“Apparently the movie draws heavily from one of the director’s favorite films, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.”
Yes!!! I told Mr. as we were walking out of the movie theater that it reminded me of that movie, which is one of my favorite movies.
Saw Hidden Figures with my D this afternoon. It touched my heart in so many ways, particularly in light of current events. Friendship 7 is my first current events memory. The man who sat next to us was about my age and I think he cried as much as I did.
@NJTheatreMOM, if you liked Synecdoche, New York you might like Anomalisa.
They’re not really anything like eachother, but they do both have the typical Charlie
Kaufman weirdness.
I’m going to give Synecdoche another try.
There is a film festival going on in my area, and many of the films are in regional release but not yet in national release. The movie we saw last night, “Big Sonia” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3531176/ is about a 91 year old holocaust survivor, and what she has done to change the lives of others. She made a statement (I am paraphrasing) that she could never forgive, as that was up to a higher authority, but neither could she let herself hate anyone. Because I completely agree with this way of thinking, its hard for me to understand why people say they “hate” certain sports teams. If this diminutive woman cannot hate the Germans or the Nazis, maybe others can learn from her. But I digress…
I took my 14 yr. old D to see Hidden Figures and she liked it so much that she saw it again with a friend. Today is going with another friend to see it for a 3rd time!
DH and I saw two films this week, Hidden Figures and Lion and enjoyed both tremendously. Hidden Figures was totally inspirational and so well done in how they told the women’s stories within the segregated times especially having recently seen Loving also. Lion was not a film that had been high on my list to see but so glad we went. Incredible story, incredibly well acted and like Hidden Figures I cried at the end. So I haven’t seen La La Land but in my mind the above two are now giving Fences and Manchester by the Sea a run for Best Picture.
First of all, a spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen Hidden Figures yet, move on. If you have:
I saw the movie this weekend. I think it was artfully made and contained many fine performances. And it was certainly both educational and inspirational. However, I was left a bit out of sorts by its fictionalization of the historical record. I believe at the very opening of the film the words “based on actual events” or something similar appear, and who knows what that means anyway, but I’d say “inspired by actual events” would be a better term. Certainly the closing moments showing photos of the three women and relating their paths after the events of the film suggest to the viewer that what has gone before is an accurate portrayal of this piece of history, but if you delve a bit into the subject matter and some of the commentary written about the movie, you’ll find that’s not entirely the case.
First of all, there’s no indication that these three women were carpoolers and close friends, or that they even shared the same timeline. (In fact, Dorothy Vaughan became a supervisor–an event that occurs at the end of the movie–way back in 1948.) The white NASA personnel portrayed in the movie are all composites, not real people. There was no half-mile hike to the colored ladies room, though it was inconveniently located as compared to the white version. No NASA employee ever shoved a full wastebasket into Katherine Johnson’s arms. And I’ll bet my bottom dollar no NASA honcho ever tore down the sign from the colored ladies room. (And at least a few dollars that the pearl necklace scene was apocryphal.) Does all this take away that much from the movie? I guess that depends on what you want from a film like this. As a long overdue exposure of an unknown story, as an educational piece that will be a revelation to many and foster a greater appreciation of how, in Martin Luther King Jr.'s words “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”, then Hidden Figures is entirely successful. But I’m a lover of history, and I get twitchy when inherently fascinating historical events are puffed up with doses of melodrama to make them more crowd-pleasing. (The example of this phenomenon that was most crazy-making to me was in the movie Titanic–whose factual subject matter was certainly incredibly dramatic on its own–when it was for some reason considered necessary to amp up the drama even more by handcuffing Leonardo Dicaprio to a pipe while the water rose higher and higher.) But I recognize that a more fact-based Hidden Figures script may have made for a boring movie–if it made it to the screen at all.
To be clear, I do recommend Hidden Figures (and I’m peeved that Taraji P. Henson didn’t get an Oscar nomination for what I thought was a tour de force performance). In fact, of the three Best Picture Oscar nominees I’ve seen (Hidden Figures, La La Land and Moonlight), I’d rank it first.
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My D’s comment on historical accuracy for Hidden Figures is that there was no smoking in the movie and we all know that wasn’t the case at that time in history.
