Picturegoer Vol. 2 Issue 32 - "Twisters" (with "Emile Zola", "Nope", "Sailor-Made Man", "Terms of Endearment" and "Star Trek")
Twisters (2024, Lee Isaac Chung) Two teams of professional storm chasers track a cluster of tornados in Oklahoma.
Sometimes all you’re looking for is a good show. “Twisters” is fairly risible on a script level, but it amply delivers on two of the commodities we go to the movies for: big star personalities and big screen spectacle. It’s an easy movie to make fun of, and equally easily to enjoy.
The film is a follow-up to the 1996 disaster movie “Twister”, but not in any plot sense; the only “returning star” from the original film is the titular column of air. Our heroes are a pair of mismatched storm chasers. Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) had spent years trying to develop technology that could disperse tornados until a tragedy sent her behind a desk; she’s been called back into the field by an old friend (Anthony Ramos) to track a cluster of tornados threatening to touch ground near her old hometown. Her opposite number is Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a YouTube superstar who refers to himself as a tornado wrangler and likes to drive his go pro laden car straight into the middle of twisters. They’re a classic oil and water pair, so how much do you want to bet that they’ll end up being opposites who attract…?
If you’re looking to pick holes in “Twisters”, it’s not hard. The movie’s script frequently feels like it was spat out by Chat GPT – every character arc is predictable, and the dialogue that isn’t “we need to move!” or “look out!” largely consists of boilerplate exposition. (“We have to help people!” Kate is constantly saying, just in case we forget for 30 seconds that saving other people from tornado-related tragedy is her defining character motivation.) “Twisters” not infrequently feels like a movie written (as Mark Kermode would put it) for the “hard of thinking”.
The movie also awkwardly pushes real science into a blockbuster shaped mold. Kate’s ability to predict where tornados are going to touch down isn’t just intuition; as visually depicted by director Lee Isaac Chung and cinematographer Dan Mindel, it basically amounts to a superpower – Kate is able to sense the weather in computer generated visions that bring to mind Spider-Man’s fabled “Spider Sense”. The tornados in the film aren’t just weather anomalies but almost malevolent forces, threatening to crush small towns like a supervillain descending with his army, and our heroes aren’t just curious scientists, but do-gooders constantly rushing into danger in ways that ultimately play as a bit silly. You’d think that a severe weather warning on everyone’s cell phone would suffice, but I guess not; “Twisters” makes it appear that it’s Glen Powell’s personal duty to drag people to safety during the middle of a calamitous weather event.
But we don’t always go to the movies to have profound experiences, and if what you’re looking for is charismatic actors chasing digital tornados around, “Twisters” certainly delivers. Director Lee Isaac Chung has a good sense of scale (even if the VFX laden tornado sequences don’t always look “convincing”, they always have a sense of scale, and the set piece sequences are chaotic without becoming confusing) and he’s very fortunate in that all three of his main leads, Glenn Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos, are innately likable. None of these people really have characters to play, but all three actors are giving actual performances as though their personalities aren’t collections of cliches. Powell continues to demonstrate that he’s got real leading man chops – cocky and confident in action scenes, he’s equally convincing when his character has to let his guard down and get sincere – and Edgar-Jones is just as good, making her character believably earnest and traumatized. If the success of effects movies largely comes down to the actors in them, then most of the relative success of “Twisters” is owed to these actors, who really seem like they’re looking up in awe or terror at a dangerous tornado, rather than (as they probably really were) standing on a green screen stage with a fan blowing in their faces.
“Twisters” is almost the platonic ideal of what “summer popcorn movies” are supposed to be – dumb, shallow spectacle, but fun. The multiplex audience I saw it with enjoyed it – they laughed at the jokes, gasped during some of the big suspense set pieces, and were rooting for the two leads, who have old fashioned romantic comedy chemistry. (Almost too much for the movie to handle: the lack of a big kiss at the finish is the one thing that disappointed the audience in my screening.) I had a pretty good time, too, while acknowledging that the film is basically fast food – you eat it, it passes painlessly through you and leaves no aftertaste. But I can’t deny it felt good in the moment. **1/2 out of *****
The Life of Emile Zola (1937, d. William Dieterle) Biographical drama about French author Emile Zola (Paul Muni), centering mostly on his writing about/exposure of the Dreyfus affair, a scandal where a Jewish French artillery officer was convicted of treason.
There are two movies battling for attention within “The Life of Emile Zola”. One is a harrowing account of the injustices heaped upon poor Alfred Dreyfus, publicly excoriated and exiled to Devil’s Island (Joseph Schildkraut won the Oscar for best supporting actor as Dreyfus). The other is a dull polemic about freedom of speech, with Paul Muni mugging his way through a pantomime of “great man” Emile Zola, all mannered tics and stuffy gestures and ponderous speechifying. (To be fair, Muni does manage some nice comic beats early in the movie, as when he comes to speak to a store owner hoping for a few francs’ advance on his latest book, only to find it’s a best seller and he’s become rich overnight.)
An American movie in 1937 was just not going to be honest about everything that happened to Alfred Dreyfus: the movie very pointedly sidesteps the deep role anti-Semitism played in his persecution, and the word “Jew” is never uttered, although Dreyfus’ superiors, when conspiring against him, are very pointedly shown noting his religious beliefs on his record…”you fill in the blank”, the movie seems to be saying, which in itself is something of a daring move for a movie of this period. Even with these limitations, it really is startling how much more interesting the Dreyfus strand of the movie is, and how tedious it is to cut back to Muni shuffling around and puffing himself up as though he knows every scene he’s in has the potential to be his Oscar clip.
“Life of Emile Zola” demonstrates the worst tendencies of what Sergio Leone called a “waxworks view of history”, jumping clumsily from big historical event to big historical event, indulging what Mark Kermode derided as “chubby hmm” moments (“my friend Cezanne!” Zola greets his roommate, so that we immediately know Zola is rooming with the famous painter) and indulging the bullshit expedient way movies so often depict the creative process – Zola meets somebody interesting, Muni furrows his brow and WALLAH!, next thing we know he’s put another best seller on the bookshelves. It’s a phony treatment of an important story. **1/2 out of *****
Nope (2022, d. Jordan Peele) Siblings “OJ” and “Em” Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) inherit their father’s horse ranch, and realize something mysterious is lurking in the clouds above…
Writer/director Jordan Peele made a spectacular directorial debut with 2017’s “Get Out”, a combination of horror film and social satire that unexpectedly vaulted Peele from respected sketch comedy writer/performer (most notably on the Comedy Central series “Key & Peele”) to modern horror auteur. Peele seems to have a talent for scenarios and images that go beyond the literal, into the uncanny. The mechanics of the plot of “Get Out” don’t really make logical sense, but the metaphor at the heart of the story is so potent that the movie functions as a waking nightmare. Peele’s follow-up “Us” got tripped up a bit in its final stretch, as the logical inconsistencies finally started to pile up too high (who made all those jumpsuits…? ), but again, the imagery of the film’s big set pieces (mostly) carried one over the logical speed bumps.
“Nope” is where the Peele engine feels like it’s beginning to stall. It buckles under the strain of a talented filmmaker trying to recreate the magic that had animated an earlier success, and stumbling over their own feet. Where “Get Out” and even to an extent “Us” were laser focused (those movies are crystal clear thematically and narratively), “Nope” feels less like a carefully built screenplay than a laundry list of images Peele had kicking around. Here’s a bit of UFO abduction horror; here’s a bit of “animals on the rampage”; here’s a bit of generational trauma; here’s a bit of meta-cinematic spectacle critique. Individual sequences have a standalone power, particularly as lensed by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema: a scene where an alien visitor suddenly emerges from the shadows; the uncanny sight of the alien spacecraft unfurling like some kind of giant, ravenous ribbon; a gasp inducing moment of blood raining down from the sky. But these parts don’t build off of one another — they bob, uncertain and isolated, in vast swathes of narrative goop.
I’ve seen defenses of “Nope” which argue for the ways Peele’s movie attempts to thematically resonate as a story about people making spectacle out of their trauma, and as a story about how black people are generationally robbed of opportunity, forced to compromise in order to simply survive. (As soon as OJ and Em realize there’s a spacecraft hovering above their near-bankrupt family farm, their first instinct is to film it and try to leverage the footage to get themselves out of a financial hole – the notion that they might save people by stopping the aliens is only brought up very late in the movie, and the way it’s voiced makes it pretty clear it’s not at the top of anybody’s priority list.) But none of these elements really work dramatically, on the basic level of story or character. I think it’s a problem that the most memorable scene in “Nope”, involving a monkey that gets loose on a set and attacks its human co-stars, feels completely narratively isolated from everything surrounding it – you could cut it, and basically the entirety of Steven Yuen’s character, without losing anything on a story level. And I think it’s a problem that the characters feel so hollow. Keke Palmer is energetic and winning as Em; Daniel Kaluuya is amusing as the monosyllabic OJ. (The title comes from two times in the movie when Kaluyya’s character, confronted with some horrifying sight, simply shakes his head, mutters “Nope”, and calmly and sensibly starts edging away from danger.) But their sibling dynamic is undercooked, their relationship to their difficult father feels like an afterthought, and the characters surrounding them – a flaky security technician, a near psychotic cameraman – are empty stereotypes. (Michaell Wincott as the cameraman is particularly embarrassing; his big monologues are arguably the worst scenes of Peele’s career to date.
The name that kept flashing to mind for me during “Nope” was M. Night Shyamalan, who whether fairly or not was treated like a punchline for nearly a decade, a talented “visionary” who seemingly got caught up in his own storyteller’s mythology, unable to tell which of his bold ideas were good and which were stupid. I have no idea what the production of “Nope” was liked, no idea if Peele is surrounded by yes men, but this feels like a movie where nobody was willing to say “Jordan, maybe we need another draft on that dialogue” (Steven Yuen in particular has a big exposition dump that feels like it could’ve come straight from the Shyamalan playbook, full of “nobody in any universe would ever talk like that” phrasing). Despite its ambitious size (certain scenes were shot in 65mm IMAX, and there’s real scope to the way the film uses its vast desert locations), “Nope” feels weirdly underthought, dashed off rather than mulled over. It feels like the work of somebody who’s not aware he’s getting sloppy. ** out of *****
A Sailor-Made Man (1921, d. Fred C. Newmeyer) A spoiled rich boy (Harold Lloyd) enlists in the Navy to impress a girl (Mildred Davis).
Like Chaplin’s first feature film “The Kid” (released the same year), Harold Lloyd’s first feature, “A Sailor-Made Man”, came about apparently by accident. The story goes that in production, Lloyd’s yarn about a spoiled rich boy who joins the navy in order to impress a girl – and then finds he can’t back out – kept ballooning with new gag ideas; Lloyd previewed a “long version” of the film – four reels instead of his then-standard two – to find out what to cut, but learned that the audience liked the film just the way it was. So Lloyd made the jump into features, although “A Sailor-Made Man” only runs about 45 minutes, and its “story” is pretty thin, basically a series of one reelers strung together; it wouldn’t be until the next year’s “Grandma’s Boy” that Lloyd would start crafting more complex stories, interweaving sentiment with his comedy.
That said, “A Sailor-Made Man”’s hit-to-miss gag ratio is pretty high. It took Lloyd longer than Keaton or Chaplin to really hit his stride as a filmmaker – his short form work generally strikes me as amusing but rarely truly inspired; it’s not until “Safety Last” that he truly came into his own as a comic genius. But “A Sailor-Made Man” is early Lloyd in tip top form, with most of the comic set pieces pretty ingenious. Lloyd and his gagmen always had a special facility with gags built around POV, and they manage a couple of doozies here – an early gag where it looks like Lloyd is painting is a little masterpiece of comic perspective. There’s surprising sweetness when Lloyd’s apparent nemesis, Noah Young’s “Rowdy Element”, actually turns out to be a pal – the moment where the bully softens up after Lloyd tries to save him from punishment is a bit of sentiment that generally only appears in Lloyd movies in relation to his leading ladies – and in general the comic business is quite clever, a mixture of inspired situational gags (how Lloyd ends up appearing to literally eat his hat would take too long to explain) and straight up cartoon jokes (as when Young gets transformed into a dummy so he can be flung over a palace wall).
The only real demerit here is the specter of racism: Dick Sutherland wears brown face to play a horny Maharajah who kidnaps leading lady Mildred Davis (soon to become Harold’s in-real-life wife), and the sequence involving that character in “Khairpura-Bhandanna” is boilerplate”keep our white women safe” nonsense, climaxing in a typical knockabout slapstick chase sequence without much in the way of clever gags. Too bad, because for much of its runtime, this is Lloyd at his inventive, gag happy best. ***1/2 out of *****
Terms of Endearment (1983, d. James L. Brooks) Widowed Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) watches, often exasperated, as her daughter Emma (Debra Winger) makes a life with her none-too-bright husband Flap (Jeff Daniels).
Adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel of the same name (unread by me), “Terms of Endearment” captures uncannily the feeling of lives being lived. McMurtry books are light on plot, but strong on character – and whatever changes he made to the spine of the story, writer/director James L. Brooks (making his directorial debut here) manages to maintain that spirit. “Terms of Endearment” unfolds over the course of a decade or so, and in that uncanny way that is so difficult to capture in movies, we feel like we’ve lived that decade along with the characters. They become real people to us; the backyard of Aurora Greenaway and the messy house of Flap and Emma Horton, become places we feel like we’ve visited regularly. As we look across the faces of the cast – most of them assembled for the film’s final, bittersweet scene – we feel like we know all of them, both their faults and their virtues (and all these characters possess both in spades – McMurtry has always struck me as an author who is infinitely generous to his characters, good bad or in-between, and Brooks follows his lead there, too).
This is an “actors first” movie if ever there was one, and Brooks assembles a superb ensemble, every member of which more than carries their weight. In small parts, both John Lithgow and Danny DeVito enter the movie almost as walking punchlines and then reveal hidden layers of grace; Jeff Daniels has in some ways the trickiest role in the movie, and handles it superbly – Flap Horton, an English student whose grades aren’t quite good enough to earn him a prestigious teaching position, is dumb but not stupid, shallow but not evil, charming and weak in equal measure. Jack Nicholson makes an absolute meal out of his scene stealing role as MacLaine’s aging love interest – this may be the point where Jack officially began “playing Jack”, taking roles that directly referenced his own public image as a bad boy Lothario, but it’s a self parody as much as anything: Nicholson is perfectly willing to look silly, to let his belly hang over his belt, and he’s charming and exasperating in equal measure. (His self loathing “God, I’m such a shit” – muttered under his breath after he pushes too far with MacLaine while trying to ask her out – is a wonderful beat for the actor, as is his devastatingly delivered “I was just inches from a clean getaway”.)
But this is really, in every sense of the word, a “woman’s picture” – in its broad strokes, “Terms of Endearment” could almost be said to be a slyer, more overtly comedic ‘80s update of the kinds of movies Bette Davis or Joan Crawford made in the 1940s, complete with a final act confrontation with tragedy – and Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger do titanic work. Hollywood movies still rarely have room for women as who are contradictory, difficult, even at times unlikeable as Aurora and Emma. Whatever behind the scenes tensions existed (Winger and MacLaine infamously clashed all through production), the end result is magical – this might well be the best performance of MacLaine’s career, with layers of wounded vulnerability poking out from behind her façade of steely righteousness (by midway through the film, just cutting to a close-up of MacLaine’s face – her lips pursing, her eyes slightly narrowing – acts as a perfect visual punchline), and Winger gets an equally rich role to play as her daughter, who we sense is only intermittently succeeding in being a better mother than the one she had. (The film opens, famously, with a wonderful gag where MacLaine pinches her sleeping infant in her cradle, and then goes to bed feeling better when she hears the baby cry; Emma has her own manipulative traits, not as overt but clearly inherited – the smile that plays across her face when Flap confesses his infidelities, while she stays quiet about hers, is a wonderful character touch: she’s going to take certain things to her grave.) The push/pull between mother and daughter feels real, nuanced and complicated: this is a movie where MacLaine’s character screams upon hearing that her daughter is pregnant (“WHY SHOULD I BE HAPPY ABOUT BEING A GRANDMOTHER?!”) and tells her daughter, on the eve of her wedding, that “you are not special enough to overcome a bad marriage”, and yet Aurora doesn’t seem like simply an abusive monster, nor does her daughter read as a naïve innocent. People are more complicated than that, messier, more unexpected.
