What I Watched -- Captain Phillips

Rather than watching the disastrous Game 1, T and I bailed in the third inning and instead went to see Captain Phillips at the MX, where we got our hot dog with ketchup, mustard, and relish delivered to our seat, thank you very much.

It was an excellent decision.  The movie was gripping in that increasingly popular ripped-from-the-headlines, I-know-how-this-ends-but-I'm-on-the-edge-of-my-seat-anyway Argo style film making.  And it was a success.

Tom Hanks - our intensely likable everyman - plays the titular Captain Phillips, and he basically is the movie.  Everything happens either at his direction or because of him, and it's a responsibility that the actor (and apparently the man) handled well.  Honestly he handled the pressure of the situation so well in the movie that it's hard to believe it really went down like that.

In case you don't know the story, Hanks plays the captain of a commercial container ship, the Maersk Alabama.  His ship is boarded by pirates off the coast of Somalia, and what follows is a showdown between the older, wiser, more collected Phillips, and the desperate kid pirates.

Bottom line: a hard-to-believe story with a good balance of suspense and understanding.