Boot Camp is our new obsession! Gina Musa’s book hits our screens in a faithful adaptation of her novel that is much more than meets the eye. The film is a story of self-empowerment and discovering your own path even in the worst of circumstances. Ready?

Here we go! 

Feeling Seen in Boot Camp

Boot Camp seems at first glance like a typical young adult romantic comedy. However, it’s much more than that. It’s a film about discovering your own power and embracing it to ultimately find yourself. The romance is just the icing on the cake, one that we love, but it isn’t the focus and that makes it all different. 

Don’t get us wrong, this writer is always here for the romance. I’m a hopeless romantic and grew up during the golden age of the genre. Name any rom-com from the 90s and 2000s and I will have watched it too many times to be considered healthy. But despite this, I never felt represented in any of them. 

The protagonists of these movies were not like me. They were not clumsy or the outcasts of their class, they were not bullied or felt alone. Usually, they were successful women or beautiful teenagers with the perfect body to be a model. They simply put on makeup, dressed better, took off their glasses, and were the kind of beautiful women that only existed in magazines. 

Whitney, the leader of Boot Camp, feels like me at just her age. A clumsy girl, who feels invisible, who has to endure bullying from her classmates, and who even her friends seem to look down on. And with that, Boot Camp had me won over. 

The Message Makes the Difference  

But I was even more impressed when I realized that the film perfectly reflected Whitney’s growth from an insecure woman unaware of her own power to an empowered one who values ​​herself enough to not settle for less than being herself and going for what she wants. 

What happened to me with the romantic comedies of the 90s and 2000s is that I tried. I tried to put on makeup and suddenly the mirror would reflect that magazine woman but I couldn’t do it. And I didn’t do it not only because life isn’t like the movies, but because I was only putting on makeup on my outside but, inside, I was still that insecure and clumsy girl who didn’t value herself enough.

What Boot Camp does is take that insecure, clumsy girl, who tries to take up as little space as possible and hates being the center of attention, and show her how much she is worth, making her discover her own power and that, that is invaluable. 

This is the reason why the film is much more than a young adult romance: for the message it sends. I saw myself reflected in every step Whitney took, every fear, every insecurity, every fall… but also in every time she got back up and was ready to fight for herself. 

Boot Camp talks about self-empowerment, body positivity, and above all, about finding your own path even when you don’t believe that path exists. And that is exactly what makes the difference.

Back to the Golden Age of Romance…with a Twist

Although Whitney is the central focus of Boot Camp, the film shows us the emotional journey of the characters around her, especially Axel. He is a man who has his own trauma to overcome and avoids thinking about it every day. 

He likes his job as a coach at the camp because it not only allows him to train the students hard to explore their own limits but also gives a sense of order and routine to his life. 

That job keeps Axel from thinking about his past and, suddenly, Whitney arrives and breaks all his schemes. She is a beautiful, committed, fighter, somewhat shy woman, and a born leader. Only she doesn’t realize all that and doesn’t see herself as he sees her. However, Boot Camp flees from the hackneyed cliché and what attracts Axel to Whitney is not her vulnerability, but her strength, her power. 

Little by little, working together, they begin to get to know each other. As Whitney finds and embraces her power, Axel feels more attached to her. The two of them fall in love little by little, without realizing it, without expecting it, and almost without wanting it.

Their love didn’t come immediately, but through hard daily training, jokes on the beach, games in the water, and conversations by the light of a campfire. And that makes it even more special, even more unique. 

Boot Camp builds to the perfect moment for the climax of the first kiss between Whitney and Axel and, just when it happens, Axel takes a step back. He doesn’t feel ready to be in a relationship because of his past but, the reality is, he’s scared. Axel is afraid of what he feels for Whitney, of the intensity of everything they are living, and he is aware that, if he takes that step, he will never be able to separate from her. 

Faced with this new and unexpected rejection, Whitney’s wounds that were just beginning to heal reopen and old insecurities return. And everything seems over between them… until Axel decides to stop running away and fight for her. The two meet in the middle of the road. Whitney and Axel get the happy ending they deserve and our romantic hearts are pumping at a thousand miles an hour.

