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.,

In 1996 a book was published called “The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy”. What I remember most about this book about the realities of average people becoming a Millionaire or multi-Millionaire in the United States is that the overwhelming majority of them who were married – never got divorced. Not ever. If they got married, they all stayed married and this is one of the primary reasons that they became wealthy, and more importantly, stayed wealthy. Failure was never an option when it comes to the extreme and very often life ending financial nightmare of divorce. If there are children involved, staying married is even more imperative both for the emotional stability of the child and to avoid unrecoverable financial loss.

The new movie “Marriage Story” is by far the best movie I have ever seen about the extremely harsh real life of divorce, both emotionally and financially. The acting from both Adam Driver as Charlie and Scarlett Johansson as Nicole is the best of their careers, especially one scene that ended with an emotional explosion from Driver that might just win him an Academy Award this year. Marriage Story is both written and directed by Noah Baumbach and the screenplay, story and especially the dialogue is about as good as I have ever seen. The dialogue at times is erratic, indirect, nonsensical and in some cases almost crazy; but it sounds like real life. How people really talk, is one of the most difficult aspects of screenwriting to master. The inevitable emotional blowup as Charlie and Nicole try to end their marriage without lawyers is acting at a level of as impressive as “Fences”, starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, released in late 2016.

Some of the best lines in this movie were spoken by actor Ray Liotta who plays Charlies lawyer: “Criminal Lawyers see bad people at their best and Divorce Lawyers see good people at their worst”. The reality of 25 thousand dollar retainers and legal fees that are 400, 450 or 950 an hour are overwhelming to hear about for anyone who has never been divorced and even for the many who have.  We have all heard real truth that the only person who wins in any divorce – is the lawyer. One of the clearest messages in this great film.

Actor Laura Dern plays Nicole’s lawyer and she will probably receive a best supporting actress nomination for this role. Everyone in this production is at their best, including Julie Hagerty as Nicole’s mother, Alan Alda who is outstanding as one of Charlie’s lawyers and Azhy Robertson who plays Henry, the couple’s learning disabled and troubled son.

What complicates this heart breaking story is that Charlie and Nicole live and work in New York City on Broadway for many years and when Nicole received and acting job in California, their entire relationship falls apart.  Logistics of a great distance, financial problems and custody of a child has ended millions of marriages.  When a marriage works, studies have shown that people live longer and are much happier than those who never marry.  When a marriage fails, many never recover from the emotional and financial loss. This real life choice is one of the most challenging aspects of being alive for all of us. There is no perfect situation and no guarantees for anyone who decides to get married.

The movie “Marriage Story” is the second in recent weeks to be released in very few theaters before premiering in Netflix on December 6th. On November 27th “The Irishman” was released on Netflix and seems that the movie industry has changed to this new formula of producing high quality movies at the end of the year funded by Amazon or Netflix.  Marriage Story is a guaranteed nominee for best picture along with the Irishman and there will be many nominations for both of these great movies. I agree with all of the very high reviews and highly recommend this movie as one of the best of 2019.