Historical movies are one of my favorites to see because if its a very good historical movie, then you might learn something that you never knew before. Everybody knows how important a person Winston Churchill has been to the world and what “Darkest Hour” shows is that without Churchill, and the incredibly difficult decisions he had to make around the time when 300,000 men of England’s army were surrounded in Dunkirk, England might have either surrendered or fallen to the Germans. With England’s opposition removed and the guns and armory the Germans would have been able to take from England, they could have in fact taken over the entirety of Europe and won the war. At the time of Dunkirk, Churchill was surrounded by weak men who wanted to negotiate with Germany a surrender, through of all people Mussolini of Italy. These men were very weak because of their fear and panic, they did not seem to realize that whatever terms they got from lowlife of the likes of Hitler or Mussolini would have been ignored and England would have been overtaken. Churchill steadfastly refused to negotiate but at times, was at least curious as to what terms England could have gotten. It took one amazing scene when he talked to some of the people of England to know the correct course he had to take. The people of England knew the best course of action for their country, far more than most of the people who were in charge. How many times in life is that a real truth.

The acting in Darkest Hour is outstanding, starting with Gary Oldman who will definitely be nominated for best actor and might actually win an Oscar for best actor. Lili James is also excellent in her role as Churchill’s typist who at first is abused by him but later becomes a valued friend.

I highly recommend Darkest Hour.

The new movie “Downsizing”, starring Matt Damon and Kristen Wig has one of the best ideas for a movie that I have seen in a long time. A scientific breakthrough has allowed for the downsizing of any human being to 1/2500 of their original size. Once they are miniaturized they can never turn back to normal size again. This amazing process will also enable any human being to have to many times their former net worth because of the tiny world they will live in and live a much better life while saving the world from over population.

Unfortunately for this film, after the process of making a person very small is over, they completely ran out of ideas, other than to have Matt Damon’s wife, played by Kristen Wig change her mind about the whole thing and later divorce him. After Damon finds himself alone in the new small world, things got extremely boring very quickly and soon after Damon runs into a Vietnamese woman who lost her leg during some mishap during her miniaturization process and somehow they fall in love. The entire second half of this movie is not only very bad, but makes no sense. Why would Damon’s character do any of the things they have him do after he arrives in the new small world? The truth is, he wouldn’t. While watching the second half of a movie that could have been very good, I wondered how Matt Damon read this script and then agreed to do it? Why did Christoph Waltz agree to appear in this mess? How was the screenplay not completely re-written into something that actually made sense and was an understandable continuation of this amazing new scientific process?

I also realized towards the end of this way too long bad movie that this is the 4th bad film in a row that Matt Damon has made, including “The Great Wall”, “Suburbicon” and “Jason Bourne”. Somewhere along the line, the concept of less money and higher quality will have to be realized. This is too many bad movies.

I recommend that everyone miss this pretty bad film.

The movie I, Tonya about the infamous skater from the 1990’s Tonya Harding could very well be the greatest thing that ever happened to Harding’s career and legacy. This film paints a very favorable and understanding picture of the famous knee attack on Nancy Kerrigan in January 1994 and the life and sports career of Tonya Harding. As I have said before on this blog, we are all products of our childhood, good or bad and the luck or bad luck we have in life all starts at birth, based on who your parents are, money, DNA, education and many other factors that decide whether we will have a chance at a decent life. Or like in the case of Tonya Harding, have to dig themselves out of a very deep hole. From the beginning as the youngest child of a very bad mother who had 5 kids with 4 husbands, was very abusive and Tanya Harding grew up from the very bottom in every sense of the word. During her career, Harding never got the respect she deserved for her performances, because the judges thought of her as white trash.

The most remarkable part of Tanya’s life was that she was ever able to break out of her terrible life and became world famous and even got to the Olympics. Harding was married and later divorced to a horrible person who constantly hit her. Her mother was a major lowlife who also constantly hit her and verbally abused her. Her mother was married and divorced 4 times and its amazing, when you see this movie that someone like this could ever have been married 4 times and had 5 kids.

There is major Oscar buzz for the acting performances of Margot Robbie and Allison Janney as both performances were outstanding. You also have to admire the amount of work Robbie put in for 5 months to learn out to skate. The story was told in an usual way, with character interviews that seemed more like a documentary but I thought that the lead up as to why the bad people around Harding decided to do the stupid act of trying to break Kerrigan’s knee were not explored enough towards the end of this film.

I highly recommend I Toyna.