EIGHT MEN IN

Merry Christmas everyone! Now in theaters:

The Boys in the Boat--The 1936 Berlin Olympics was a highly satisfying episode for the good guys. Most famously, when Der Fuehrer said his was the Master Race, Jesse Owens heiled (phfft!) heiled (phfft!) right in Der Fuehrer's face. It wasn't enough to prevent the war that was coming, but it was a great foreshadowing of who would prevail.

Yet alongside that glorious debunking of supposed Aryan racial superiority, right under the noses of its promulgators, was another splendid underdog story. Briefly played by Jyuddah Jaymes, Owens is a minor figure in this period spectacle about the improbable rise of the University of Washington's eight-man crew to compete for the U.S. in those same games. It's directed by George Clooney from a script by Mark L. Smith, based on Daniel James Brown's 2013 book.

The story was remarkable before the crew got to Berlin. The UW boys were already upstarts in the sport, long associated with elite, affluent Eastern schools. This crew included working class, Depression-era grunts; the focus here is on Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), who when we first meet him is literally homeless. He lives in a junked car in a Seattle hobo jungle, patching the holes in the soles of his shoes while trying to eke out an engineering degree. He joins the crew for the stipend and the roof over his head.   

"Eight-man crew is the most difficult of all team sports," the coach here pronounces to the aspirants. "The average human body is just not meant for such things." I once had occasion to learn first-hand that my below-average human body wasn't meant for such things. Two of my nieces rowed crew, and back in the '80s I myself had the opportunity to take a one-man shell out onto the Potomac River; my near-helplessness in managing to get the thing to go anywhere gave me a small taste of how much delicate skill the sport requires, even setting aside its physical demands.

The Boys in the Boat gets across hints of this subtle precision; Clooney shows us, for instance, the hiccup-y little wrist-flip that precedes the return stroke. There's a great deal to like about the film, really, starting with what a wonderful, heartening story it tells. It's handsomely produced, with lustrous cinematography by Martin Ruhe, crisp editing by Tanya M. Swerling, another lovely score by Alexander Desplat. And it has rich, sometimes fascinating period detail, like the swanky spectator trains that run along the river banks at the fancier courses.

But as with several of Clooney's earlier directorial efforts, this movie is well-made, well-intentioned, good-hearted and generally enjoyable without being entirely satisfying. And unlike, say, The Monuments Men or The Tender Bar, it doesn't even have vivid star character actors to liven things up.

Joel Edgerton as Coach Al Ulbrickson and Peter Guinness as master boat-maker George Pocock are authoritative presences, but not complex characters. The guys playing the crew aren't, as in the standard sports movie template, a ragtag band of misfits with distinctive oddball personalities; they're just pleasant, good-looking young men. Rantz's coed love interest (Hadley Robinson) tries to generate some playful, mischievous heat, but she's rowing upstream opposite her bland leading man.

Overall, this film has the flavor of a feature length Super Bowl commercial. Like the best of those commercials, it can raise an inspirational tingle. But I don't know that it does much more in two hours than a good Super Bowl commercial can do in sixty seconds.

EIGHT WATCHERS

Despite the depressingly--though appropriately--audience-less venues, I thoroughly enjoyed the Tokyo Summer Games, which wrapped up this evening. Thanks to the greatest TV channel of all time, Turner Classic Movies, I also got to observe the Olympiad by watching a film that's been on my list since I read about it back in the '70s...

Visions of Eight--Produced by Stan Margulies and David L. Wolper and scored by Henry Mancini, this is a 1973 anthology of documentary shorts, each on a different aspect of the 1972 Munich Summer Games, by eight important directors of the time. All are interesting; a couple of them are real gems...

The Beginning--Soviet director Yuri Ozerov helmed this brief, briskly edited segment on the Opening Ceremonies. A standard travelogue in style, but a good time capsule of images and people.

The Strongest--Mai Zetterling choose weightlifting for her subject, she says, because she knew nothing about it, but was fascinated by the solitary, obsessive nature of the training. "I am not interested in sports, but I am interested in obsessions." She captured some remarkable physical feats, and some poignant psychology.

The Highest--As pure cinema, Arthur Penn's visual poem on pole vaulting is probably the best of these shorts. Nearly wordless--indeed, nearly soundless; just some dim crowd noise and chatter faded in and out--it's elliptical and almost hypnotically beautiful.

The Women--Though women had been participants in the Olympics since 1900, they were still enough of a novelty in '72 to be patronized in this short by Michael Pfleghar; he got some fine footage, however, including scenes of German long jumper Heide Rosendahl.

The Fastest--Kon Ichikawa had already directed one of the great sports documentaries, Tokyo Olympiad (1965), about the '64 Summer Games; it featured throat-catchingly wonderful footage of Ethiopian marathon great Abebe Bikila. His quick, highly concentrated, almost forensic look at the Men's 100 meter dash at different speeds is another high point of this collection.

The Decathlon--Milos Forman intercuts the event with both traditional and classical German music, at times facetiously. We see some of then-Bruce Jenner's first Olympic appearance.

The Losers--Claude Lelouch's painful and compassionate look at some of the losing athletes is another of the best segments.

The Longest--Except for a vague mention in the opening, this short by John Schlesinger is the only one to include any content about the Munich Massacre; its main subject, however, is British marathoner Ron Hill (who just died in May of this year, at 82). Somehow Schlesinger's style seems, with the possible exception of Ozerov's, the most dated and heavy-handed, but it's still a compelling chronicle.

What I liked about all of these films is how little any of them rely on talk; there are interviews or a scrap or two of narration here and there, but on the whole this is visual storytelling.

Anyway, in the unlikely event that you're not quite ready for a break from the Olympics, Visions of Eight is available to stream at TCM.com through August 18; Blu-ray and DVD editions are available from The Criterion Collection.

A BRONZE IN MEN’S SONNETEERING

The Winter Olympics, one of the few sporting events in which I take the slightest interest, kicked off last night in Vancouver with the usual kitschy pageantry—although it was pretty kick-ass to hear k.d. lang sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

The Games proper commence today. The Wife is a Winter Games fanatic, & will likely be parked in front of the TV for many hours.

This was not the case in 2002, however—that year, I dragged her up to Salt Lake City to experience the Games live. She had often said that she’d always wanted to go, & I doubted that they’d ever be geographically closer to us. I managed to score tickets for exactly one event: Women’s Freestyle Skiing.

We had been out here in Arizona for more than a decade by that time, so long that we had forgotten how much winter can suck—we had to buy winter coats for the trip. But we remembered it fast as we hiked up the snowy mountain to the venue in Deer Valley, froze our asses off in the bleachers while we watched the lovely Australian Alisa Camplin sail to the Gold Medal...

...& then trudged our way back down to the shuttle buses.

That same day, on the sidewalk in front of the lodge, I saw Mitt Romney dancing to the music of a Dixieland band. This was the most Caucasian sight I ever expect to behold.

That night, back in our hotel in Salt Lake, while The exhausted Wife slept, I wrote this sonnet:

Though she despises snow, and might not wear,
To save her life, a pair of skates or skis,
She pulled a tasseled hat over her hair
And wrapped herself in vinyl and fake fleece.
Then, pluming silver steam out of her smile,
She rode on trains and buses, and her feet,
On shifting snow, that dizzy, final mile,
To take, at last, her own Olympic seat.
And shivering in authenticity,
She took her role as spectator with grace,
Subject, like the skiers, to gravity,
And likewise eager for her downhill race.
Four hours hence, back in her hotel bed,
She'd had it with Olympics--so she said.