Boot Camp‘s Great Supporting Characters

Beyond Whitney and Axel’s journey, Boot Camp has some great supporting characters with many different edges like Willow, Aspen, and Martina. 

At first, Willow is Whitney’s nightmare. She bullies her, makes fun of her, and seems proud of her behavior so when the two meet again at the camp, sparks start to fly right away. But, as we get deeper into Willow’s story, we discover much more than just an abuser in her. 

Her relationship with her mother is not ideal and, as Whitney embraces her own power and Willow’s mother notices her, Willow feels jealousy for the first time. She always felt like she wasn’t living up to her mother’s expectations and now she’s seeing how someone she made fun of is doing so. This doesn’t justify Willow’s attitude but we can understand where she’s coming from. 

Everything Willow is going through changes her perspective on her actions and, while she and Whitney don’t become the best of friends at first, they end up getting closer and admitting that they have a lot more in common with each other than they like to admit. Everything finally comes together in Boot Camp and they end up being friends. 

As for Aspen and Martina, they quickly become best friends with Whitney. But, apart from that, they find each other and begin to explore the feelings that are born between them. 

And, while the film doesn’t focus too much on this lesbian love story, it does perfectly portray the initial insecurity and doubts of it and, above all, it gives them a happy ending, something that is difficult to find on our TV when it comes to an LGBTI+ couple. 

In conclusion, Boot Camp is a film that is much more than it seems and that we recommend! Personally, as I had the opportunity to tell Rachel and Drew in an interview that we will publish soon, after Bridgerton season 3, this is the second time I felt truly seen on my TV. And that is tremendously powerful and one of the reasons why everyone should watch this movie.

Boot Camp is available now in select theaters and on demand.

I haven’t been this excited about a movie star in a long time. Partly because we haven’t had anyone new in ages who exudes that delicious ineffable movie-star It. It’s not just about looks, though of course a pretty face doesn’t hurt. No, it’s about the effortless charisma. The paradoxical insouciance, like they’ve just accidentally stumbled into being the sexiest damn thing you’ve ever seen onscreen, and aren’t even aware of the effect they’re having.

I’m talking about Glen Powell, of course. (Even his name is right outta the Golden Age of Hollywood.“Glen Powell and Rita Hayworth star in the most thrilling movie of 1942: City of Secrets!”) He first made me sit up and take notice as astronaut John Glenn in 2016’s Hidden Figures. He’s not in that film much, and I didn’t even mention him in my review (though I did sneak him into the image illustrating my writeup; I just had to), because that movie ain’t about his character. But when I say he made me sit up and take notice, I literally mean I went bolt upright in my seat the moment he appeared onscreen and gasped (quietly, in my head), “Who is THAT?”

Maybe that’s the definition of a movie star: When they’re onscreen, you can’t take your eyes off them.

Anyway, Powell is rightfully finally breaking through this year with well-deserved leading roles, in the rom-com Anyone But You (which I have not seen yet but hope to soon), in crime comedy Hit Man (which is brilliant; review asap), and now the disaster drama Twisters. I’m happy for him! I’m happy for us all — we deserve a new movie star to remind us why we fell in love with movies. But it’s a real mixed bag for me when I say that he’s the best thing about Twisters. Because at this point, I will take whatever Glen Powell is on offer, and he does not disappoint here: he’s charming, funny, and has an improbably delightful shit-eating grin to rival Harrison Ford’s (my previous movie-star high-water mark for improbably delightful shit-eating grins).

I just wish Twisters were worthy of what Glen Powell is bringing.

I get why They — the big Hollywood They — saw easy cash in revisiting 1996’s Twister. It was a huge hit that has since become iconic for many good (and some not-so-good) reasons. It shaped the industry’s previous generational paradigm shift: its spring release date followed by instant box-office success helped move the supposed “summer” movie season for blockbusters back to early May. (Difficult as it may be for today’s youngsters to imagine now that big loud brash movies come year-round, there really did used to be a discrete season for big FX-laden crowd-pleasing genre flicks, and that season was [Northern Hemisphere] summer.) Twister represented a visual-effects breakthrough, with its heavy usage of nascent CGI: all those stormy goin’-green skies and all those tornadoes had to be created digitally, and those FX mostly still hold up almost 30 years later. The movie even inspired a boost in people studying meteorology at the university level! It was later the first feature film to be released on DVD, which surely helped cement the popularity of the format and ensured that the movie would become, in more recent years, something of a (misnamed) cult classic, not least because of its early appearances by actors who went on to become cinephile favorites, including Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jeremy Davies, as well as enduring beloveds Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, and Cary Elwes.

