Captain Philips

[Steve Williams]

I saw this film yesterday in Denver before returning home and all I can say is "wow"

Even though we all know the story and how it ends, watching it play out to its conclusion is an adrenaline rush much the same as I experienced watching Gravity in Imax 3D. The final scene in the film is so powerful that if it doesn't gain Tom Hanks an Oscar Best Actor nomination I would be shocked.

Also the Somalian who plays Muse the leader of the pirate group who took the ship was found driving a taxi in Minneapolis and has had no acting experience. He was scary good and absolutely believable in the role. When he said to Capt Philips, "look at me, I am the captain now" it was completely unscripted. I anticipate he will receive nomination for Best Supporting Actor

This movie is in my top 5 so far.

Not to be missed

Thumbs way up

 

[Steve Williams]

How ‘Captain Phillips’ Shows Modern Piracy in All Its Complexity

By Peter Debruge | Variety

With all due respect to Johnny Depp and Errol Flynn, piracy is a lot more complicated than Hollywood makes it look. How refreshing, therefore, that Paul Greengrass and company go out of their way to provide valuable context while also avoiding reductive racism in “Captain Phillips,” their white-knuckle retelling of the Maersk Alabama hijacking.
Frankly, after seeing the first preview for “Captain Phillips” this summer, I worried that the film might do just the opposite, though I should have trusted in Greengrass, who opened “United 93” with the controversial decision to show the Muslim terrorists going about their prayers — a choice that asks us to see the culprits as people.

“Captain Phillips” makes a similarly courageous choice by balancing the story between the Americans and the pirates, whom Greengrass introduces like desperate day laborers outside a Home Depot. These untrained volunteers are hardly the ruthless mercenaries one might expect; nor are they the simple fishermen for whom apologists make excuses, citing how international corpo
rations have over-fished the waters off the Somali coastline. But they are proper people: fully rendered characters that Greengrass deems worthy of fair consideration and basic respect.
You wouldn’t know that from that first trailer, however, which simplistically (and rather sensationalistically) boils things down to a black-and-white conflict, literally. The ideological deck is clearly stacked in the Americans’ favor, with none other than two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks (the Jimmy Stewart of his generation) playing Richard Phillips, the real-life captain who risked his life to protect his crew. Meanwhile, the pirates are depicted as fearsomely as possible: as angry, armed black men — an image likely to strike a nerve with the sort of white people who instinctively lock their car doors when rolling through neighborhoods of color.

As if “Jaws” hadn’t given audiences enough reason to fear the water, this story suggests there’s something even scarier than sharks on the high seas. After giving the heroic Hanks plenty of screen time, the trailer’s first glimpse of the pirates shows disembodied black hands clutching an AK-47. Machine-gun fire obscures the Somalis’ faces, while Greengrass’ disorienting shaky-cam style abstracts them further, reducing these desperate men to one-dimensional villains. (It’s as if the trailer wants to exploit the same gut-level panic Hanks satirized in “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” where his Wall Street character overreacts when confronted by two African-Americans in the Bronx.)

Thankfully, the film itself is far more nuanced than the marketing department would have you believe. After withholding their faces for the better part of two minutes, the trailer finally fixes on Barkhad Abdi (playing Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse) as he threatens, “Look at me. Look at me! I’m the captain now.” And look at him the film does, admirably allowing this unfamiliar Minnesota-found actor to hold his own opposite a star as formidable as Hanks
.
It’s unfortunate that dramatizing the daring David-and-Goliath attack provides further publicity to Muse, who enjoyed plenty of attention after his capture, when his grinning photo was circulated all around the world. That said, Greengrass recognizes that what makes Capt. Phillips’ story worth telling isn’t simply the beat-by-beat re-creation of what he went through, but the broader context — a situation so complex it virtually demands its own documentary.

Lucky for us, a film called “Stolen Seas” exists to do just that, examining the hijacking of another freighter, the CEC Future, from all sides. (That same real-world incident also inspired Tobias Lindholm’s terrific “A Hijacking,” another tense, if not quite Greengrass-flashy, based-on-a-true-story thriller.) If “Captain Phillips” left you burning to know more about piracy, you owe it to yourself to see “Stolen Seas,” which radically altered my perception of the subject. Over the course of four years, director Thymaya Payne spent significant time on the ground in Somalia, examining the roots of the problem and even managing to slip cameras into the hands of actual pirates. What he finds couldn’t be further removed from the Hollywood myth of the romantic swashbuckler. Despite that legacy, as best I can tell, Greengrass gets it right.

 

[Steve Williams]

The film in many places deviated from the real story and I found this interesting tid bit

http://nypost.com/2013/10/13/crew-members-deny-captain-phillips-heroism/

 

[Steve Williams]

As great as this film is it still doesn't beat Gravity IMO but still a must see

 

[Steve Williams]

The best scene in Captain Phillips wasn't even in the script

By Scott Meslow

Captain Phillips is a strikingly powerful movie, with a commanding lead performance by Tom Hanks that's easily the best work he's done in a decade. But for all its strengths, the film's best scene (and the scene that might earn Hanks an Oscar) comes at the very end of the movie — and it wasn't even in the script.

(Spoilers for Captain Phillips to follow.)

