Hidden Figures (film)

This time last year, I was about a month into a project to do a podcast episode every day about women in STEM. And I'd recently discovered Katherine Johnson, and through researching her I discovered Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. I immediately added these women to my list of who I wanted to feature on the podcast, along with a few other African-American NASA engineers. Then not long after that, I saw the first news report about Taraji P. Henson joining the cast of a movie about Katherine Johnson. I found out about the book Hidden Figures, and I was incredibly excited. As the casting notices came in, I only became more interested in the film. I read excerpts from the book in my research (it hadn't been released by the time we'd done our episodes on each of the women, but the author's research was invaluable to our own).

Suffice it to say, this was a highly anticipated movie for me.

I was sad I wasn't going to be able to see it during it's limited release right after Christmas, but now I'm incredibly glad that I got to go on it's "opening weekend" because my ticket helped it become the top box office draw that weekend. Which is just amazing on so many levels.

But I'm here to do a review, so my review:

Go see this movie. As soon as possible. Preferably immediately.

The acting is amazing, the story is compelling, the art direction and design are perfect. As a historical drama, it hits all the notes it needs to. It felt to me like it didn't pull any punches, but it didn't set out to tell a tragic story but an inspiring one.

A true one.

And it accomplishes that with a skill and style that stories like this are rarely afforded.

It is above all an emotionally affecting movie. You feel for these women and you care about what's going on. In the theater I was in, there were cheers and applause throughout the movie, and a huge round of applause at the end. I've heard similar reports from people around the country, in many different demographics and regions. Audiences care about this movie, and it's easy to care. These women are inspiring, and not just because the actresses who play them are inspiring, but because they actually were inspiring. They've been inspiring me for a year now.

Even though I know exactly what the outcome is of the historical events in the movie, I still was caught up in the tension. And it was amazing to see a piece of history we've lost a piece of, a time when people came together to create science and math that didn't exist before. And the movie acknowledges that we did this because of fear of the Russians, but it also reminds us how much benefit we got from these geniuses, including the African-American women of the West Area Computers, being allowed to do what they do best. And they got us to the moon.

The movie challenges us to wonder what they could do now if we made that kind of effort again.

So go, just go. Go see it. Please. And take any kids you know to go see it.

Leverage Season Three

Season One Season Two So far, I've been loving Leverage, as you can read in my reviews of previous seasons. I thought that season two was the perfect follow-up to season one. Actually, they reminded me of British tv shows, where each "series" feels more self contained than American television usually does. Season three is a bit more of the same, but they introduce something I've been expecting for a while - an overall adversary. The entire season is built, more or less, around the fact that the team has been told they must take out international criminal Damien Moreau.

We start with Nate in jail after the events of last season's finale. He's resisting the urge to break out of prison because of the deal that he made with Sterling, but the deal to take out Moreau eventually trumps that, and Nate breaks out and soon enough everybody is back to their same antics.

I'll be honest, I wasn't the biggest fan of the Moreau storyline. I still liked it, Leverage at it's worst is still ten times better than most shows. Moreau felt almost tacked on sometimes, and it doesn't help that the actress playing the mysterious Italian was just never really working for me. I don't know why, I think maybe most of her dialogue was redubbed in ADR and it made her sound strange because her words weren't coming from her mouth. Bad ADR will lose me every single time.

But there are so many amazing episodes in season three, especially since Gina Bellman is back full time as Sophie. The Reunion Job, where the group has to fake their way through somebody else's high school reunion, The Scheherazade Job where Hardison has to perform as a violin virtuoso, or The Gone-Fishin' Job where Hardison and Elliot are taken hostage by a backwoods militia are all excellent episodes with a lot of fun moments.

The season belongs to Parker though, in my very biased opinion. Early on we meet her mentor Archie in "The Inside Job," and it's a brilliant episode that really opens up her character and starts fleshing out her past. Not too much, just enough to make her even more fascinating. She spends the season dealing with her growing feelings for Hardison (a romance I'm much more invested in than Nate and Sophie's unresolved tension), and in The Boost Job she has to deal with meeting a young girl who is very much like her. In The Underground Job, Parker is even put in the place of a grifter, dealing with a corrupt politician as a new intern. She excels, proving that Sophie's lessons are really working.

Of course, the rest of the team has to deal with their pasts' as well. Nate's father appears in The Three-Card Monte Job and Sophie must deal with her time in England during The King George Job. Elliot even gets to sing in The Studio Job, where he becomes an unlikely country star as part of the con, revealing a hidden talent (that works because Christian Kane is actually an excellent singer).

The season finale, a two part story consisting of The Big Bang Job and The San Lorenzo Job, wraps up the Moreau story and delves only a little bit into Elliot's history. The cons in these two episodes are huge, and the stakes have never been higher. The San Lorenzo job was especially fun for me, because we ended up watching it not long after the recent U.S. presidential election, so the take on corrupt American politics was especially amusing.