@MommaJ : I had a post some ways back on the fictional compression of events from different time periods in Hidden Figures, of which there are many. You also missed perhaps the biggest whopper: Locating Mission Control for Glenn’s Mercury mission in Langley VA rather than Cape Canaveral.
re Anomalisa: I did watch it, based on the many ecstatic critical reviews it received. It has amazing and quite affecting claymation technique – but of course, that’s something of an oxymoron, and at its most amazing and affecting it is nowhere near as beautiful or as visceral as Pixar’s CGI or Studio Ghibli’s hand-drawing, to name just two sources of high-quality animation. That technique is deployed in the service of what is basically a minor, fairly cliched bit of French existentialist filmmaking (had it been made with people, not Plasticine models), with a gimmick. The gimmick was largely the point of Kaufman’s minimalist, three-actor, one-act play on which the movie is based (and which it doubled in length). In a black-box theater with a small audience, it may well have come across as a stroke of theatrical genius. In the movie, the gimmick is annoying until you figure it out, and then almost instantly it’s annoying again.
In other words, I didn’t like it that much. A lot less than Being John Malkovich, and significantly less than Synechdoche NY or Adaptation. I suspect I might have liked the shorter play a little. As it is, the movie is going to be remembered not for its script but primarily for having full frontal nudity for both sexes and fairly realistic, soft-core (depressing) sex, but not in the same scene, all of course with Plasticine models. It’s a cinematic first that’s unlikely to be followed by a second anytime soon, and no one will care either way.
I agree with you that I’m somewhat bothered by the liberties taken with the truth, but also that while it might have made a fine documentary, as a story there wouldn’t have been much there. I needed something to feel good, and it certainly fit that bill!
Scientific American synopsis of each of the women’s lives: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-story-of-nasas-real-ldquo-hidden-figures-rdquo/
The book (by Margot Lee Shetterly) actually also covers a fourth woman - Christine Darden - who does not have role in the movie.
@JHS, sorry I missed your earlier post–I didn’t mean to be too repetitious.
@2VU0609, I did notice the lack of smoking, but I guess I find it easier to consider that dramatic license, as opposed to completely making up a bunch of events.
I think a better approach would have been to make all the characters fictional composites, with the true circumstances used as the backdrop/inspiration. It’s the conflating of fact and fiction, combined with selling the movie as factual, that annoys me. It was quite clear what parts of Titanic were true and what parts were romantic embellishment, and it was never marketed as a true story. Hidden Figures is being marketed as the true story of these women, when it’s actually highly fictionalized (or maybe just contains “alternative facts” 
). Guess I’m just trying to campaign for truth-telling, a difficult endeavor these days.
If that is indeed the case, then “inspired” would be more honest. I saw it today and truly enjoyed it, more so than LaLa Land.
As far as the basic story of Hidden Figures, I think that fictionalizing their friendships is movie business, and that’s fine. The only thing I think was jarring was the including Kevin Costner as the White Savior character, when that’s not real or needed. They did what they did, which was phenomenal and totally against the tide of their times. There was no heroic white guy busting down the bathroom sign or otherwise being the savior.
That’s my only beef–that Hollywood still thinks we need a white “hero” in a movie about African-American women.
If you like claymation, try to see 'my life as a zucchini '. This is not Aardman, strictly for older children and adults, not little kids, due to the subject matter - abused children in a group home in Switzerland. The main character reclaims the nickname his mother gave him when she was drunk, 'zucchini '. I read the team needed one full day to animate 4 seconds. The characters are incredibly expressive and I really can’t imagine how the film makers did it.
That sounds a little dark and serious. I’m used to my claymation movies being about chickens trying to escape. Well, now that I think about it, that was a little dark, too. Pies and a chicken stalag.
When I saw Hidden Figures, in the opening credits, it said “Based on a true story.” That makes it liberal enough for me.
The Costner figure was a mix of 3 guys, I heard, because they couldn’t get rights to the character they wanted.
Anf far as I remember, there was smoking. Just nowhere near the amount common in VA until recently.
I don’t think we should nitpick this movie. Too important to reduce it to that.
I saw Lion - incredible story - really enjoyed it. Thought Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman were great and deserve all the accolades they are getting. Very touching, yet not sappy. And it was filmed beautifully.
Moonlight - very powerful film. Some very good performances, but don’t understand all the hype Mahershala Ali is getting. I thought some of the other actors in the film were better. Naomie Harris was terrific, great score, didn’t totally love the way it was filmed. Not my favorite movie of the awards season, but it was well done.
I saw Hidden Figures with a female friend. We both enjoyed it. To our surprise, the theater was about 80% filled, which is unusual, even tho it was $6 Tuesdays. People applauded at the end of the movie and were very attentive and polite throughout it. I think it was well done, even if it wasn’t quite 100% biographical.
Is applauding in theaters a regional thing? I’ve never seen it in my neck of the woods yet a few posters have mentioned it here.
Are these the same people that clap when the plane lands? 
When I saw Hidden Figures there was applause not just at the end of the movie, but during the movie. Now that’s unusual. (The last movie I saw where the audience applauded at the end was The Hunt for the Wilderpeople.)