I loved Hidden Figures. It was beautiful, and uplifting ,and pretty much the perfect first-film-of-the-year for me. It clears my Threshold of Awesome, and reminded me of how awesome actual human people can be.

It also reminded me of how far we’ve come since the decade in which I was born, and how courageous we had to be in order to make it that far. And that’s pretty important because we have a long way to go, and more courage will be required.

The leads, Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe, were all powerfully convincing, and Kevin Costner finally got to make up for Pa Kent, which I shouldn’t have been holding against him, but that’s a different story altogether. I also loved seeing Aldis Hodge¹ play support-staff for someone else’s genius, and Mahershala Ali² be so completely different than the Cottonmouth character he sold to me in Luke Cage. 

I wish we’d seen just a little bit more of the mathematics, enough for me to fully grasp the enormity of the problems faced by the space program, but that’s a tough call to make for filmmakers. Confuse the audience for just a few seconds, and you run the risk of losing everybody. So, you know, they probably made the right call.

¹Hodge played Hardison in Leverage, and I cannot un-see him as a hacker with mad grifting skills.

²Cottonmouth was pretty much my favorite character from Netflix’s Luke Cage. Shame about that mic stand thing.

I saw Passengers on Tuesday night. Here are some words I used on Twitter:

Beautiful. Powerful. Heartbreaking. Inspiring. Awesome.

Chris Pratt did a fine job, and Michael Sheen was spot on, but Jennifer Lawrence absolutely owned her role, all the way to the bone. She was astounding, and without her performance the film simply wouldn’t have worked. Chris Pratt may have been positioned as our protagonist, but Jennifer Lawrence was the beating heart of the story.

Enough gushing. It’s a fine movie, and it clears my Threshold of Awesome.

I saw Rogue One. The odds are pretty good that if you’re reading this, you’ve already decided whether or not to see it, and if you haven’t yet seen it you’d rather I not spoil anything. I’ll make this quick:

It is a fine film beyond simply being a Star Wars film. I think it’s a better movie than The Force Awakens, and it does an outstanding job of setting up the original trilogy. It clears the Threshold of Awesome, and if you’re a Star Wars fan, I suspect you’ll be quite pleased with it.

That’s it. Enjoy the movie!

Arrival is brilliant, beautiful, touching, and quite thought-provoking. It clears my Threshold of Awesome, and invites me to say very little about it lest I rob my readers of the voyage of discovery the film offers.

The film is adapted from Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” which can be found in the collection “Stories of Your Life and Others,” which Publisher’s Weekly called “… the first must-read SF book of the year” back in 2002.