Twister was, dare I say it, a perfect storm of a blockbuster. But it could have simply been rereleased in summer 2024. Sure, revamp it for IMAX or whatever, if an excuse is required for a rerelease. People would have paid for that. I would have paid for that, even though I’ve seen Twister easily a dozen times, mostly on a small screen at home. (Though I did see it that summer of 1996, and loved it instantly. I have no specific memories along these lines, but I’m pretty sure it was one of the movies that I was having Big Thoughts about at that time, to the point where I was, like, Yeah, I should probably do some film criticism. Which I started doing a year later, and I reviewed the film in 2000.)

Instead we got Twisters, and look: no one was asking for a sequel, but a sequel would have been very much welcome if Twisters was able to make a case for itself. Like, why have you gathered us here for another go at this story at this particular point in time? The one reason — the best one, the big one — might be because, a quarter of a century later, we could now admit to the cyclonic elephant in the room in Twister: it was an early climate-change movie, with its “record outbreak of tornadoes” and insanely dangerous, even grading on the tornado curve, weather-that-is-trying-to-kill-you. (For another undeclared early human-impact-on-the-planetary-environment drama, see also 2000’s The Perfect Storm, about unprecedented extreme weather and fished-out oceans.) Maybe nobody realized it at the time — though I would be astonished if the first screenwriter on the project, Michael “Fuck with Nature at Your Own Peril” Crichton, did not — but looking back now, the 1996 film is quite obviously an attempt to 1) reckon with increasingly dangerous and unpredictable weather, and 2) try to learn how to live with it.

So it’s genuinely astonishing, deeply baffling, and almost embarrassing to sit through Twisters and not see a single solitary acknowledgment of global warming onscreen. Director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) has stated that this is deliberate: “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented,” he told CNN. I’m not sure he appreciates that releasing a movie like Twisters in 2024 and not mentioning climate change is absolutely sending a message: of denial of reality, of an ostrich-like desire to bury one’s head in the sand rather than face literal existential danger.

Goddammit.

Anyway, that means that Twisters is a hugely cowardly missed opportunity for us, as a culture, to finally grow the hell up about the damage we have done and continue to do to our pleasant Earth.

This is not the only way in which Twisters is absurdly coy. The movie cannot even decide if it’s a genuine followup or merely a furtive remake. Screenwriters Mark L. Smith (Overlord, The Revenant) and Joseph Kosinski drop in numerous sly callbacks to Twister but not a single overt one.

When meteorologist Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) flies out from New York City to Oklahoma at the behest of her former storm-chaser colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos: The Bad Guys, In the Heights), to help him deploy a (genuinely cool-seeming) 3D-radar technology that will hopefully get much-needed detailed scans of active tornadoes, she has to keep telling his team, some of whom are also her former colleagues, that she’s “not back!”… just as Bill Paxton’s storm-chaser–turned–meteorologist Bill does multiple times in Twister. Oh, Smith and Kosinski shuffle the rebranding around a bit: Kate isn’t just Bill but also Helen Hunt’s Jo, in that she lost someone important to a twister; Javi is also Cary Elwes’s Twister “corporate suckup” Jonas. But Twisters frequently indulges in for shot-for-shot and beat-for-beat xeroxing of the 1996 flick. It also sneaks in Dorothy, the tech for lobbing little sensors into a tornado for recording just what the heck is going on inside the funnel, with no mention of where it came from. The technology seems to be settled and considered reliable here, while it was solidly experimental in the ’96 film; proving it could work was the geeky backbone of the previous movie.

