I knew very little about rowing. The son of one of my colleagues was on the UCLA rowing team during his four years in college. I knew it was a strenuous sport, and somehow I associated it with New England, particularly Boston. During visits to Boston and Cambridge I remember seeing rowing teams practice on the river there. I didn’t know it was an Olympic sport.

A friend recommended the book by Daniel James Brown, and when he stated that the movie was out, I thought I’d skip the book and go right to the movie, directed by George Clooney.

The story is a fairly predictable sports drama set in 1936 in Seattle, Washington, during the height of the Great Depression. A few underprivileged but ambitious boys applied for the junior rowing team at the University of Washington, not because they thought of themselves as champions, but because the were desperately trying to somehow pay their way through college. Getting on the team came with room, board and tuition.

The sport is brutally hard, not only on the physical level, but also emotionally. It is truly a team sport. Eight rowers and and one coxswain must be completely coordinated as one machine. There is no room for any ego or heroes on the boat. It’s all about the boat.

The Washington team is the underdog. It shows their training by a very competent coach and it follows them through local and national tournaments all the way to Hitler’s 1936 Olympics.

I found myself in the edge of the seat, as it is expected in a sports movie (remember Rocky, Chariots of Fire, Ford v. Ferrari, and a hundred others). At the end I walked out of the theater very satisfied. The underdogs won. I learned a lot about a sport that I had not paid much attention to. I gained respect for rowing.

I very much recommend you go see The Boys in the Boat.

Oppenheimer is a biography about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the effort of the United States to build the world’s first atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is America’s foremost theoretical physicist with nobody of his stature challenging him. Driven by the military with relentless pressure, led by Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Oppenheimer almost singlehandedly assembles a team of world-class scientists, builds a town from scratch in the New Mexico desert, and creates a terrifying technology that nobody, including himself, fully understands. At one point he states that he does not know for certain whether setting off the bomb would not create a nuclear chain reaction that could destroy the world.

Along with the tremendous work and achievements of the scientists, the politicians of the time are paranoid about leaks, spies and Nazi infiltration. Communism looms large as the enemy, and anyone with communist connections is automatically suspicious. It does not help that Oppenheimer brings his brother into the project, who joins the Communist Party against Oppenheimer’s warnings. His wife (Emily Blunt) and his mistress are both former Communists. Interleaved with the storyline of the development of the bomb is always the congressional investigation into Oppenheimer and the scientists around him.

The story is huge, and its participants include Einstein and Truman. And with a running time of three hours it is of epic length. I found it overwhelming  at times, slow and repetitious at other times, but exciting nonetheless. When I walked out I was quiet and dumbfounded about the stupidity and arrogance of humanity.

I am giving this movie “only” 3 stars, but something is nagging me: I think this is the kind of movie I need to watch more than once. The first time is just to get familiar with the story and the characters. It won too many awards, it is too highly lauded, for me to give it a down-graded score. I will take another opportunity and watch it again – and I may write another review at that time.

Life is like a hen house ladder. Shitty and short.

This quote is by Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a teacher of ancient history at the Barton Academy, a New England boarding school for boys. Nobody likes Hunham. His students hate him for his rigidity, his fellow faculty members find him pompous, and the headmaster despises him. And he smells.

It’s Christmas 1971. All the students go home for the break to be with their families, but there are always a few that can’t go home for various reasons. Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a misfit 15-year-old, gets a call at the last minute from his mother who scheduled an impromptu honeymoon with her new husband and does not want him with her. Hunham is assigned by the headmaster to stay at the school to chaperone the holdovers. There is also Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s head cook, who also has no place to go since her only son just died in the war in Vietnam and this is her first Christmas alone.

The unlikely trio has no choice but to come together and make this work for two weeks over the holidays. Whether they planned it or not, they get to know each other, and learn each other’s deepest secrets. In the process, they bond and learn life lessons and all realize that whatever happened in the past happened, and their future is in front of them.

The Holdovers is an emotional holiday movie, a little like The Breakfast Club from 1985 – could it really have been that long ago? – where a group of people of completely different backgrounds is thrown together and eventually create bonds.

As the first world war unfolded, which was then known as the great war, since they didn’t know there’d be a second, Germany’s propaganda machine recruited its young men as soldiers. A group of teenagers enlist voluntarily in the army, their faces full of fervor and optimism. But those preconceptions about the honor of war crumble very quickly as they see their first conflict and they realize they put themselves into a situation where it does not appear there is a way out. The hopelessness, the utter despair, the terrifying fear consume the boys as they are falling, one by one. In the end, when an armistice is negotiated by the brass, riding in luxury train cars and sipping wine, the boys are sent out one more time in the last 20 minutes before cease fire.

This movie has been made twice before. The other two are Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and the lesser-known version by Delbert Mann, All Quiet on the Western Front (1979). This current rendition is supposedly the most expensive German film in the history of Netflix. My wife loaded it up and we found it is a German film, dubbed in English. Which, of course, was better for her, but I would have liked to watch it in its original language. Yet I don’t think I can do it again, it took too much out of me.

The uselessness and injustice of war depressed me, as many war movies will do. Every leader who is in a position of sending other people’s children into harm’s way should be required to watch All Quiet on the Western Front. This happened in 1917, and a hundred years later we still haven’t learned these basic lessons.

Of course, the irony is that the French won that war and forced the Germans into reluctant submission. They ended up signing an agreement they knew they ultimately could not accept. We all know that a young soldier named Adolf Hitler was also a grunt in that war and experienced the humiliation of Germany first-hand. It lit up a fire in the chest of that young man, and we all know where it ended.

In March of 2021 I watched a movie titled A Man Called Ove. It was a 2015 movie in Swedish, with English subtitles. I gave it four stars. Here is my review. 

One of my readers at the time commented that there was a Tom Hanks adaptation on the way, and here it is.

This review is difficult to write because I could just copy the Ove review here. It follows the script that closely.

Otto (Tom Hanks) is 59 years old and lives alone in a housing development somewhere in the northern United States, judging from the snow. He loses his job by a forced retirement program. His wife passed away from cancer six months before. He grieves badly and visits her grave every day. He has no relatives or children. He is the self-appointed master of the condominium association of his little community. He does not care about the official roles, and he rules with an iron fist. Daily rounds include checking whether the garbage recycling is done correctly and whether gates remain closed. Driving of any type in the community is forbidden, and leaving a bicycle out is a serious infraction. He is a true curmudgeon and the essence of a grumpy old man.

One day new neighbors move in across the street from his place. Marisol (Mariana Treviño) is from Mexico.  She has two young daughters,  and is pregnant with her next. Her husband is the opposite of handy and has difficulty even driving a car. Otto has them in his sights immediately.

Otto is seriously depressed and he attempts suicide several times in the movie, only to be interrupted by Marisol and her family. An unlikely friendship develops, and gradually he gets drawn back into a semblance of purpose.

A Man Called Otto incorporates many flashbacks to when Otto was young and his romance with his wife Sonya (Rachel Keller). Interestingly, the actor playing young Otto is Truman Hanks, Tom Hanks’ 27-year-old son.

A Man Called Otto is a well-crafted film about an ordinary man’s life from young adulthood to retirement. While I gave Ove four stars, I am giving Otto “only” three. It is a little awkward from time to time where Ove was nothing but authentic. But it’s a good movie, it draws out a tear or two, and it made me think of “the circle of life.”

You should go and see it.