The movie “Hidden Figures” is one of those rare great films where you have so many conflicting emotions while seeing it. In my case, the emotions included respect for how brilliant these 3 black women from the south were in the early 60’s. So brilliant that they were able to break into a field completely dominated by white men, which means that they had to be far smarter than anyone who had the job they got at NASA. I was amazed that all 3 of these women were able to get anywhere near the education they would need to get the jobs that they had, considering the prejudice and injustice they had to overcome during their lives just because they were black women. The other emotion I felt was anger over the disrespect these 3 women received because of who they were, even being forced within an institution as respected as NASA to use what they called “colored bathrooms”. Despite all of this, especially in the case of Katherine Johnson, they were able because of their mathematical brilliance to put many of their white male co-workers to shame and in several instances, save the Space Program and some lives along the way.

The movie Hidden Figures is about 3 women who worked at NASA during the early years of the Space Program, even before IBM Mainframe computers were used to perform all of the massive calculations necessary to get a rocket into space and return a space capsule flown by a man back to earth. These women were Katherine Johnson, played by Taraji P. Henson, Dorothy Vaughn played by Octavia Spencer and Mary Jackson played by Janelle Monáe. Of these 3 women, Katherine Johnson had the largest part of this great historical story, mainly because her work was the most instrumental in getting the United States into space to compete with the Russians, but more importantly due to her incredible genius at calculating orbits and complex mathematical equations, actually saved lives. From Katherine’s first day of being transferred to the part of NASA that was focused on planning and calculating the orbits of spacecraft, she was discriminated and disrespected by everyone she worked with, for being the only black person and the only black woman in her group. This included having to run over one half mile to a different building to use the “colored women’s bathroom”, which sets up what was in my opinion the best scene of this movie when her boss, played by Kevin Costner, questions where she is for 40 minutes at a time during a workday. Kevin Costner is also outstanding in his role, one of the best he has had in many years.

The other two women were also very impressive. Mary Jackson became the first woman engineer at NASA and Dorothy Vaughn became the first African-American supervisor at NASA and taught herself coding to eventually become an expert FORTRAN programmer. Both of these women also had to overcome long odds and long hours to gain any traction in their career, as the corporate world at NASA would “change the finish line”, whenever any of them had an opportunity to get promoted or even get a small raise.

What got me the most about this extremely impressive story was the realization that when so many people are oppressed by bigotry or sexism, so much potential and contribution from so many gifted people are lost for all humanity. How many geniuses do we lose to bigotry, money or circumstance or just being born in the wrong place or time, or to the wrong parents, never to realize their full potential to perhaps one day cure a major disease, or invent something invaluable to the human race? How many brilliant women never go into math or science for the simple excuse that they believe that this is a man’s job. When we realize that a brain is a brain then we recognize that a person’s sex or race have nothing to do with their intelligence or creativity. Unfortunately, humanity has lost so much due to so many years of injustice and stupidity making the fluke miracle of these 3 women, that nobody has ever heard of before all the more amazing. Why these 3 pioneers have not been honored by the President long before they have been or more widely known in this country, over 50 years after they accomplished so much for the US Space Program is another reason why I got so angry while watching this movie. Everybody has heard of John Glenn and Alan Shepard, but what about Katherine Johnson, whose mathematical genius made their famous spaceflights possible in the first place.

Kirsten Dunst and Jim Parsons also make solid appearances in this film as co-workers who made the lives of these 3 great women as difficult as possible.

Hidden figures is a highly informative and well made historical movie about the early years of the Space Program and receives my highest recommendation.

The movie Armageddon, that came out in the Summer of 1998 is one of those movies than when you see it on TV, you will always watch it, mainly because of the special effects, the entertaining acting and even scenes of comedy throughout this film mainly from Steve Buscemi, who almost steals this whole movie himself. The subject of this film is very compelling, a huge asteroid has been created from a collision in space and now a rock the size of Texas is heading towards earth and will hit us in 18 days. This is known as “A Global Killer, nothing would survive, not even Bacteria”, which is the famous line from Billy Bob Thorton who plays the head of NASA, named Dan Truman. Bruce Willis plays Harry Stamper, who is the world’s greatest Deep Core Driller in what had to be considered the action star high point in his career, even considering the Die Hard movies.

Michael Bay directed this movie, and as everybody knows, all Bay movies come off almost like music videos that have rapid fire and sometimes confusing scenes of action, facial expressions and in many cases nothing to connect one scene to another. I find much of this kind of filmmaking very annoying but in this case, there was an acceptable amount of this and not too much like many of the Transformer movies that Micheal Bay makes. For me, the high point of this movie was in a conference room where Dan Truman tells Stamper and his daughter played by Liv Tyler, about the 3000-foot high tidal waves and waves that will travel at 1000 miles and hour once this asteroid hits the earth. The reaction of Liv Tyler, who just says, “unbelievable” and the harsh reality of what is coming in 18 days I thought was very well done in this one scene.