And that’s where there was a tiny opportunity to insert just a hint of awareness of the fact that, ahem, the 1996 movie, like, exists. I’m not asking for a lot here! Maybe a single line of dialogue that mentions, say, that Kate and Javi are former students of Jo’s, and that’s how they have access to Dorothy. And re global warming? When Javi is trying to convince Kate to come back and help with his 3D-imaging project, he mentions that these massive tornadoes are “getting worse every year.” Okay, yes, but WHY? We don’t need a thesis on climate change, but maybe just drop in something about how atmospheric CO2 is up dramatically since 1996, why not? (C’mon, this shit was easy.) The unwillingness of this movie to confront the real world, when it also desperately wants to be set in the real world, is frankly bizarre, and indicative of nothing so much as pandering to anti-science bullshit.

Oh, and speaking of anti-science… there is a real and not-very-subtle anti-academic vibe going on here. Powell’s Tyler and his wacky team — who are, let’s be honest, much more of a feather with the university goofballs who were unquestionably the heroes 30 years ago — are most definitely not people with degrees or credentials. Instead, they are “hillbillies with a YouTube channel,” self-styled “tornado wranglers” who sell T-shirts and mugs with slapped-on logos at their storm-chaser stops. Yes, they are redeemed, somewhat, eventually, but so is corporate-suckup Javi… and yes, it’s good that the characters are less black-and-white than in the 1996 movie. But it’s impossible to imagine that Tyler’s gang — which includes the awesome Sasha Lane’s (How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Hellboy) Lily and the also awesome Katy O’Brian’s (Love Lies Bleeding) Dani — will have anywhere near the staying power in the pop-cultural mindset as Jo’s band of misfits. That’s not on the cast — they’re splendid and it’s clear that they are doing their best to bring the same gung-ho cheese and the cheerful eccentricity (which isn’t even all that eccentric!) — but the movie muffles them. They are a sideshow, not the heroes. They are also emblematic of an attempt to capture lightning in a bottle twice, which happened organically the first time and isn’t something that can be done deliberately on repeat.

That said, Kate’s work-in-progress science project to tame a tornado by throwing a bunch of superabsorbent baby-diaper chemicals up into the funnel is at least a fresh idea here, and as clever and inventive as Dorothy was in 1996. (Tyler has his own intriguing notion about how to tame a twister.) The tornado action is intense, in a theme-park sort of way. But it’s almost irresponsible for a movie about extreme weather to be nothing more than a bit of fun fluff anymore. With only the smallest of tweaks, perhaps Twisters wouldn’t feel reckless in all the wrong ways.

more films like this:
• Twister [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Max US]
• The Perfect Storm [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Paramount+ US]

It was a text from Sutton Foster that got Amy Sherman-Palladino to drop everything. The Tony-winning actor was leading a new production of “Once Upon a Mattress,” a musical take on “The Princess and the Pea” that in previous incarnations starred Carol Burnett and Sarah Jessica Parker. Might the creator of “Gilmore Girls,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and Foster’s own “Bunheads” take a pass at the stage show’s script?

“For Sutton Foster, anything,” Sherman-Palladino recalls. What was supposed to be a quick punch-up gig for a two-week Encores! stint has turned out to be the scribe’s Broadway debut, as the production — about a queen who discourages her son’s wedding prospects with impossible tests, and a swamp princess who takes on the challenge — has begun a four-month run at New York’s Hudson Theatre before moving to Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre in December.

The revival, directed by Lear deBessonet (“Into the Woods”), also stars Michael Urie, Ana Gasteyer, Will Chase, Brooks Ashmanskas, Daniel Breaker, Nikki Renée Daniels and David Patrick Kelly. And Sherman-Palladino, who left the stage behind to pursue her TV dreams, has joined a burgeoning club of writers updating classic musicals for new generations (Amber Ruffin and “The Wiz,” Larissa FastHorse and “Peter Pan”).

Between rehearsing “Once Upon a Mattress” and shooting her Prime Video ballet-centric series “Étoile,” the showrunner-turned-librettist got candid about rewriting a musical’s book on a tight timeline, ridding a fairy tale of its misogyny and bringing physical comediennes back to Broadway. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

You made an early career choice between writing for “Roseanne” and attending a “Cats” callback. Since then, you’ve consistently cast stage actors and snuck musical numbers into your TV shows. How does it feel to finally be working on a theater project?

