Hacker Cinema
Captain Phillips
2013 · Film · 134 min
Directed by Paul Greengrass
The true story of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in two hundred years.
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14 comments on Hacker News
I guess what I mean is if education is the goal, then a written medium is far better than a video. Real life has too much nuance to be able to accurately re-create, plus the more expensive the production, the more it needs to earn a return incentivizing the entertainment aspect over the education aspect.
Obviously written works do not present more information, but they can provide only the known information (which I guess a documentary composed of the actual recordings and interviews of the events can provide). And obviously written stuff can also be fabricated and blah blah, but assuming all of that, I just presume the fidelity of a video re-creation of an event is less than that of a written one.
One example I just thought of that led me to this assumption of discounting all videos is the way Captain Phillips is portrayed. The recent movie Blackberry is also highly fictional.
https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/blackberry/
I know these aren't documentaries per se, but they all require digging to get to the truth v fiction parts, so why bother digging? If I want to be entertained, I watch the video. If I want to be educated, I look up written sources I think might be credible.
For the « how », you can watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Phillips_(film) to get an idea of the pirate logistics
>People aren't inspired by safe shipping lanes.
Captain Phillips was a pretty good movie.
Killing pirates has been done relatively recently. There was even a movie starring Tom Hanks based on one such incident entitled “Captain Phillips”. Also, that was not the only nor last incident when pirates were killed.
I hope he is able to profit from his story with book and/or movie rights. It's a fascinating story and I bet would make a great movie a la Captain Phillips or 127 Hours.
There's some issues with pirates in many parts of the world though (source: Captain Phillips movie). It's just not practical to really secure container ships from every feasible sea and air attack surface, unless there was a big red button that just drops the reactor into the depths of the ocean.
A 'Captain Phillips' executive identified the tone of the film as a source of discomfort for censors, particularly “the big Military machine of the U.S. saving one U.S. citizen. China would never do the same and in no way would want to promote this idea.”
I was watching Argo on my Chinese IPTV streaming service in Shenzhen with my Chinese roommate and my roommate was blown away by the idea that the movie was based on a true story. He said that the Chinese government would never take such extreme steps to rescue its citizens from any such situation. I never really thought about his comment and his shock (it was a lot of shock) until reading this just now. Wow, interesting.
That third link is fascinating - not just for he insights into how Chinese censors indirectly guide producers, but also for the lack of ironic detachment and self-awareness shown by the American analysts, eg
Red Dawn, a remake of a 1980s action movie about a Soviet invasion of the United States, was originally shot featuring China as the antagonist invading the United States. According to Mr. Shiao, however, the Chinese are “not interested in their country being perceived as a violent military threat to the lives of average Americans.”
and
A 'Captain Phillips' executive identified the tone of the film as a source of discomfort for censors, particularly “the big Military machine of the U.S. saving one U.S. citizen. China would never do the same and in no way would want to promote this idea.”
While I think censorship an unwise and ultimately self-defeating policy, and also agree with the basic premise that a good many of the rules are just dressed up protectionism, I can't really blame China for declining to import overt propaganda. China makes lots of propagandistic films, but the propaganda is mainly about what China should be like. It'll be some time before they produce an overtly anti-American film like Brother 2 or Valley of the Wolves (as opposed to striaght-up propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_8lSjcoSW8) and I doubt whether it would be well-received here if they did.
That list was incomplete. I added a recent Indian film about Ramanujan and a Soviet film about Sofia Kovalevskaya from the 1980s. FWIW, there's also an upcoming film "Dau" (in post-production) about the Russian mathematical physicist Lev Landau.
One difficulty is that the Wikipedia list does not include made for TV movies and documentaries, like 'Dangerous Knowledge' (2007) on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, or the BBC documentary 'Isaac Newton: The Last Magician' (2013), or the PBS documentary 'Newton's Dark Secrets' (2005), or "Breaking the Code" (1996), another biography of Turing, or "Freedom Man" (1989) about the black American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, or the 1973 Italian TV movie "Non ho tempo" about Galois, or Simon Singh's 1996 documentary "Fermat's Last Theorem", focusing on Andrew Wiles but including other mathematicians.
Or the BBC documentary "The Birth Of Calculus" (1986) on Leibniz, the four-part BBC series "The Story of Maths" (2008), the 2008 "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem", or ... I think you get the picture that there are many TV movies about mathematicians, and most of them are white males. BTW, none of them are "average".
When "Moneyball" was turned into a movie, people asked how a book that dealt with statistics could be turned into a movie, since statistics alone isn't that interesting. What big screen movie is there to make out of Dirichlet's life? Of Riemann's? Of Wiles'?
