Moonlight

Moonlight takes place in Liberty City, Miami and shows three snippets of a young man’s life as he grows up black and gay in what is a  tough neighbourhood.

First we meet a young Chiron (Alex Hibbert) nicknamed Little. His lone parent is his crack-addicted mother Paula (Naomie Harris). Basically he is fending for himself and eventually he runs away from home. Typically, it is a crack dealer named Juan (Mahershala Ali) who finds him inside an abandoned house and takes him home to the place he shares with his girlfriend, Theresa (Janelle Monáe). Both Juan and Theresa form a bond with him despite hostility from his mother.

Then we meet Chiron as a teenager (Ashton Sanders), withdrawn and just about coping with his still addicted mother but he is bullied by his peers who regard him as a ‘faggot’ but it isn’t until he hooks up with an old friend, Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), on a beach that he has his first sexual encounter.

In the end though, Chiron cracks under the weight of the bullying when Kevin is put up to attacking him and he smashes a chair over the ringleader Terrel (Patrick Decile), which means he ends up in a juvenile detention centre.

Finally, we see Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) ten years on, now known as Black. He's now a drug dealer himself living in Atlanta and has basically turned in to Juan, showing what a big influence he had on him. Although, Juan himself is no longer alive. Chiron’s mother is now in a home. After getting a phone call from Kevin (André Holland), who is now a cook in Miami, he goes to visit him. Kevin is still his only sexual encounter and he still has feelings for Chiron despite now having a child of his own.

'Moonlight' is one of those films that just drifts along, following a life, but in a mesmerizing way. It's not the sort of film that gives you answers, it just shows you the way things are and lets you draw your own conclusions. A bit of thinker’s film if you like. Ultimately it chronicles how much a part drugs can play in the lives of some people.

The film is full of strong performances from the likes of Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris as well as others, which is why it has been heavily nominated for awards this year. It also has three actors playing the lead character, as well as for the likes of Kevin, which is a bold move.

Is it the best film of the year as decided by the Academy? Probably not but it's still pretty good.

Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures follows three black women who worked in NASA's computing section in 1961 where they performed the calculations for the space program by hand. They were basically the computers of the day as real computers were only just being rolled out to such places as NASA. Being coloured they had their own separate toilets and dining facilities.

Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) had been managing her section for some time but is repeatedly denied a supervisory position and is instead overseen by her own supervisor Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst).

Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) meanwhile is an aspiring engineer but she cannot progress further because she doesn’t have the right qualifications, which she is barred from getting because of her colour. She goes to court to try to get this changed.

Then there is Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), who is the main focus of the film. Johnson is the most talented mathematician at NASA and once they realise this she is called upon to work in the Space Task Group under Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons) and his boss Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). Their aim is to put a man in space before the Soviet Union.

It’s not easy for her working in her new environment and not only because she had to climb a high ladder every day to write on a huge blackboard. She has to drink coffee from a pot labelled ‘Coloured’ and has to run half a mile back to her old building where the nearest toilet for coloured females is. While at home, she has three young daughters to raise.

Despite all this, through her excellent work, she earns the respect of everybody on the project including astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell). Glenn trusts her calculations above those of anyone else’s including those produced by their new IBM computer.

The aim of the film is clearly to raise the struggles that the coloured minority had to be recognised at that time. However, personally I found learning about the space race with the Soviet Union, the difficulties of getting a man into space, keeping him there and then getting him back again in one piece the most fascinating part. 

As it is ‘based on true events’, you of course rush home and immediately ‘google’ the plot. If only to check whether Katherine really need to run half a mile just to use the toilet? And... no, of course she didn't. That, and a whole lot of other things, were manufactured or overstated for dramatic effect. Sadly, that ruined the film for me.

Katherine Johnson herself states that she didn’t experience any segregation and that everyone worked brilliantly together as a team. In fact, the film seems to totally undersell what Johnson achieved. As for NASA, who are practically painted as racists, they didn’t even exist until after the types of issues raised in the film were resolved.

The real story is fascinating enough, so it’s really annoying that the filmmakers were not impressed by the quiet and efficient way these women actually conducted themselves and achieved so much.

Therefore, it’s really just an enjoyable piece of (part) fiction that is also quite informative about the space race, which I don’t think they tampered with too much.