It’s completely bananas. I just lucked into the fact that this wonderful person in my life named Sutton Foster texted me one sentence — that was the extent of the negotiation, I drove a hard bargain — that has changed everything, and now I’m getting to be a little part of a world I admire so much. What world am I in that my job is to sit at this table read and listen to these people harmonize around me like this?

Had you seen the musical before?

I had never seen it. I knew some of the music — “Shy,” “Happily Ever After” — and I think I’d seen a version on television. What I did know is Carol Burnett. There’s not a lot of women who have that comedy, that big voice, that command of the stage — well, except this kid named Sutton Foster who’s been running around.

Sutton and “Mattress,” that’s perfect casting. The first thing she said to me was, “I want to be so gross, I want to be as disgusting as possible, I want to be this true Swamp Thing that crawled out of the muck.” And yet you fall in love with her, even with s— in her hair and leeches on her back. Nobody finds moments of humanity in insanity like Sutton Foster, and in this she’s certainly at her most insane.

When you first signed onto the rewrite, was Broadway in the conversation?

I thought this was just for City Center, where they rehearse for like two weeks and then perform for two weeks. I may have had two weeks to get them the draft — a fun couple of weeks of writing jokes and lobbying hard for one classless d— joke, come on, Lear, let me get one in! It’s amazing to watch because it’s so fast and frenetic, and the fact that they can pull it off at all and at the level at which they pull it off, it’s such a thrill. So I thought it was over, and then suddenly, it’s going to Broadway. Well, I had all this other stuff I wanted to put in it, so can I put it in now?

Sometimes, these things take years to get to Broadway, and in that time you do try things and throw out things and put things in. But the whole thing has happened unbelievably fast. I think part of the reason that everybody thought it could go to Broadway so quickly is because it felt like Michael Urie and Sutton [as Prince Dauntless and Princess Winnifred, respectively] had been rehearsing for months. From day one, they were so in the pocket of being weird together and speaking each other’s language that it was a kind of magic.

I managed to shove a few more things in there that I had really, really wanted to, but in my dream of dreams, we would have had a proper time frame to really dig deep. But for me, nothing is ever done. I look at the “Gilmore” pilot, and I’m like, can I rewrite that? I remember when they sold “Gilmore” to Netflix, I said, “Can I remix the whole thing? Because I was never really happy with the sound on it.” And they’re like, “Yeah, can you not call us again? It’s a done deal, lady, you’ve got to move on.”

How did you go about rewriting the book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and Marshall Barer, especially in such limited time?

Making everybody happy was hard. Over the years, there have been several kinds of incarnations of this show: The structure was changed, some characters were left out, and there was actually not one definitive blueprint to follow. So I’m working off of production drafts and working with three different estates, and the originators aren’t around to explain, “That’s what this very shorthand stage direction meant.” And at the same time, I’m in production. I’m on set on [forthcoming TV series] “Étoile,” [where] my [assistant directors] would get a glimpse of the [“Mattress”] script and go, “Who’s Winnifred?!” No, don’t look over there, your script is over here! It was insane, keeping everything straight.

I wrote a movie version of “Gypsy” — which has never seen the light of day, but I’m still hopeful — and I remember getting on the phone with Stephen Sondheim, and after all the wonderful compliments, he goes, “I just have a few thoughts, if you want to hear them.” I’m like, “Oh my God, of course!” And he goes, “I want to hurry, because page one…” It was like 15 hours, and it was the best 15 hours of my life.

That’s what you always want to be able to do, is really rip through things. This was not the project for that. It was very, very fast, and you never get to do everything you want to do at that speed.

Amy Sherman-Palladino, pictured at the Critics Choice Awards earlier this year.

(Amy Sussman / WireImage)

What’s the hardest thing about updating a text tied to multiple estates?

They’re all protecting their own legacies, and you end up having to work within the confines of other people in control of your destiny. Sometimes it’s a good exercise to do that: On “Gilmore Girls,” we had zero money. “The Drew Carey Show’’ would send over their extra water and half a sheet cake if someone had a birthday over there. I mean, it takes place in Connecticut, and we’re in Burbank where there’s no snow!