Brooks keeps finding the little nuggets of human truth that save “Terms of Endearment” from turning into a soppy TV of the week, even when in the film’s final act it moves directly into disease of the week territory – like McMurtry so often does, Brooks brilliantly uses humor as a way to diffuse melodrama. (“I think it went really well, don’t you?” Emma says to her sobbing younger son at the end of their tearful hospital goodbye.) Even when people behave badly in “Terms of Endearment”, there are no villains; characters that would be monsters in a lesser movie are given moments of grace (“I never thought I was the sort of man who’d give up his kids” – and the forgiveness with which that line is received – is a truly adult moment). With only a point or two dinged for Michael Gore’s syrupy, ready for TV score – ladled over whole sections of the movie like syrup – this is a seemingly effortless movie, warm and inviting as a hug. **** out of *****
THIS WEEK! THE LATEST INSTALLMENT IN AN ONGOING SERIES EXPLORING THE ORIGINAL ADVENTURES OF THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE!
“Star Trek” Season 2 Episode 5: “The Apple”
The Enterprise crew land on an apparent paradise of a planet turns out to be full of threats: flowers that shoot poison, rocks that double as explosives, and a race of childlike aliens who take all their orders from “Vaal”, a snake shaped cave/artificial intelligence.
“The Apple” plunges “Star Trek” straight into the world of pulp adventure stories, complete with slightly uncomfortable colonialist undertones – the inhabitants of Gamma Trianguli VI are all white folks wearing red body paint, but there’s still a slight “look at these silly primitive peoples!” aspect to the Enterprise crew’s interactions with them that is just this side of a “white man in darkest Africa” adventure.
“The Apple” still manages to be kitschy fun, but this is definitely an episode hampered by budget limitations. It’s a grand adventure stuck within the confines of a sound stage (when Kirk senses that somebody is hiding “behind that rock”, he’s pointing to a rock lioterally right behind him, rendering the crew’s attempts to form a sneak-around strategy pretty silly), and the red-body-paint-and-silver-haired inhabitants and giant-snake-god-computer are pretty silly. It’s all fairly goofy stuff, but there are also some workable ideas here: this seems to be the first episode of the series centered around the “prime directive” (not called that yet), with Spock and Bones getting into a lively debate about whether or not to interfere with a functioning culture who are nonetheless slaves to an artificial intelligence.
Things fall apart in the third act, as all the ethical dilemmas posed by the concept get hand waved away or reduced to smirky sex jokes (the moment where the natives ask “what is love”, and Chekov immediately gets an arm around the babely Yeoman Landon is unintentionally hilarious). The snake God “Vaal”, despite an interesting introduction (Vaal apparently controls all life functions on the planet – weather, temperature, food, vegetation – and in turn is “fed” by the natives), ends up being the lamest of the “artificial intelligence” enemies we’ve had on the show thus far; we never really get any explanation of what Vaal is, who built it, if it's machine or creature or something else…the giant snake head design is pretty cool (and surprisingly expressive – the thing somehow really does look exhausted after Kirk’s gambit to drain its power), but there’s no there there, and the climax that feels under-thought and undercooked.
Still, in this middling episode, there are some quite nice character beats. The Kirk-Spock-Bones dynamic has really clicked into place by now, and the interactions between those three are quite nice; Kirk also gets some effective interactions with Scotty as the latter, commanding the Enterprise in Kirk’s absence, desperately tries to troubleshoot his way out of a life-threatening situation. (The running joke of Kirk threatening to fire Scotty if he can’t come up with a solution pays off in a surprisingly emotional way.) We perhaps even get the start of the more daring Kirk of the movies, as he voices doubts to Bones that his obsession with following the book has unnecessarily endangered crew members. (Season 2 is where the meme of red shirts as completely disposable starts to take hold – they get killed off left and right here.) Not such a good showing for Chekov, though – having been shown as capable and able in “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, he’s basically just a dumb, horny teenager in this episode, as disposable to the mission as any red shirt would be. **1/2 out of ****
NEXT WEEK: Frank Tashlin rocks and rolls, Amy Adams makes first contact, and a pioneering female filmmaker. Stay tuned.