The Hollars, a review

I went to see this movie, because Josh Groban is in it, and I'm a Grobanite.

It's definitely a step up from Coffee Town, which I reviewed here Review of Coffee Town.

The genre here is psychological.  Some of the characters and scenes are a bit sit-com-ish, but mostly it's higher brow.

The focus is still thirty somethings, but there are some older people as well -- unlike Coffee Town.

I was very critical of the role for the sole female character in Coffee Town.  Here there are more women, though they're still wives and moms who definitely get less camera time than the guys.

The main character is John Krasinski, who is also directing and co-producing.

I'm always going back to what David Foster said, to whit: you know a star because when they're on stage or camera they're [singular they] the one you look at. You don't look at the other people.

Krasinski definitely has that, some kind of gravitas and poise that makes him seem to be the focus of everyone's attention, though it could also be that everyone was focused around him because he was directing.

I would say that this is a chick flick, because it's all about emotions and relationships -- no chase scenes or bombs -- but it's still created by a man from a male point of view.

Still, I'm grateful that the older female character is a powerful personality, called "Chief," who runs the family and is loved and respected.

The plot is complex, with lots of romantic intrigue. A lot if the intrigue involves the awareness of dealing with exes and their new partners.

Josh's character is not just a cameo, unlike when he appeared in a Muppet movie. It's a real role, with lines, who is an integral part of the plot. While most of the other characters have rather prominent flaws, his character is absurdly kind, generous, empathetic, and even tempered. I guess this is him playing to type. This doesn't necessarily make the character likable, though, as he's always in control, no vulnerability. The other characters are all suffering because of their flaws, while his is not. He's a care giver, not a care needer. For those who accuse him of being wooden in his acting, this role gives little space to refute this allegation. Still I would assert that, at least in Coffee Town, he was clearly not wooden. Perhaps this upcoming Broadway role will show him to more advantage.

I am intrigued by Anna Kendrick. I last saw her in "Into the Woods." She comes across as very feminine and childlike. She's allowed to speak in a high voice. I've been feeling recently that female performers with low voices tend to be preferred, tho maybe that's my own insecurity about having a high voice.

I saw the movie in the theater near Lincoln Center -- a place where I have several times heard Josh sing on stage. Movie theaters in NYC somehow seem special, because they're generally upstairs, with often more than one set of escalators to get up to the theaters from a smallish lobby.  Somehow that gives me a sense of going into a protective cocoon.

Spoiler alert, don't read past this

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While much of the movie focuses on the awkwardness of dealing with exes and their new relationships, there's one couple that's been together for 38 years. They get the whole "until death doth you part" scenario. That makes me jealous. I didn't get that. I got dumped. I wonder if people who do get that know how lucky they are, despite their grief at losing their partner.

The ending of the movie is pleasantly touching -- so it's not all sad.

edited 8/28/16 == mostly to remove autocorrect issues.  It's so frustrating when a word gets changed after you read it and it was ok

On the evolution of gymnastics & spectacle

I've been watching women's gymnastics on YouTube, especially, of course, the gravity defying leaps and flips of Simone Biles.

Then I went back and watched some of the older gymnasts who I remembered from my childhood, like Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, who got "perfect 10"s back then.

When I looked at the older performances, it almost didn't look like they were the same sport.  The older performers were doing less difficult stunts, but more gracefully, more slowly, and with more certain landings.

More recently, I started watching the rhythmic gymnastics.  Those hadn't run across my social media feed before today.  This seems to be because the USA didn't have any really strong contestants in that sport.  Instead, the dominant performances were from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Italy, China, Canada, Germany, Finland, Brazil, Austria, Uzbekistan, Estonia. In this sport, the competitors perform with apparatus: ball, clubs, ribbon.  I particularly liked the ribbons, which were very long and had to be kept airborne through twirling them into interesting shapes.

Interestingly, in this other sport the performances look more like the older ones in the ordinary gymnastics -- more ballet-like, less tumbling, more graceful.  There is something decided ungraceful about the necessity to run headlong across a mat in order to just barely manage to get multiple flips in the air without landing out of bounds.  These recent performances might be powerful, impressive, intimidating, amazing -- but certainly less graceful than the rhythmic gymnasts -- and less graceful than Korbut & Comaneci.

Also, I noticed that the women who were making these powerful jumps also looked powerful, with huge bulging muscles; while the rhythmic dancers were less muscular.

This reminds me of some earlier observations I have made in the area of fireworks.

When I was a kid, we went to a local park, in the small city where I lived, and they had fireworks.  Those were fired off at a rate of about one per minute or maybe one per 2 minutes.  We would watch each individual firework ascend into the air -- leaving a faint trail of sparks as it went up -- and then we would all say "oooo" very softly as it exploded.

The number of fireworks set of was decidedly less than what one would expect today -- there was also decidedly less noise, light, and smoke.  It was a much more laid back experience, where we took time to enjoy each individual firework.

I'm not at all convinced that the evolution of these spectacles so that the performances are bigger and more powerful is necessarily an improvement.