Learning to craft a world and a story and seven seasons of a journey out of nothing and with nothing — that lean, mean training prepares you for anything. My job is to fight the battles that I feel are worth fighting, and to keep fighting them so that the cast feels supported by the material and Lear has what she needs to do something we’re all proud of.

I was so f— naive — I went through a draft and changed all the things I’d change in a [TV] script, and some of it was as little as changes for spacing on the page or moving the comma so the person doesn’t pause at the wrong time, not realizing that they had to redline everything for the estates. It’s one of those dumb things that was so automatic for me, but I’d just made Lear’s world 15 times harder. So I apologize, Lear, I love you, it was not on purpose.

This musical, as beloved as it is, had its share of misogynistic material. How did you approach the update for a new generation?

That was the most important thing. It is a fairy tale, which does have a lot of, “I gotta marry a prince in the end,” but that’s not the [universal] female journey anymore, which is a great thing.

We wanted to lean more into the naivete of Winnifred, somebody who has a vision in her mind of what happily ever after is. She’s got this ridiculous speech about how it means you get to do gymnastics and climb trees, but it’s the end of that monologue where she says, “You get a pal” — you have someone to share this life with. She doesn’t want someone to put her on a pedestal, to dress her up in pretty clothes and look at her like an object. She wants someone to share s— with and laugh with, someone to look at all of her weirdness that she can’t do anything about because that’s who she is, and go, “I think you are special.”

That journey of love and acceptance, of wanting to belong someplace and having someone see you for the greatness that you are, even if you did crawl out of the slime — that’s the princess journey.

This is a female-led musical driven by broad, physical comedy — a type of show Broadway hasn’t seen much lately. How do you feel it will be received by today’s ticket-buying audiences?

I think all of us are aligned in the fact that you’re not going to walk out of the show having learned any lessons. We’re not teaching you d—. You gotta learn that somewhere else. If you want to break it down and make it sound deeper than it is, it’s about being different and finding the one person who sees what’s cool about you. But it’s just a fun show. There’s nothing you’re taking away from “Oh, Mary!” either, except that, for an hour and 20 minutes, you’re going to laugh your ass off and it’s gonna leave you on a high.

Broadway is best and thrives the most when everything is represented: the dramas that make you feel hard things or change your perspective or make you cry, the shows that really make you feel s— about yourself. Sometimes, you gotta walk out of a theater feeling like absolute crap, and that’s just part of the theater experience.

But there’s also a place in theater where, for a few hours, you’ve forgotten that your kid won’t talk to you, politics are madness and the world is falling apart. It hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s all waiting for you the minute you walk back out, but you’ve had something joyous that makes it OK to wake up the next day and go into your challenging life. So why not be someplace wonderful for a couple hours?

Michael Urie and Sutton Foster, center, with the Broadway cast of “Once Upon a Mattress.”

(Joan Marcus)

Advertisement

Are negotiations underway to have your version be the licensable “Mattress” moving forward?

There’s been discussions about it. I don’t think they wanted to take that step at this moment. Which, to me, says I gotta prove it, because if this version scores with audiences, maybe people will want to do this version. If not, then maybe people are like, “As long as she sings ‘Shy,’ I’m good.”

That’s the gig. I can’t worry about that because I have too many other things to be nauseous about. But I would love for that to happen because I love the show. And, I’d love to take another pass at it, if they’d let me, and probably another pass after that.

What was given to me by Sutton and Lear was a gift. I embrace this gift wholeheartedly and I hope I’ve done well by them. That’s all I can control at this moment. But I want to do more theater, because there’s nothing like it. It’s dangerous, anything can happen, so it’s not for the faint of heart. But I want to do more of the things that are truly and utterly terrifying, and theater is terrifying in the best way.

What advice would you give to another writer tasked with updating a classic musical?

Valium. Get a vat of Valium, up the dosage, just do it. Every time you get that call about your latest draft, just have that bottle right there. It’s gonna make everything go so much smoother.