Captain Phillips

We watched Paul Greenglass's Captain Phillips last evening and it was excellent filmmaking with taut scripting and cinematography. This is the story of the hijacking, by Somali pirates, of the Maersk Alabama in 2009, and subsequent rescue of the Captain from the pirates by Navy Seals. There is a lot of drama, and quite a few harrowing moments. Indeed, the last forty minutes of the movie are just excruciating in their tension, even though we know how the story turns out. Tom Hanks gives a magnificent performance as the eponymous Captain. The last fifteen minutes of the movie are outstanding acting, and Hanks should have gotten an Oscar nomination for the work. [[How Leonardo DiCaprio keeps getting nominated for Oscars, I do not understand. Is this by the same mechanism as L Ron Hubbard's nominations for the Best Novel Hugo in the 1980s and 1990s?]] I'm sufficiently impressed that I will now have to see Greenglass's movie United 93, which I'd been avoiding because of the painful subject matter.