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.