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parallelogram @622

Transitive verbs used intransitively, agreed; at the risk of having said this here before, I hate hearing the exhortation 'Enjoy!' Irrational perhaps, but true. I suppose a direct object can be 'understood', but I do feel the lack of it here.

Again probably repeating myself, I keep seeing 'cater to' - e.g. Toby Young in the Spectator (29th April): 'Netflix caters to people with a wide range of different tastes...' Andrew Robson is another frequent 'cater to' writer in his otherwise excellent Times bridge column. Not certain I am on solid ground here, but I still don't like it. Surely 'cater for'?

Finally, I wonder how long the fashion of 'super' will last, as in 'I am super happy, super annoyed etc.'

Good point about golf ties @623.

parallel

Glad to see you here again.

I agree about the verbs. The rocket will launch......The train derailed......are wrong and irritating.

Paul

I agree about cater to - wrong and cater for is correct. I also agree about Robson's column. I wrote to him recently suggesting a better line on one hand and received a nice reply thanking me and saying he simply had not seen the improvement.

Jigjag

Great win last night! Calvert - Lewin makes a difference even when not scoring.
Hoping Yorkshire get a CC win soon - it`s been over a year since the last one!

Tyke

Yes he makes a big difference, but is only just getting fit -just in time I hope!

Hope Yorks first win is not at New Road!

I'm watching the "Queen stage" of the Giro d'Italia. They've gone over 2000m altitude. A commentator, Robbie McEwan, helpfully explained that they have difficulty getting enough oxygen at this altitude as the % of oxygen in the air is lower because oxygen has heavier molecules (which is true, but not enough to make any difference to the mixing of gases).
It reminds me of the last time I had a new tyre, when I was offered it to be inflated with nitrogen rather than air (for extra expense, of course) as it "didn't expand as much when it got hot.

to be fair, he has just corrected himself (or someone else told him!)

I'm pleased he appreciates the gravity of the situation!

For UK chess fans 'Pawn Sacrifice ' is on BBC2 tonight ... late - I've set the recorder!

Thanks for the tip, Tyke, I’ll also record it. Don’t think I’ve seen it before.

Film 'Pawn Sacrifice'. I was somewhat put off by this review on the English Chess Forum in 2020.




I have just watched the film "Pawn Sacrifice" shown on BBC2 yesterday evening, 16th May, and presumably still viewable on the BBC I player. I had not seen it before and was only vaguely aware of it, so was pleasantly surprised to find it being screened. To those unfamiliar with it I should say that it is a bio-pic of Bobby Fischer, centring chiefly on the 1972 Reykjavik match, and depicting his childhood and upbringing in New York and his growth as a player through the 1950s and 1960s. However, in common with most films and fictional representations of chess, it left a great deal to be desired. In fact I found it a horrible mess of a film. I wonder if others have seen it and what their impressions are?

For one thing Tobey Maguire seemed wrong for the part of Bobby Fischer, both phyically and otherwise, being too small and slight, and lacking the dominating presence and charisma of Fischer. We do not really get any sense of a great, if very wayward, intellect on display here, but merely a petulant and obsessive individual. There is no light or shade in his performance. Other characters are equally underdrawn. Bill Lombardy (American GM turned Catholic priest) gets a very large role, though surely greatly exaggerated, since he was a rather peripheral figure in Bobby's life and did not act as Bobby's second, certainly not in Rejkjavik as is suggested, whilst the other major character in the film, Paul Marshall, is so far as I am aware a complete invention, and it is never clear precisely what his role is. The portrayal of chess tournaments and the chess scene generally is predictably unrealistic, and goofs of one sort or another abound. So far, so predictable.

But more seriously the script is just all over the place and seems unable to settle on a theme or point of view. It sort of argues, reasonably enough, that Bobby's whole life had been geared to winning the world championship, and to challenge the Soviet hegemony which had been maintained, as he saw it by cheating, as at Curacao, but too many plotlines are taken up or hinted at but then discarded or discontinued. In the very first scene Bobby's mother appears to be talking of how she is the subject of FBI attentions because of her Communist associations, and I thought that this might be a thread running through the film, but it is never developed. His mother more or less disappears from the film therafter. His sister, Joan, suddenly emerges halfway through to take a more central role, particularly as regards Bobby's mental condition, but this too is not developed. The filmakers cannot seem to settle on whether Bobby is utterly deranged (which he was surely not at that stage of his life) or entirely rational albeit obsessed.

There is much prominence given throughout to Boris Spassky as his ultimate opponent, and though one can see this as a dramatic ploy (and Fischer did indeed foresee early in his career that Spassky would emerge as a great player) but too much weight is given to him. Spassky is depicted as a very glamorous figure, and identified as reigning champion long before he actually gained the title. There is no mention of Botvinnik or Petrosian or Tal, who loomed much larger in the chess world in the earlier part of Fischer's career. Of course the film understandably doesn't want to clutter the stage with too many characters but surely in a biopic one cannot ignore them completely. And the film stops abruptly with Fischer's victory at Reykjavik, with only some documentary footage of the older Fischer expounding on the game. No explanation of what happened after the match or why and how he went off the rails. Was it being suggested (as per the title) that he was being used by the American government to score a sporting victory against the Russians to try to offset American failures elsewhere, particularly in Vietnam, and was then discarded when he had served his purpose? But that is completely contradicted by what we know of Fischer as a man engaged in a personal quest, rejecting any sort of outside, governmental assistance. A much better film could surely have been made of this subject matter.