So, of "regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years", where I'll define "mythologized" to mean "made a movie about them", and I'll limit it to feature length films based on lives of actual scientists:
"Kinsey" (2004) on Kinsey, "Copenhagen" (2002, TV) on a meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, "Creation" (2009) on Darwin, "Something the Lord Made" (2004) about heart surgeons (one of which was a white male), "Tim's Vermeer" (2013) though that's more an amateur scientist, "The Aviator" (2004) about Howard Hughes (aerospace engineer and inventor), "A Dangerous Method" (2011) concerning Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (the first two being white males), this fall the film "Experimenter" about Stanley Milgram will be released, "The Insider" (1999) is a drama based on the research scientist Jeffrey Wigand, and "The Strangest Dream" (2008) about the physicist Joseph Rotblat.
Those are movies about 10+ real scientists, all male, straight, and not disabled, plus a couple of others. (There were a few movies with other than white, male, straight characters, but certainly not this many.)
You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.
If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,
A problem with your list is it's easily interpreted as cherry picking. Jodie Foster was the protagonist of "Contact" (1997), a big budget sci-fi film. How does your choice now of "Gravity" indicate a changed pattern from nearly 20 years ago?
Another problem is that you haven't established what the baseline should be. Given the 12.2% of the US population is "Non-Hispanic Black or African American", what percentage of films with 'hero scientists' should have a "Non-Hispanic Black or African American" in that role? Given that 51% of the adult population in the US are women, how many hero scientist movies should have a women in that role? Perhaps it's more that these roles were previously underrepresented?
Is the pattern you see simply explained by the secular trend that people other than straight white males are becoming more frequent in science?
You ended by picking two items from a different context - postings to HN in the last month and 'male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year', I think to establish a pattern. But you again lack the evidence needed to tell if your observations are really a pattern instead of cherry picking. What is the expected baseline?
If the ratio of men to women in science is 4:1, then we would expect a female scientist to be publicly disgraced with about the same ratio. (It's hard to give a good ratio since I think it's more likely that a senior researcher will be found out and reported in the international news. I believe there are more males in higher level positions than females. Also, "Japanese women account for only 10% of the researchers in Japan" and "only 12 percent of the science and engineering workforce in India was female in 2010", so the international ratio is probably more like 8:1.
Checking now, I searched "Retraction Watch" for all people described by the writers as being "disgraced". The complete list of male scientists in the last few years are: Naoki Mori, James H. Hunton, Dipak Das, Don Poldermans, Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Woo-Suk Hwang.
The only disgraced female scientist mentioned is Bengu Sezen.
This 8:1 ratio is about what I expect from the percentage of women doing science in the world stage, and within the error bars for something with so few numbers.
What method did you use to count disgraced male and female scientists? I see you missed Haruko Obokata as another disgraced female scientist, so it doesn't seem like you've done a systematic search.
(A double-check search against sciencemag.org finds Jens Förster and Marc Hauser as additional 'disgraced' male researchers and no additional female researchers. Note that Science does not use the term 'disgraced' in articles about Haruko Obokata.)
Also, what do you use as the ratio for males in science vs. females in science? If it's 4:1 or higher then with 3 male disgraces you would expect less than a 50% chance of hearing about a female in the same situation, no?
Otherwise, if you're just making connections based on the latest hot gossip, then you'll be suffering from some serious bias error. You're not going to hear about Naoki Mori on HN.
Regarding postings to HN, what is your criteria? For example, "Alain Badiou Is Making a Movie About Plato with Brad Pitt and Sean Connery" from 7 days ago is a movie about a guy. Is it mythologizing a male? What about "Deep Web (2015 Documentary) – The Story of the Silk Road" from a month ago - does it mythologize Ross William Ulbricht? How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?
If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.
How about a disposable combat drone launcher system built into a standard cargo container? The device could remain inert until needed, but be activated on request from the crew. If the movie Captain Phillips accurately portrayed the piracy threat, then several smaller drones might be able to act as a deterrent. (Particularly if a TrackingPoint like weapon were incorporated.)
For those who haven't watched it, Captain Phillips is a great movie to understand a bit more about sea piracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Phillips_(film)
Oh, this is really annoying! During my around-the-world solo sail I was warned to stay away from Socotra, described as a den of pirates. Being alone on my boat made me particularly wary of such places, but based on the linked pictures, it seems I missed an amazing experience.
The nearby African coast is now the site of many more recent pirate attacks, including the attack on which the movie "Captain Phillips" is based.
An account of my sail: http://arachnoid.com/sailbook
It's a constant disappointment, especially when the characterization of the lead role is questionably accurate. (Captain Phillips, or the Christian Bale one about a GI who escape a POW camp.) If you want to see a recent movie that is considered quite accurate, Blue Caprice seems to be.
I hear they made a movie of that. Captain Phillips, I believe it's called?