Most directors would probably have ended the film with Phillips being escorted to safety on the USS Bainbridge — or flashed forward, to show Phillips' homecoming with his wife and children in the United States. Instead, the film follows Phillips as his rescuers lead him to the ship's infirmary. Phillips is covered in blood, disoriented, and near-delirious with shock, and a medical examiner gently attempts to calm him down as he asks about his family between sobs.

The scene is extraordinarily raw — surprising, heartbreaking, and human in a way that few recent films have achieved. But how did it come about? In a press conference following a screening at the New York Film Festival, Hanks — who called the scene "a moment like I've never had making films" — revealed that the scene was entirely unscripted and unplanned. "It's not on the page at all," explained Hanks. "It was not meant to be the last scene in the film." Here is Hanks' full explanation of how it came about:

But we had the actual captain of the [USS Bainbridge] with us when we were shooting, and [director Paul Greengrass] said, 'What did you do with Captain Phillips when you first got him onboard?' And the captain said, 'Well, he was a mess, so the first thing we did was take him to the infirmary to get him cleaned up.' And Paul said, 'Well, why don't we go down to the infirmary?'

We'd never been there. It was not part of it. It wasn't in the schedule. It hadn't been scouted. It wasn't lit. But we went down there — and we had the actual crew of the ship that we were shooting on — and said, 'What would you do to someone that came in here?' And they said, 'Well, we'd lay them down here, and we'd do this and this and this.' Paul said, 'Well, shall we give a try?' And Barry said, 'Well, give me a couple minutes to put up some lights.' We shot it — I don't know, four or five times, I guess.

We had, literally, the crew of the infirmary. They didn't know they were going to be in a movie that day. They thought they might be dress extras walking around in the background, and here they are — boom — with cameras that are going to be on them.

The first take I remember completely falling apart because these people had never been in a movie before, and they could not get past the horrible self-consciousness of everything that was going on around them. But we just stopped, and Paul said, 'Don't worry about it. You can't do anything wrong. It's not a test. If it doesn't work, we won't use it. So let's just try it again and see what happens.' At that point, those people were really quite amazing. The freedom in order to give it a shot was so liberating. And everybody was up for it. So it really made itself.

Paul Greengrass, however, refused to let Hanks be so modest:

When we went down to the infirmary, and we tried that first go, and Barry got in the wrong place — you're sort of trying to do it all in a rush. And it wasn't quite working, but you could feel something. I remember we went outside, and I said, 'Did you feel something there?' And [Tom] said, 'Yeah, yeah, I did. It's just… Everybody's being nice to me, after 60 weeks of people putting guns in my face.' What I mean is… What that is — and you see it with great actors, of which Tom obviously is one — where you see a door. There's just a tiny gap, but the door is there. And it takes courage to walk through, as an actor, and find the truth. And that's what is there in that scene. It's the truth of vulnerability, of shock, of confusion — all the things you would expect of things like that. But I think — and you've just seen it — whenever I see that scene, there's a shocking sense of humanity. And that is an actor finding the truth. You have to seize those moments, and Tom did.

 

[Drikus]

Just saw the trailer, looks very good!

 

[KeithR]

Hmm. Debating this or The Counselor next weekend as I probably can't miss the "Carrie" redo this weekend

 

[still-one]

My wife and I saw this yesterday and both of us thought it was very good. Even though we all know the outcome the tension is constant throughout the film. Tom Hanks is good but his acting in the last several minutes is suburb.

Although I really enjoyed Gravity due to its beautiful photography and special effects plus Bullocks acting, all in all Captain Phillips is the better movie overall.

 

[Steve Williams]

I agree having seen both. Comparing apples and oranges because Gravity in Imax 3D isn't something we have ever seen before

Capt Phillips was extremely suspenseful esp with the kid who played Muse (very believable to the point of absolute reality)

The last scene with Tom Hanks in the Infirmary was chilling. Acting at it's very best and not part of the original script

 

[still-one]

I agree having seen both. Comparing apples and oranges because Gravity in Imax 3D isn't something we have ever seen before

Capt Phillips was extremely suspenseful esp with the kid who played Muse (very believable to the point of absolute reality)

The last scene with Tom Hanks in the Infirmary was chilling. Acting at it's very best and not part of the original script

Steve, I just read the review you posted above regarding the infirmary scene. While watching that scene I wondered if they used real people rather than actors. There was a reality to how they interacted with Captain Phillips that is too often lost in movies. A truly memorable scene.

 

[Steve Williams]

They were real navy corpsmen who happened to be in the infirmary that day and were told what was going to happen. They blew the first take but shortly after got a wrap

My wife asked the same thing coming out of the theater and I know I posted info here on that very topic.

 

[Steve Williams]

http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?12365-Captain-Philips&p=225086&viewfull=1#post225086

 

[jazdoc]

Saw this last night and really enjoyed it. Very reminiscent (although not quite as good) as his masterpiece "United 93". Could have been 15 minutes shorter...

 

[Steve Williams]

Saw this last night and really enjoyed it. Very reminiscent (although not quite as good) as his masterpiece "United 93". Could have been 15 minutes shorter...

The extra 15 minutes were seen in the very last unscripted scene

 

[Bill Hart]

The "Momster"- my wife's 94 y/o mother, insisted that my wife take her to the theatre to see this. If she stayed awake during the movie, it's Oscar bound.
Interesting that a couple of recent fiction thrillers, Daniel Silva's latest and Alex Berenson's, center on Somalian pirates.
We've been dealing with those dudes since Jefferson's time-