“The Boys in the Boat” (2023)
Clooney’s latest isn’t his best but highly entertaining.
Breaking with tradition, I didn’t make a single note on my trusty notepad last evening (13th March) when I watched and enjoyed George Clooney’s latest offering from behind the camera lens. Instead, I almost immediately had the feeling this “based on a true story” tale of young underdogs shaking up the world and the Olympics of 1936 was rather akin to his 2008 sporting drama “Leatherheads” and so with the lights turned out, my pen and notepad cast aside I rustled up a bowl of popcorn and settled into an entertaining tale that (whisper it) is Clooney’s weakest film to date from the director’s chair.
Also breaking with my passionate tradition of penning my thoughts on films and the directors who curate and nurture them into being, I could weave my usual spoiler free tale of a beautifully and elegantly shot film from George Clooney which accompanied by a joyful and bubbling musical score from Alexandre Desplat is a rather joyous way of spending two hours inside the magical distraction of cinema. I could weave a tale of underdogs, junior, youthful underdogs led ostensibly by a college student living inside a wreck of a car after being abandoned by his parents, a desperate young man crudely called “Hobo Joe” because of the moth eaten clothes he wears or the holes in his hobnail boots. A tale of working class kids trying to pay and navigate their way through college who stumble upon the chance of rowing their way not only through college but through young life and into the infamous Berlin Olympics of 1936 and a brush with fame with Jesse Owens before their own gold medal achievements.
I could weave that tale, sure, or I could distract you from my light-hearted criticism of this film being George Clooney’s weakest to date by gushing my unabashed praise once more on his debut film “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” as Sam Rockwell tries to convince you he’s not only a game show host guilty of “polluting the airwaves with mind numbing puerile entertainment” but also that he was a CIA hit man guilty of the killing of 33 people. Three years later Clooney arguably bettered his astonishing debut film with “Good Night, and Good Luck” and a visceral take down of media in the 1950’s and 1960’s (and ever more so today) and “television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us” from an on-going censorship no-one dares to admit because of the fear pumped into our eyeballs every day by that very same media. Boy could I reiterate that story!
We’ll skip over 2008’s “Leatherheads” for in 2011 George Clooney directed another sideswipe at today’s media and political landscape in “The Ides of March” and although both Ryan Gosling and Philip Seymour Hoffman (sleep well genius you beautiful and much missed man) both provide stellar and outstanding performances, the film was good if not great, and a missed opportunity for something much, much larger and much more seismic. Between 2014 and 2020 Clooney directed “The Monuments Men”, “Suburbicon” and “The Midnight Sky” with the former film much more impressive than the latter two before in 2021 he returned to top form with the Ben Affleck starring “The Tender Bar” and a beautiful coming of age tale that, if you’ll allow me to quote from my original review:
“Again Clooney reverts to being wholly behind the camera, leaving the stage clear for Ben Affleck and Daniel Ranieri to dominate with such differing performances early on before Tye Sheridan picks up the gauntlet thrown down to him by the youthful Ranieri to take their collective character to a “Good Will Hunting” style ending that left your honest amateur film critic with tears gently rolling down his cheeks”.
So I could pun intended reel off all of these tales and weave together an original and informative piece of writing but first, here’s another reel, a show reel of real writing from the past decade before I detail briefly why I won’t be weaving any of these tales today.
"George Clooney “Behind the Lens” Part 1"
"Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (2002)
"Good Night, and Good Luck" (2005)
"The Essential Film Reviews Collection" Vol.1
"The Essential Film Reviews Collection" Vol.7
Above you will find not only a painstaking yet spoiler free breakdown of the majority of films in the career of George Clooney the director but also over a decade’s worth of similarly spoiler free appraisals of over 300 films contained within my 7 volumes of my ludicrously titled “Essential Film Reviews Collection”.
Below you’ll find three brilliantly and all uniquely written spoiler free takes on this year’s Oscars winners and within my archives you’ll also find my opus appreciation of the films of Christopher Nolan and this year’s Oscar run away success story, “Oppenheimer”.
But here’s the thing: You’re a writer not a reader and so despite my hours and years of writing these love-in appreciations for Hollywood’s finest, you probably won’t have even read this far. So you’ll ignore everything above and below (you might give this article a clap or three) but you won’t actually have read it or fully appreciated it. Medium is full to the brim of non-writers, copy and paste merchants who don’t have a single desire in their body to be a writer. Grifters seeking claps whilst posting claptrap that pollutes this platform, obscuring actual writers who actually write.
See below: Three unique takes on a horrific shadow on our world of a wartime atrocity we’ll never recover from in a thousand lifetimes, the re-teaming of actor and director in a remarkable film of childhood trauma, coming of age and breaking free from an institution that is funny as hell and deserving of the highest praise, and a Frankenstein science-fiction comedy of unrequited love in a Wes Anderson style picture postcard world.
A zone of interest? More like zero interest. Virtually zero engagement and little to zero comments on the actual contents of the films let alone my spoiler free take on them. No remarking on the holocaust. No comments on how the second film sounds so bittersweet or that Yorgos Lanthimos has done it again with his brash, awkward comedy or that Emma Stone won the Oscar. Zero. Nothing.
So you’ll ignore all the above and all the below whilst clapping for the vacuous nonsense that pollutes the airways here from cut and paste merchants who promise to clap 50 times for your article as long as you do likewise on theirs, a reciprocal arrangement that boosts utter rubbish above real writing to defeat an algorithm that, hold onto your hats everyone, can’t be defeated. Churn and create all the claps you want but you’re not winning this game. No-one is. Least of all pleading for claps on articles of utter drivel cut and pasted from someone else that have all the authenticity of a 3 dollar note.
Hardly an underdog story is it?
*This article was originally posted to my Medium blog site as I yet again made many friends among the inhabitants there* (chortle/guffaw/titter)
Thanks for reading! Wild ride eh? And you know I’m right and that’s why you’re going to ignore these gems too: