Review: Hidden Figures

An inspiration film based on true events with a touch of humour

Last night I caught the movie Hidden Figures about the black women who worked at NASA as "calculators" during the 1950s and 60s. The story was set in 1961 when the Russians were beating the Americans in the race to space.

Luckily NASA had Katherine Goble (played by Taraji Henson) who as a young child already displayed a talent for mathematics. She was assigned to work in the Space Task Group on John Glenn's first trip into space and manages to figure out an equation to bring him back safely.

Her friends are Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), who aspires to become an engineer and even fights in court to be able to attend engineering night classes in an all-white school, and Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) is smart enough to learn computer code so that her job and those of her cohorts won't disappear.

Katherine Goble made calculations for space missions

It was difficult to watch the underlying theme of segregation in the film, how blacks had to use "coloured" washrooms, lunch rooms, sections in libraries, buses, and so on. But it reflects that era when blacks were forced into such humiliating situations. The same could be said with Asians as well in another period.

But at the same time it was heartening to see how the three women handled such condescending attitudes by still carrying on with dignity and teaching their children to do the same.

It was pretty amazing that these three women are real people who accomplished so much under such adverse conditions as documented in the non-fiction book by Margo Lee Shetterly. However the movie has a few historical inaccuracies that should be pointed out.

While the movie was set in 1961, Vaughn was already made the first black and female supervisor in 1949.

By 1958 there were no more segregated facilities at NACA (later called NASA). The scene where Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) takes down the coloured sign for the bathroom is fictional, nor was he her boss, but Robert Gilruth.

The real Goble (Johnson), Jackson and Vaughn

Also in that same year Jackson becomes NASA's first black female engineer.

Although John Glenn did request Goble (she later remarried and became Katherine Johnson) to recheck the IBM calculations for his landing, she had a few days to do this, not within hours of his launch.

The movie's epilogue says Johnson also calculated the trajectories for Apollo 11 and Apollo 13, and for the Space Shuttle. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and a 40,000 square foot Computational Research Facility at the Langley Research Center was renamed the Katherine G Johnson Computational Research Facility in her honour last year. She is 97 years old.

Jackson also went onto helping other people, particularly women get promoted at NASA.

Thank you to these women and all those who worked as "computers" at NASA to inspire us to keep pushing onwards and upwards in realising our dreams. There is no limit unless you think they exist.

Hidden Figures

Directed by Theodore Melfi

Starring Taraji Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae

Circling New York by Water

Passing under the Brooklyn Bridge on our harbour cruise around Manhattan

Yesterday the summer heat definitely arrived, the same day we decided to do a harbour cruise around Manhattan. We went down to Pier 83 on West 42nd Street and caught the 12.30pm cruise.

Even before the hour and a half tour started, our guide was already telling us interesting facts and figures about New York. Not only was he a fountain of information, but also funny too. What a change from the guide who took us around Kykuit.

Passing by the Statue of Liberty on a gorgeous hot day

We learned that the Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world for 45 years with 102 floors, and has two zip codes. The guide pointed out that you will never have a record of 45 years anymore since everyone is in a race to build a taller building.

Before the Empire State Building it was the Chrysler Building that was the tallest building for only seven months at 77 stories. The building's outer layer is made of nickel alloy -- the same metal used to make five-cent coins, which is why the building is so shiny.

Our guide then told us to look to the right to look at New Jersey for a few seconds before continuing on about Manhattan, as a joke. But one interesting fact was that Hoboken, New Jersey has more churches and bars in one square mile. Go figure.

Another trivial bit of information about Hoboken is that it was where the game of baseball started, and where they began manufacturing baseball caps.

Not many people know who Audrey Marie Munson was

He also talked about a woman's likeness being on more than a dozen statues on top of several buildings and places in New York. Audrey Marie Munson was considered America's first supermodel, or "American Venus" and acted in a few films.

In 1909 she was discovered by a photographer in New York and he introduced her to his artist friends, including sculptors who used her as their muse. From there she acted in some silent films.

But then things went awry -- Her parents divorced when she was young and so she and her mother lived together in a boarding house owned by Dr Walter Wilkins. According to the story, he fell in love with Munson and even arranged to have his own wife murdered so he could marry Munson.

The Enterprise was named after the Star Trek spacecraft

She and her mother fled New York and Munson denied having any romantic relationship with Wilkins. He was eventually tried and convicted of murder with the sentence of death by electric chair; however, he managed to hang himself before his execution.

A about two years later Munson tried to commit suicide by swallowing a solution of bicholoride of mercury. When she was 40 years old, her mother had her committed into an insane asylum where she lived out the rest of her days until she died in 1996 at the age of 104.

A half niece found her in 1984 when Munson was 93. But after she died, Munson was buried without a gravestone in the Munson family plot in New Haven, New York.

What a sad story.

Our tour also took us to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and we later passed under the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges before turning around and returning to where we started.

Under the wing of the concorde, that no longer operates

Apparently New York is called the Big Apple because apples have a lot of sugar. And that was a metaphor for rich. So jazz players would say that getting gigs in New York meant getting the "big apple"...

Afterwards we went onto The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum next door. The aircraft carrier was built in 1943 during World War II and served in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The Intrepid was destined for the scrap heap, but property developer Zachary Fisher and his brother Larry saved it and parked it on the water and stocked it with lots of military planes, and even has the British Airways Concorde and the space shuttle Enterprise.

The Chinese consulate is a big compound

It's more for military buffs, but still worth checking out at least once. Visitors can also go into parts of The Intrepid, seeing where the captain worked and slept, and the equipment they used, precursors to GPS and such. The bunks don't look too comfortable, but that's the way things were at the time.

As we left The Intrepid to go back home, we passed by the Chinese consulate, a massive compound seems to house its staff as well. Wonder if they get many protesters, though NYPD officers were standing around the door leading to visa applications...