Director Clint Eastwood knows what many avid movie goers have realized for many years; that the best movies are often the ones that are about true stories. “Richard Jewell”, the new movie about a security guard who was falsely accused of planting a bomb at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta is one of the best true story properties Clint Eastwood’s production company has made in the last few years – on a par with “Sully” released in 2016.

The most amazing thing about this story of FBI and media incompetence is that something like this could ever happen to any decent human being in this country who was not only innocent, but a hero who saved countless lives because he did his job so well. Richard Jewell’s problem was that he fit too many of personal characteristics of other similar criminals and bombers, including the fact that he was kind of a loner who lived with his mother. Due to the desperation of the FBI, the speed of their “rushing go judgement” including missing the simple fact that the person who called in the bomb threat at a pay phone outside of the Olympic park on July 27, 1996 was too far away to also plant the bomb. Once the FBI realized they missed this obvious piece of evidence, they tried to manufacture a second possibility that Jewell was using an accomplice. The FBI then also tried to trick Jewell into confessing, by telling him they were going to shoot a training video for FBI personnel – something that I was amazed to see could ever happen in this country.

This nightmare that terrorized Richard Jewell, played perfectly by Paul Walter Hauser and his mother Bobi Jewell played by Kathy Bates went on for 88 days. The lead investigator Tom Shaw, played by John Hamm, even leaked the details of the FBI investigation against Jewell to a ruthless police reporter, Kathy Scruggs, played by Olivia Wilde. Once the investigation was leaked, Jewell’s picture was on the cover of every newspaper and magazine in this country, effectively ruining his reputation and destroying his life. None of the members of the FBI or the thousands of reporters covering this false story cared about Richard Jewell, they only cared about themselves and their careers. To this day, there are still many people in the world who think that Jewell had something to do with the Olympic bombing. Were it not for Jewell’s lawyer Watson Bryant played by Sam Rockwell, who he met a decade earlier during his delivery job in Watson’s law firm, its possible that Jewell would have been railroaded into jail. The relationship between Bryant and Jewell and how much Bryant cared about Jewell as a human being and a friend is one of the best things about this movie. When we are at our lowest, all of us need a friend; a great message in this film.

While watching this movie, realizing that Jewell was not only under tremendous stress but also obese, I had to wonder how he lived through this without dying of a stroke or a heart attack. Unfortunately Richard Jewell did die in 2007 of heart failure brought on by Diabetes.

I agree with the mostly positive reviews for Richard Jewell that are in the 75% range and my opinion is a bit higher at 80%. I recommend this movie as one of the best Eastwood films about a true story.

In 1862, flight was all about hot air balloons and considering a straw basket, rope and a sewn together giant hot ball of air; flying or floating in a balloon in 1862 was about as dangerous as it could ever be.

The unusual new film “The Aeronauts” is very loosely based on the  July 17, 1862 balloon flight where James Glaisher, a weather scientists and expert balloonist Henry Coxwell took dangerous risks and rode a huge hot air balloon to an all time record height of 37,000 feet. In order to make this story marketable, Coxwell was replaced with a woman Amelia Wren, played by Felicity Jones and Glaisher is played by Eddie Redmayne. Jones and Redmayne starred in “The Theory of Everything” in 2014 and the hope here is that more audiences would be interested in this story because of the actors involved – correctly thinking that a movie about two men and a dangerous balloon ride would never draw enough people into theaters.

The problem with this entire movie is that about 90% of the story is entirely about this dangerous balloon ride with some flashbacks about Glaisher’s ambitions to understand and predict the weather and convincing Wren to fly with him. I was disappointed both with the lack of a story here and the fact that many of the amazing and dangerous feats during this highest ever balloon flight did not actually happen. There is one scene in particular where Wren climbed all the way outside of the balloon, almost 7 miles high and in the freezing cold, to the very top to free a frozen flap that was preventing the balloon from descending. The special effects with this scene with Felicity Jones is by far the best part of this movie.

On a recent talk show appearance, Eddie Redmayne talked about the first day of shooting this film, when he and Felicity Jones were almost killed when they accidentally threw out too much ballast (sand bags) and because of this they could not avoid trees and eventually crashed. Why a risk like this was taken with these two actors makes no sense on the first day of shooting considering the quality of special effects now available by using green screens makes no sense. When shooting any dangerous scene within any film, the concept of “its only a movie” should never be forgotten.

Despite the very good special effects and one amazing scene involving Amelia Wren climbing to the top of the balloon, I cannot recommend this movie, because there is nowhere near enough story.

If any aspiring writer of fiction approached any literary agent with story like the movie “Dark Waters”, most would say that the entire story is absurd, because it would be impossible for any large company to knowingly poison the population of a town or city for 40 years for profit. Someone in the company would come forward and report something like this. People are dying, getting cancer, there are birth defects, large numbers of farm animals are dying. How can that many executives turn a blind eye to mass murder for profit? There is no way this could happen. That many educated executives could never be that cruel to so many people for so long. How could they rationalize causing serious health problems to other people and then lie about it, for profit? How could they sleep at night, knowing what they are doing to the health of so many people? Nobody would ever believe a story like this. So much for fiction.

The real world has produced a company like PG&E that knowingly poisoned the town of Hinkley California from 1952-1966 by dumping 370 million gallons of chromium tainted wastewater; the subject of the movie “Erin Brockovich”, released in 2000. In April 2014 the Governor of Michigan changed the water source for Flint Michigan to the Flint river and did not care that he was poisoning the water to Flint with lead. This criminal outrage went on for years, before it was finally stopped.

The subject of the new movie “Dark Water” is about Dupont, who “knowingly”, despite their own medial research dumped a chemical called C8, also known as Perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA to make a product called Teflon, invented in 1961, on the residents of Parkersburg, West Virginia. Like all products that involved chemical compounds, there is waste output involved and the problem always is, where to dump it? Dupont only cared that it was making over 1 billion dollars a year manufacturing Teflon, not about its own research that proved the extreme health hazard the chemical C8 – that represents 8 molecules of Carbon, was causing to thousands of people.

Dark Waters is both hard to watch and almost impossible to believe even happened because the crime is so huge. The story of this film is about a corporate lawyer, Robert Bilott who devoted almost his entire legal career through years of great hardship to force Dupont to be accountable for the decades of criminal outrage they perpetrated on thousands of people. Dark Waters is both a legal and human drama, with some complex legal judgments and hundreds of thousands of documents that Billot processed, looking for the trail of evidence he needed to sue Dupont in Civil court. Dark Waters also stars Anne Hathaway as Billot’s wife who supports him through years of stress, and Billot’s many health issues caused by this landmark case. In the end, Dupont was held accountable, eventually settling on a judgement of 670 million dollars, which for anyone who sees this great movie would agree was not nearly enough, when you consider the crime of knowingly poisoning so many human beings for 40 years. One of the most significant moments in this movie for me came at the end, where near the closing credits it was announced the 99% of the world’s population contain some traces of C8. Another memorable scene involves a young teen aged girl who smiles at Robert Bilott, showing her black teeth caused by the dangerous chemicals she ingested.

The acting in Dark Waters, including Bill Pullman, Tim Robbins, Victor Garber, Mark Rufalo who plays Robert Bilott and Anne Hathaway is outstanding and this movie should receive and Oscar nomination for best picture. I agree with the high critical acclaim for this movie and highly recommend it as one of the best films of 2019.,