Apart from this, there are many problems with this film, starting with the stupidity of giving the world only 18 days to save itself. There is no way of course, that all that would have to happen to prepare to drill a huge asteroid could ever be pulled off in 18 days. Why not 30 days, or 60 days, or 90? Even with those lengths of time, we would all be in a huge amount of trouble on planet earth, but 18 days would never be doable. On top of this, the Space Shuttle is nowhere near a vehicle that could accomplish the task of going way out in space and land on an asteroid. The Shuttle, as everybody knows was designed to orbit the earth and nothing more and some of the scenes later in the movie are absolutely ridiculous and were thought of only for dramatic effect. The ending I thought was too melodramatic but once again was added for effect and emotion, but in the end, this movie was entertaining.

What is most amazing here about the year 1998 was that some months later, the movie “Deep Impact” came out that was about the exact same thing, a huge asteroid is about to hit the earth after a collision in space. I thought at the time that something had to have gone wrong with several production companies in Hollywood to put out both of these movies within months of each other. This movie had excellent drama and spectacular special effects at the end of the movie and starred Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni and Morgan Freeman who plays the President as one of the first black men to ever play a US President on screen. Like Armageddon, Deep Impact is a movie that I always tend to watch when it comes on TV. There are flaws with this movie as well, especially the ending which involves Tea Leoni and her father, played by the late Maximilian Schell , which I thought was something that nobody would ever do in real life and was actually ridiculous. At some point, drama has to be sacrificed for common sense and it was not for both of these films.

Overall I recommend both of these films and they make you think about what could happen and how the world would react but both of them are seriously flawed.

On no less than 5 occasions during this film/documentary named Jackie about the life of Jackie Kennedy which is about the short 2 years as First Lady and the days during and following the assassination of the John F Kennedy in November 1963, there is the playing of this sickening sound of violins that seems out of tune and then fade slowly downward. I assume that this sickening sound is by design to somehow put to music what had to be a nauseating time for Jackie Kennedy to have to live through; that is to witness at close range the assassination of her own husband. One has to wonder how this poor woman survived her own life, which started out as charmed and then from age 31 until the end of her life 33 years later had to be agonizing just about every day. Losing one child while pregnant and another child who lived only 39 days. Realizing that her husband was cheating on her constantly, and then having to relive a horrible assassination as her husband’s blood and brains were all over her while riding in a Limousine that inexplicably had no roof in Dallas Texas on November 22, 1963. Then after all of this, trying to make peace with a tragic Presidential Assassination that could have been prevented so easily by just using some very basic common sense. What were they all thinking in November 1963, when their security jobs were all about protecting the life of the President and First Lady? What were they all thinking and how could they live with themselves after this tragic day happened?

Jackie had to be thinking, during her many hundreds of sleepless nights, if only we had lost the election in 1960 then everything would have been OK, if only if we lost that election. The election of 1960 between Kennedy and Nixon was one of the closest in terms of popular vote in American history, only about 100,000 votes difference. Had Nixon won, then Kennedy would not be president and she would still have her husband and her children would not be under the constant attacks from the vile press, who never gave her or her children a moments peace. During the years after her husband was murdered, she had to be worried about her remaining two children and the danger the were probably in for the rest of their lives.

The movie Jackie is really a documentary about Jackie Kennedy talking about her life as first lady and then the days before during and after the assassination of her husband. Many of these scenes are very hard to watch and it is remarkable that any person could have gone through what Jackie Kennedy went through during this time in her life and then having to raise two young children on her own. Jackie’s remaining life, which is not covered in this movie, was all about protecting her children and included even marrying for money. Throughout this movie, which included an interview with a man who was going to write an article about her, Jackie Kennedy, played extremely well by Natalie Portman, as are many of the other cast, there is constant chain smoking. I know the time period of this movie was the 60’s when it was not known the extensive health effects of smoking, but the amount of smoking in this movie I thought was far too much.

There are a number of points in this movie where Jackie is trying to figure out her own life, at one point telling a priest played by John Hurt, that “my kids have no use for me, all I want to do is be with my husband”, what is the point? I remember thinking at this moment that perhaps the point of her life was all about being an inspiration to millions of other people in the world who are hurting, who look to Jackie Kennedy as a survivor and if she can go through this much horror in her life, then just maybe I can survive just one more day. In the end, Jackie Kennedy only lived to be 64 years old, dying of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. One can only wonder how long she would have lived had they never won that election in 1960. In the end, as they say repeatedly in this movie, there was only one Camelot. One can also thank God that Jackie Kennedy was not alive to see her son die in a horrible plane crash in 1999. You just had to figure that that would be more tragedy in one lifetime that even she could survive.

I highly recommend this movie, and it is a guarantee that Natalie Portman will be nominated for best actress.