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.

Feynman

Having reviewed The Challenger Disaster recently, I should also mention Feynman, a graphic novel biography of Richard Feynman written by Jim Ottaviani with art by Leland Myrick. It's based, in part, on the oral histories Dick did with Ralph Leighton, son of his long-standing colleague Bob Leighton. It's great fun to read, bringing back a number of memories of a fascinating character I had the pleasure of knowing. It includes some stories I hadn't known, and quotes extensively from some of his lectures. His Nobel Prize banquet speech, for example, covers some of the same ground as Robert Heinlein's SFWA Grand Master speech. The artwork is lacking in several places --- sometimes it's hard to tell Feynman from Freeman Dyson, for example --- but the story is nicely laid out in the same random-walk way that Feynman's oral histories are.

(That said, all of the graphic novels Ottaviani and his collaborators have done have been excellent. They cover a wide range of technology and science, and are a delight to read.  I'll review more of them some other time.)

The Sessions

William Macy deserved an Oscar nomination for his work in The Sessions (2012), a movie for which Helen Hunt was nominated. John Hawke plays a man in an iron lung who wants to lose his virginity. His therapist points him at a sex surrogate, played by Hunt. Macy plays Hawke's priest with an amazing touch of humor. In fact, all of the characters in this movie face their challenges and emotional problems with humor, honesty, and poignancy. Even better, it was a delight to see Helen Hunt, on screen, naked, having clearly eschewed any kind of plastic surgery, unlike certain other Oscar-winning actresses younger than she is. Stunning performances all round, including by Adam Arkin as Hunt's husband, Moon Bloodgood and W Earl Brown as Hawke's caretakers. This was an hour and a half well worth spending.