INCLEMENT WEATHER
Main Cast: Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar Jones
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Most excellent news all of you lovely people out there in the dark. I have signed for the lead in a workshop of a brand new Broadway bound musical. We begin rehearsing next week and I couldn’t be more thrilled to get back in the saddle again. Yes, I will be playing Carol Peletier in Shuffle Along: The Walking Dead Musical. I’m not really sure who or what Carol is or how she fits into the plot in general but by casting a star of my magnitude, it has to be the plucky heroine who saves the day for the intrepid band of survivors of the zombie holocaust. I’m having my attorneys Fajer and Hellmann vet my contract this week. I must be guaranteed at least four numbers in the first act and three in the second, one of which must be the eleven o’clock number and at least one extended dance sequence. It’s only fitting. After all, it’s Vicki Lester’s name on the marquee that’s going to make the box office take off.
I stopped by my favorite restaurant for lunch to tell them the good news and to, perhaps, pick up a few tips about working with zombies. I’ve worked with most types of human and any number of animal species over the years but zombies is a new one.
I suppose they’ll try to fake it with actors in prosthetics and hideous makeup but I think it would be much more honest if we were to hire a chorus of actual zombies and teach them the basic rudiments of tap and how to meld their voices in traditional four part harmony. Their lyrics should be relatively easy to learn as most of their vocabulary seems to consist of variations on nyyaggh-eeahh. The score for the show, given its grand scale and operatic themes of life and death and survival should really be entrusted to an operatic composer. I’m going to suggest they pay off whomever they were going to use and go after Ricky Ian Gordon. He could do the work justice.
After finishing my goat stew. I realized that I had a number of hours before my next meeting and so I decided to head over to 42nd Street and see what was playing at the AMC cinemas there. After riding up a rather interminable series of escalators, I emerged at an auditorium playing Twisters, a totally unnecessary and unasked for sequel to the 1996 summer popcorn flick Twister which starred Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, and Jami Gertz who created a camp moment with her delivery of the line ‘We’ve got cows’.
As I scanned over the cast, I noted that Anthony Ramos had third billing and, as I feel we musical theater performers should stick together, I figured it would be worth the price of a matinee ticket. (They tried to offer me the senior discount – how appalling! I am forever and always a youthful 39 years of age and have been so since the last millennium). (Ramos was in the original company of Hamilton for those of you who were unaware of his bona fides).
Twisters has nothing much to do with Twister other than it taking place in Oklahoma in tornado season with most of the major characters being storm chasers or meteorologists or some such. None of the cast of the original film returns. The only character that repeats is a piece of machinery that is featured briefly in the preamble of the film before the dreaded words ‘Five Years Later’ appear on the screen about fifteen minutes in. This time around, our hero, Tyler, is a YouTube celebrity storm chaser and self-styled tornado wrangler (Glen Powell) who with his ragtag bunch of misfits on his crew fills the Bill Paxton slot. Our heroine, Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is first introduced as a plucky graduate student who has some idea about shooting diaper goo up a tornado to suck up the moisture and stop its destruction. Her field experiment goes hideously wrong and she retreats to the national weather service in New York for solace.
After the ‘Five Years Later’ title, she has changed makeup and added highlights but her old grad school buddy Javi (Anthony Ramos) tracks her down. She’s got a sixth sense when it comes to reading tornadoes and he needs her to help on his new venture capital funded business using surplus army radar things which can triangulate and measure just what happens inside a funnel cloud. So off goes Kate to Oklahoma and, in a reversal from the first film our heroine is the one with the matching fleet of SUVs and folk in corporate suits (with David Cornswet in the Cary Elwes slot).
It doesn’t take long for Kate’s bunch and Tyler’s bunch to run into each other and the race is on. Will our romantic leads fall for each other? Will barrels of diaper goo save the day? You know where Twisters is going to go after the first twenty or so minutes. It doesn’t help that the story beats are almost identical between the two films. Instead of a tornado destroying a drive in, it destroys a rodeo. The matriarch is a mother, not an aunt. It doesn’t matter, we’ve seen it all before.
Glen Powell has a sort of aw shucks young Paul Newman charm and is easy on the eyes and gives the performance worth watching. And he wears a white tee shirt in the rain like nobody’s business. Daisy Edgar-Jones is supposed to have a brilliant scientific mind but she does not portray that well and has no romantic chemistry with Powell at all. He tries. She just doesn’t have it. The rest of the cast is serviceable. Let’s just say that Oscar is likely to pass them all by.
What does work are the special effects. The tornadoes are scary and feel quite real and not just manufactured of bits and bytes of CGI. Director Lee Isaac Chung (best known for Minari from a couple of years back) knows how to stage and pace a scene to ratchet up the suspense and keep the audience interested in the cardboard characters on screen. It’s too bad he did not have a better cast or a better script. The screenplay is credited to Mark L. Smith working from a story by Joseph Kosinski. The whole thing is so formulaic that I suspect there were a number of uncredited chefs in the kitchen. Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin, authors of the original film, are given a ‘characters created by’ credit. As the only character that repeats from the first film, from what I could ascertain, was played by a battered yellow fifty-five gallon oil drum, I assume this was simply a contractual necessity.
Is Twisters worth a look? If you don’t mind a film that’s more less an amusement park roller coaster interrupted now and again for exposition or unbelievable romance, it’s worth the matinee price. Just take your bathroom breaks and trips to the concession stand during the talky scenes and be sure to be back in your seat in time for the tornadoes to touch down.
Flying plastic balls. Flying diaper goo. Flying chickens. No flying cows. Gratuitous faux Copland score. Modern country music. Swimming pool rescue. Rodeo clowns. Science fair model tornado. Mama farmer. Exploding movie theater.
Originally from Seattle Washington, land of mist, coffee and flying salmon, Mrs. Norman Maine sprang to life, full grown like Athena, from Andy’s head during a difficult period of life shortly after his relocation to Alabama.
Leave a Reply