The Boys in the Boat

[Geoff Jones]

I saw a public "early access" showing of The Boys in the Boat at Harkins Arvada (Auditorium 9) on Sunday.

I found the movie to be impressively generic and bland. Tissue-thin characterizations. No tension. No real drama. No humor. It just went through the motions telling the story of what happened.

The crowd, most of whom were seniors, seemed to enjoy it.


Throughout the movie, I was distracted by the pixel structure, as if watching through a screen door. This tended to happen in brightly lit scenes, especially long shots.

(We sat on the third row, which honestly wasn't all that close.)

Previously, I've only seen a few movies at this location and never in Auditorium 9. Was something wrong? Was it a 2k projector? A 2k DCP? Who knows.

I would have gotten a better presentation at home.

My fifteen-year-old 1080p projector died this year, and I replaced it with a 4k model from Epson. I sit about 9 feet from a 125" diagonal 2.4:1 screen and never see any pixel structure.

[Mike Blakesley]

We watched the movie from the 4th row of our theater and I never noticed any sort of pixelization. Our projector is 4K though.

I thought the movie was pretty good, especially the competition scenes. I agree though, there was no character depth and the whole movie was kind of bland. It didn't rise and fall like sports movies tend to do. You didn't really find out much about any of the team members -- there wasn't even the usual post-movie 'where they went next' scene to go along with the real-people pictures.

The blandness carried over to the picture image. It wasn't fuzzy, but the whole thing seemed a little gauzed over and poorly lit, like it was all shot at dusk. The outdoor scenes didn't have a lot of contrast. If you take a look at the one sheet, it has the same effect. I can't really describe it, the movie seems to lack contrast. Maybe this was a device to invoke the time period of the movie (late 1930s, I think?).

I always enjoy watching movies set in early-20th-century America just to look at the backgrounds, the buildings, cars, clothes, etc. This movie seemed to get most of the details spot on, although I'm sure there are people on IMDB right now typing things like "the gray Ford shown parked in front of the saloon didn't actually come out until 1949...you can tell by the distance the headlights are from the radiator."

I thought the sound mix was impressive. The score was great and fit the action well. I couldn't really tell if the movie was well directed or not -- it held my attention so I guess that means it was.

My favorite scene was one of the rowing scenes in the middle of the show. It was done in a river or lake that had a railroad track running alongside, so the crowds were seated in bleachers on a train that followed the rowers along. I assume that's the way it was done back in the day....if so, that's really cool. I wonder if it's still done that way. (Do they even still do this particular sport?)

Audience reactions here have been over-the-top good. People are saying it's the best movie they've seen in ages. It's drawing a ton of senior citizens, which are a lot of work to get in the door -- because they all pay separately, and the credit card or gift card users can't seem to work the technology. Some of them get pretty grumpy. I say (under my breath) "you coulda paid cash and avoided this perceived hassle." But on the way out, universally everyone is loving it. The high school basketball coach brought his whole team in as a team-building exercise.

3.5 out of five for me. If the picture had been bright, crisp and colorful it would have been a 4.