi, after having studied chess in prison for years with not much else to do, Jake wins game after game, and after one of the many times Jake announces checkmate, Avi says with annoyance that he's not going to play Jake anymore.

But since watching the movie I'm playing stronger players much more, and surprise surprise, my game has improved quite a lot.

As I have written on this blog before, I've seen chess games where the very best players in the world -- Fischer, Kasparov and other world champions -- lost, analyzed by the world champion who lost. Whereas for the most part it's very unusual to come across games analyzed by the losing players. I keep analyzing games I've won, even though I realize how much my game could benefit from analyzing games I've lost. My ego is still directly interfering with my chess game to that extent, and I can see it, and I still can't bring myself to battle my ego that much. I believe I've analyzed a total of 1 game I've lost on this blog.

Oh well. Rome wasn't built in a day, and it's not as if I make my living from chess.

Revolver represents only the 2nd time of which I'm clearly aware in which a work of art directly, tangibly and immediately improved my life by explaining something about my own mind to me. The first time was decades ago when I read Gravity's Rainbow, which explained to me that paranoia consists of irrationally over-estimating the amount of attention other people pay to you. I just needed to remind myself that others had plenty of better things to do than participate in a plot against me, and poof, there went my paranoid tendencies.

Again, maybe that was everyday common knowledge to many or most people, but to me it needed pointing out.

Also, at the end of the movie several different people, not playing fictional characters, spoke about the ego. I think some of them were psychiatrists. One of them was Deepak Chopra, and he said something which I didn't find dopey. I like that. A few years ago, I was caught up in a feud between New Atheism and Chopra. In the meantime I have come to regard New Atheists as dopey. Who knows, maybe Chopra belongs on the long, long list of people and things about which the New Atheists are wrong.

The other interesting thing about Revolver is the Kabbalah symbolism: names, numbers, colors, mannerisms and other things refer to symbolism and archetypes of Kabbalah. I don't really know anything about Kabbalah yet, but the colors are purty, which I think is way cool, and the stories are interesting, whether they actually make sense or not. (And SOME of them probably DO!) I'm an atheist, but I've never let that spoil my appreciation of religious art.

For those of you considering watching Revolver -- remember, most people hate it, as I've warned you several times now -- there's a third thing I'd like to mention: Mark Strong, one of my very favorite actors. He gives the most brilliant performance in Ritchie's much-more-popular Rocknrolla, as the hard-as-nails Archie, and he gives the most brilliant performance in Revolver, as Sorter, a very quirky and extremely lethal hitman.

Another Annoying Movie Cliche: The Surprise Checkmate in 1

Recently I blogged about some movie cliches I hate, like how if a brand-new Lamborghini and a 30-year-old van are in a chase scene, the Lambo doesn't outrun the van, and how everybody always takes their coffee black.

Last night I saw Guy Ritchie's Revolver and liked it quite a lot, but it also gives me the opportunity to complain about another non-lifelike movie cliche, the surprise checkmate in 1. That is: a checkmate which the losing chess player didn't see coming one move before. And these were supposed to be advanced chess players. Grandmasters see checkmate coming inevitably many moves ahead, sometimes dozens of moves ahead. [PS, 7. September 2016: Since posting this, I've seen Revolver several more times, and I must point out that it is not clear, in any of the several games of chess played in the movie, that the losing player never saw the checkmate coming before the last movie. Sorry.]

In real life, sometimes the winning player will make the last move and say, "Mate in 6." Or in 12 or in however many moves it will take to end the game. Of course, the other player isn't required to resign just because the other player announces checkmate in however many. Chess players are never required to resign. But if they're both Grandmasters, chances are that the loser will see what the winner is talking about, if he hasn't already seen it moves before and has just been wondering whether the eventual winner already sees it coming too and isn't going to screw it up. Every now and then in world-class-level chess, the loser will play the game out until the end, until he is checkmated, but in such cases both players and and any advanced chess players among the onlookers know exactly what is coming long before the final move.

Ritchie handles this somewhat better in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Somewhat. Only somewhat. Because it is hardly unheard-of for a player to win a game by sacrificing his Queen. Only in the movies have advanced chess players never ever heard of such a thing, just as only in the movies does a customer in a bar order something no more specific than "a beer." (Well, okay: maybe in 1873, out on the American Western frontier, there was a saloon or two than only offered one type of beer, and only served it in mugs which were all the same size. Maybe. But you know what? Even in a Western set in 1873 it'd be refreshing to see someone ask a bartender whether the saloon had any good IPA.)

So how do you portray advanced chess accurately in a movie? Do you have to have actual Grandmasters on the set, or re-create Grandmaster games move for move? No. You could, but it might unnecessarily complicate things, and creating a good movie is a hell of a difficult complicated task under the best of conditions. The moviemakers aren't there to play world-class chess, but to present the illusion that the characters are playing world-class chess. Typically, in a movie chess game, the entire board position isn't visible, so keep it like that if you want to, because the point of all of this is the the illusion rather than the actual chess. But instead of the surprise mate-in-one as in almost every game of chess ever portrayed in a movie, have the eventual winner move and announce, "Mate in [however many)." Or have the loser do what Grandmasters often do in real life when they realize they've lost: think, then sigh or nod their head, and topple their own King, resigning. In a movie like Revolver, which portrays many chess games between two supposed chess geniuses with a third person looking on, it would be very easy to have the onlooker, realistically, be puzzled, and ask why the loser resigned, and have one of the players rattle off what the next 10 or so moves would have been, maybe throwing in a variation or two ("[...]not Queen to f6 because then Rook to b1, Bishop to to d3[...]" and so forth). It doesn't matter that the audience won't be able to follow it all, because in real life they wouldn't comprehend it either. Just have the onlooker, who is also a genius, but not a chess Master, listen politely and clearly uncomprehendingly to the 10-or 20-move explanation for the resignation, and respond: "Uhhhhh... Okay."

Easy to do. Easy enough, for extra-super-duper realism, to rattle off the analysis of a Grandmaster game from a chess book or a chess column, in which the writer, often one of the players in the game, explains the resignation by writing out what those last however-many moves would have been, often with variations. And easily, you make a good movie much better, because you don't take the chessplayers in the audience out of the suspension of disbelief, you don't give them a crude and entirely unnecessary reminder that this is make-believe, like a phone number that begins with 555, or a character who's supposed to be the world's greatest computer hacker who is mightily impressed by seeing some monitors rather than by hearing the specs of the computer before him.