"Hidden Figures"

[Lilly]

Just saw this movie on HBO...it was wonderful...I give it two thumbs up!

[.ZZ.]

27 minutes ago, Lilly said:

Just saw this movie on HBO...it was wonderful...I give it two thumbs up!

I saw that too Lilly, she really broke some ground.

How about when she had to run through the building and parking lot to get to an approved rest room?

[Lilly]

32 minutes ago, .ZZ. said:

 

How about when she had to run through the building and parking lot to get to an approved rest room?

I was like, "that BS has to stop!"...and it did (thankfully).

I really enjoyed this movie and want to recommend it to all my fellow UMers.

[Hermai]

Hidden Figures is an interesting example of Hollywood's desire to push a social justice agenda that feeds into vicious identity politics.

------------------------------

See:

"Hidden Figures is engaging, entertaining and enlightening – but by playing fast and loose with historical fact, it risks blunting some of the story’s eye-opening emotional force."

And see:

"The film’s emotional peak comes when Space Task Group director Al Harrison – charismatically played by Kevin Costner – smashes a symbol of the institutional racism. Yet the incident never happened, and the character is a fictionalised composite.

Employing dramatic licence in this way is typical of Hollywood – but, crucially, in this case events could not possibly have happened that way. Harrison’s “white saviour” outburst comes after realising Johnson has been wasting valuable computing time rushing between the white and black sections to use a segregated toilet. Yet Nasa abolished segregated wings in 1958, and Johnson says she used the unlabelled “white” toilets all along, first by accident, later in defiance.

Her sudden promotion in the film to the Space Task Group – again patronisingly portrayed as a white-saviour moment – in 1961 is also a distortion. In fact, she joined the team in 1958, after five years with the Flight Research Division, and co-authored a report in 1960 (she is repeatedly denied the chance to do this in the movie).

Vaughan was indeed the first black supervisor at Nasa, as seen in the film, but took up the role 13 years earlier, in 1948. Similarly, Jackson was Nasa’s first African-American female engineer, as the film claims, but also achieved this earlier, in 1958.

These women deserve to be celebrated, but director Theodore Melfi has allowed heart to rule head.

Such factual inaccuracies do more harm than good – by embellishing injustice, you risk creating easy fodder for dark, reactionary forces to seize upon.

There was no need to exaggerate the evils of segregation – and doing so threatens to cloud Hidden Figures’s well-intentioned cause."

 

Source:

https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film-review-hidden-figures-takes-liberties-with-real-life-facts-1.66710

Edited September 16, 2017 by Invisig0th

[Lilly]

It was a fictional movie, not a documentary. 

[Hermai]

1 hour ago, Lilly said:

It was a fictional movie, not a documentary. 

So is Harry Potter. I don't see moviegoers representing Hogwarts as reality.

[Lilly]

The thing is that if one looks at US society in general parts of the south were still living under segregation into the early 1960s. It's true that NASA was not taking part in this stuff during the time period supposedly taking place in the movie, but something tells me that prejudice (especially toward females) still existed at that time in history. All in all, this was a fictionalized movie using some historical females (who actually did exist) but it was not a documentary by any means.

[Hermai]

19 minutes ago, Lilly said:

The thing is that if one looks at US society in general parts of the south were still living under segregation into the early 1960s. It's true that NASA was not taking part in this stuff during the time period supposedly taking place in the movie, but something tells me that prejudice (especially toward females) still existed at that time in history. All in all, this was a fictionalized movie using some historical females (who actually did exist) but it was not a documentary by any means.

You're correct. I meant no disrespect in sharing the above article.

[GlitterRose]

14 hours ago, Invisig0th said:

So is Harry Potter. I don't see moviegoers representing Hogwarts as reality.

You haven't met this guy...

[Hermai]

Just now, ChaosRose said:

You haven't met this guy...

But, I want to.

[GlitterRose]

Yeah, he's a stroke of awesome. 

I told you I have a derailing problem. 

Back to regularly scheduled programming. 

[Lilly]

Hollywood movies do this kind of thing all the time. They will take people who actually did exist but then weave a story around them that's anything but historically accurate. One should never take a fictional movie as reflecting objective reality.