Overall, I could probably write a long, glowing review for every single episode of season three. They all have something good in them, even when there are parts that aren't as much fun. But the best for me is definitely how Parker, Hardison, and Elliot are evolving. I would watch entire seasons in one sitting if people would let me.

Moonrise Kingdom

So, here's a confession for you: before this film I had never watched a Wes Anderson movie. I know, I know. I've heard all about why he's amazing and heard plenty of lectures about why I should have picked up The Life Aquatic or The Royal Tennebaums, but to be honest nothing he's done before has really caught my eye and made me go "that, that looks like the kind of movie I'd appreciate spending two hours with." I can't even quite put my finger on why, perhaps because I don't like quirky for the sake of quirky. Is Anderson like that? I don't know, but all the trailers and clips I've seen made his previous films feel that way, and so nothing really was compelling enough to bring me on board.

But the trailers for Moonrise Kingdom had a lot going for them, and I'll admit adding Bruce Willis to anything increases my desire to see it about 300%. Maybe it was that the cast just had too many actors I love, maybe it was that the kid's summer camp story was more interesting. Maybe the jokes were things I found funnier. Maybe the guy cutting the trailer was better at his job than the other guys.

For whatever reason, I decided I wanted to see it. And to be honest, it probably was the best way to get me to watch a movie of this particular subset/genre. While the adult actors whose names I recognized all did amazing jobs, I was actually most impressed by Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as the young couple who decides to run away together. Their performances might be the type to turn off some people, but there was an unnaturalness to their delivery that actually made them more likeable to me, and I think that they stole the show at every opportunity.

It didn't hurt that the characters had a lot of moments that reminded me of myself, or people I've known, or my own weird childhood running around reading fantasy books and pretending the world was different. It just had so many things that seemed to be out of the books I would read about scout camps (my own experiences with camp were quite different) and it was presented in a way that made me feel nostalgia for something I never actually experienced.

The story is weird, that is certainly true. On paper, you could write a synopsis and it actually would sound rather tame. I read the plot summary on Wikipedia just now and sure, everything it says is true. That is the action of what happened.

But Moonrise Kingdom isn't a movie that's about what happens. That's not really what's memorable about it at all. For one, it's one of those pieces that film students love because it's just so artistic. There's a very distinct feeling and theme to all of the visuals, and it's like every small detail was chosen with care. But also there's a slight absurdity to everything, the dialogue and the situations, that really define what the movie is.

I won't say that it's a film for everyone, I imagine it won't appeal to many mainstream audiences at all, because it is a bit odd, but it's a nice odd. People who want the plot to go from A to B to C and for things to be realistic aren't going to like it. But if you're willing to let it just let it be charming and beautiful and enjoy it for what it is, then it's well worth the time spent with it.

Never Let Me Go

I read the book Never Let me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, many years ago when it was first released. I wasn't really familiar with Ishiguro, this was the first book of his that I had read. The thing that struck me about it was that beyond the plot or the characters, he was very adept at establishing a mood. There was a very distinct feeling that you got throughout the work, a longing and a sort of bittersweet wistfulness. It wasn't long after I read it that it was announced the book was being adapted to the screen, and I had no doubt they could do justice by the story, the action in the film is relatively simple. There's actually not to many events, and so the challenges that filmmakers normally have fitting everything into the allotted time wouldn't be the real problem.

The real problem would be capturing the mood. Especially considering that the novel is told in first person from the point of view of Kathy (Carey Mulligan's character). First person stories are notoriously difficult because you aren't given the same insight into the characters. And it's really Kathy's state of mind that provides the emotions for the reader as they experience her life through her eyes and her memories.

The film uses one well worn technique for this - the voiceover. But Mulligan's performance and her voice are so strong that it works. The cinematography is beautiful, and everything truly does come together to really capture the same longing that you feel when reading the novel. To be honest, the plot of the film is not particularly memorable, and in some ways it's not even really that original. In a lesser filmmaker's hands, it wouldn't have worked. Just like a lesser novelist couldn't have pulled it off either. It's a rather typical love triangle with a science-fiction twist (in the novel it's less obvious until later, the movie spells it out very early on).

But the filmmakers made one very clever choice early on - the film never for a moment looks like science fiction. There is no sense of it being the future, in fact it has the look and feel of a period piece set maybe around the 1940's. That adds an air of nostalgia, a heaviness of history to it, that helps bring the audience right back to the subtlety of Kathy's mind.

It probably isn't a film that will appeal to everyone. The pace is quite slow, there is no real action and the conflict is very understated. It's a very internal film, and that isn't always going to be appealing. But it's a very skilled adaptation of the book, and the only fault I can find with it is that it reveals it's mysteries too early. The novel is one of the few instances where I believe people are better off knowing very little going into it, and that spoilers truly spoil part of the enjoyment. The movie doesn't have that problem, because the reveal is quick and painless and has little impact.