Saturday, February 25, 2017

Theater Whore: Hidden Figures


Hidden Figures 2/10

Are people afraid to say this movies sucks because it stars three Black women and you have to be careful about who you say sucks right now? I'm not. Hidden Figures sucked. I'm not talking shit about the accomplishments that these women made. I'm talking about the acting, the writing, and the music. God, the music. Okay. I need to get my shit in order. This movie has a cast of people that should be able to knock socks off and this should have been one of the best movies of the year but every ten seconds it felt like the screen should have had a subtitle that said “YOU ARE CURRENTLY WATCHING A MOVIE!” I never got lost in this for a second and my ass is able to do that with movies featuring talking trees in space with a best friend that is a raccoon.


This stars Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughn, Janelle Monae as Mary Jackson, and Taraji P. Henson as Katherine G. Johnson. They do smart people shit. If you wanna know more about them go read their Wikipedia page. You'll learn more about them than from this strangely paced movie. It tries to have funny parts and you know its supposed to be funny because of the music. The situation isn't funny though. When you are working on getting the first American to orbit Earth and you have to walk a mile to the nearest bathroom I don't care if Benny Hill shit starts playing I'm not gonna think its funny. The passage of time is hard to tell because no one looks any different throughout the movie. This felt rushed as hell and I found out that the book and movie came out the same year. And it felt like it was three hours long but was a little over two.


There is a scene where Kevin Costner rips down all the “colored bathroom” signs and my brain screamed “Oh, no fucking way that happened!” Turns out I was right. The actual Katherine G. Johnson said she used to just use the Whites only bathrooms with no problem. I get what the movie was trying to do with that scene and this film but it felt so fake. I mentioned the music earlier and its a thing with me where I hate hearing new sounding music in films based in the past unless its done jokingly or its just that filmmakers jam like with Quentin Tarantino. Ninjas have rap music. Okay. But hearing Pharell throughout this just continued to remind me that I was watching a movie. This film was everything I was afraid it would be. And stop calling it a “Black film.” Its not, you weirdos.

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