AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Hidden figures movie running time11/7/2023 ![]() Sometimes, it seems, agenda is better off taking second place to the pure pleasure of seeing just how fast a stacked deck can be demolished. The film recounts the vital history of a team of black female mathematicians at NASA, who helped the USA win the space race against the Soviet Union. There are scenes in which kids say the funniest things, bullies receive their comeuppance, hunky men propose in the cutest ways and we get impassioned monologues happy to sacrifice plausibility for whoopability. The performances are uniformly winning when they need to be and hissable when they don’t. ![]() A movie that knows right from wrong and doesn’t see any use in complicating matters. The second film from Theodore Melfi, whose sole other credit, Bill Murray vehicle St Vincent, should have tipped us off sooner to the likely prevailing mood, Hidden Figures is a bouncy, almost garish feelgood girl pic. Glenn, too, is a clean-cut good guy: a trouper when he first meets the girls, distinguishing himself by coming over to shake their hands and gloriously vindicated in the final reel by his endorsement of Katherine’s addition assets. Yet Costner somehow manages to salvage some audience satisfaction from the affair, when he finally smashes down a segregated bathroom sign and declares: “At Nasa, we all pee the same colour.” ![]() Kevin Costner rides the waves of cliche with slightly more dignity as their superior: a man who cares only for the numbers, not the colour of those totting them up.Īn extended riff depicting Katherine’s bladder trials as she must make the 40 minute round trip from her desk to the only loos on the campus designated for black women (often, horrifically, to the soundtrack of a new Pharrell Williams track called Runnin’) are among the most tonally askew in the movie. Dunst is dealt a harsh hand, but Jim Parsons fares even worse with his role as a snippy, racist colleague to Henson, forever rolling his eyes in unprogressive protest. It’s semi-soap: the supporting characters at least are fleshed out to a barely skeletal extent. The arcs of their stories – as well as Henson’s romance with army man Jim (Mahershala Ali, who, like Monáe, turns in a strong turn following an indelible one in Moonlight) – intersect with fibonacci precision and convenience, yet for all its formula there’s something irresistible about Hidden Figures. Monáe, meanwhile, is Mary Jackson, who must lobby a local judge to allow her access to a local segregated school so she can take night classes that will enable her to train as Nasa’s first female black engineer. Hidden Figures: trailer for Nasa scientists biopic Guardian
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |