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.
Well, hello there…
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.
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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.
Anyone else getting Linda Hamilton–in–Terminator 2 vibes off this image?
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.
“If I said you were an untamed force of nature, would you hold it against me?”
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.
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Storm chasing is all fun and games until Nature drops an F5 on your head.
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.
Been there, got sucked up in the funnel, bought the T-shirt.
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]
Kunal Nayyar in ‘Christmas Karma’
| Photo Credit: True Bit Entertainment/YouTube
Christmas jumpers are all I can remember of this film. As this reimagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol dragged on with sickly-sweet sentimentality and song, my eyes constantly tried to work out whether those snowflakes and reindeer were printed on the jerseys or, if knitted, how complicated the patterns would have been.
Christmas Karma (English)
Director: Gurinder Chadha
Starring: Kunal Nayyar, Leo Suter, Charithra Chandran, Pixie Lott, Danny Dyer, Boy George, Hugh Bonneville, Billy Porter, Eva Longoria, Mia Lomer
Storyline: A miserly businessman learns the true meaning of Christmas when visited by ghosts of Christmas past, present and future
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Runtime: 114 minutes
Gurinder Chadha, who gave us the gorgeous Bend it Like Beckham (who wants to make aloo gobi when you can bend the ball like Beckham indeed) has served up an unappetising Bollywood song-and-dance version of Dickens’ famous Christmas story.
A still from the film
| Photo Credit:
True Bit Entertainment/YouTube
A curmudgeonly Indian businessman, Ishaan Sood (Kunal Nayyar), fires his entire staff on Christmas Eve—except his accountant, Bob (Leo Suter)—after catching them partying at the office. Sood’s nephew, Raj (Shubham Saraf) invites him for a Christmas party which he refuses to attend.
He returns home after yelling at some carol singers for making a noise, the shopkeeper (Nitin Ganatra) at the corner for his business decisions and a cabbie (Danny Dyer) for being too cheerful.
His cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Joshi (Shobu Kapoor) tells him to enjoy his dinner in the dark as he has not paid for heat or electricity. He is visited by the spirit of his dead business partner, Marley (Hugh Bonneville), who is in chains with the spirits of all the people he wronged. Marley’s spirit tells Sood that he will be visited by three spirits who will reveal important life lessons.
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A still from the film
| Photo Credit:
True Bit Entertainment/YouTube
The Ghost of Christmas Past (Eva Longoria), with Day of the Dead makeup and three mariachis providing musical accompaniment, shows Sood his early, happy days in Uganda as a child and the trauma of being expelled from the country by Idi Amin.
Sood comes to Britain where his father dies of heartbreak and decides the only way out is to earn a lot of money. He meets and falls in love with Bea (Charithra Chandran) but loses her when he chooses paisa over pyaar even though he tries to tell her he is being ruthless only to earn enough to keep her in luxury.
The Ghost of Christmas Present (Billy Porter) shows Bob’s twee house full of Christmas cheer, despite the roast chicken past its sell-by date, and his young son, Tim, bravely smiling despite his illness.
The Ghost of Christmas Future (Boy George, Karma is sure a chameleon!) shows Sood dying alone except for Bob and Mrs. Joshi. He sees the error of his ways and throws much money around as he makes everything alright. He even ends up meeting up with his childhood friend in Uganda.
Apart from the mixed messages (money makes everything alright, let us pray for the NHS but go to Switzerland to get well) and schmaltzy songs, Christmas Karma suffers from weak writing and wooden acting.
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Priyanka Chopra’s Hindi rendition of George Michael’s ‘Last Christmas’ runs over the end credits featuring Chadha and the crew, bringing back fond memories of Bina Mistry’s ‘Hot Hot Hot’ from Bend it Like Beckham. Even a sitar version by Anoushka Shankar is to no avail as watching this version of A Christmas Carol ensures bad karma in spades.
An orphaned girl hires her hitman next-door neighbor to kill the monster under her bed. This R-rated action/horror movie mashup has lots of violence but surprisingly little gore. However, there are still many gruesome moments, even if they’re just offscreen. And some language and a strange portrayal of Christian worship come up, too.
Across the three feature films he’s made to date, the 36-year-old Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan has proven himself prodigiously gifted at manipulating the parameters of time and space through moving images, resulting in visually astonishing, narratively diffuse feats of showmanship that drift and shift in accordance with a self-consciously slippery dream logic.
In his 2015 debut, “Kaili Blues,” which maps the contours of the area around his hometown, Kaili City, in southwestern Guizhou province, Bi traced the psychic and physical geography of his own youth to reflect on rural China’s relationship to the country’s rapidly advancing modernity. Wandering the streets and alleys of a riverside village in a bravura long take that collapsed its past, present, and future in a swirl, he announced himself as a boldly cinematic voice, one for whom restless yearning to escape from existentially impoverished realities into fantastic, subconscious realms was clearly a formal and thematic imperative.
His elliptical debut turned out to be mere table-setting for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a labyrinthine neo-noir that—despite unfurling across Guizhou province—was a more baroque, impersonal affair. Following another drifter in search of a missing person, Bi reinterpreted this generic premise as a jumping-off point to meditate at large on time, memory, and cinema’s role in shaping both, enumerating his influences—among them Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, and Andrei Tarkovsky, the latter of whom Bi has openly referred to as a formative inspiration—while burnishing his international reputation as a filmmaker capable of traversing stylistic boundaries with supreme confidence. Again came a fluid long take, this time in the form of an hour-long 3D sequence shot that started once its protagonist took his seat at a run-down movie house.
This sophomore effort—technically a leap forward, one achieved with a surfeit of production resources—brought Bi toward other issues, none unfamiliar for an emerging auteur with his emphases. Most glaringly, for all the puzzling surface pleasures wrought by its heightened stylization and oblique storyline, the film felt consciously artificial, all but completely lacking its predecessor’s tactility. If “Kaili Blues” laid the groundwork for Bi’s cineastic language, it also grounded him in a localized context where his abstractions could still accrue atmospheric density. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” might be seen as unburdened by its aversion to narrative or emotional clarity, but its flourishes felt curiously weightless and inconsequential.
“Resurrection,” Bi’s third feature, is no less staggering than his last two, and it’s saturated with some of the more striking images you’re likely to see in a theater this year. Still, its onerously oneiric progression is a disappointing development, signaling a greater shift from the yearning poetics of Bi’s past work toward circular meta-cinematic pastiche. If his previous films were concerned with exploring time and memory, the subject of dreaming is what most moves Bi in “Resurrection” — but in all three instances, his thesis is essentially the same self-reflexive assertion of belief in cinema’s power to reflect the experience of our inner journeys.
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Styled as a love letter to the grand illusion of cinema, albeit one to be read upon its deathbed, “Resurrection” opens in a fitfully imagined alternate reality where imagination itself has become imperiled. People have discovered that the secret to immortality lies in no longer dreaming. However, a small subset of the population has defied this anti-dreaming decree, preferring to still revel in fantasies despite the fact that this significantly shortens their lifespans. (A series of intertitles, styled to emulate those of the silent-film era, compares people not dreaming to “candles that do not burn,” and Bi consistently returns to this metaphor across each of the film’s chapters.)
Dream dissidents, known as “Deliriants,” are summarily outcast from society and hunted down by “Other Ones,” who are capable of entering their dreams and do so to extinguish them, lest these outliers become monstrous. “Resurrection” follows one Deliriant, played by Chinese pop star and actor Jackson Yee, as he shapeshifts from dream to dream at the behest of an Other One (Shu Qi), who installs a film projector inside him as a seeming act of mercy, allowing him a few reveries more before his inevitable death. Comprising the rest of the film, each of the Deliriant’s dream scenarios is linked to a different era of moviemaking, from German expressionism to neon-streaked, Wong Kar-wai-indebted romanticism; Bi also connects each vignette to one of the five senses and places them in distinct periods of 20th-century Chinese history.
The most spellbinding section comes first, through Bi’s tribute to silent melodrama, as the Other One hunts Yee’s Deliriant through what appears to be a Chinese opium den but soon transforms into a byzantine maze of exaggerated, crooked film-set backdrops. Evoking memories of both Murnau and Méliès, the accomplished production design of “Resurrection”—by Liu Qiang and Tu Nan—shines brightest here. Through its successive sections, the film then morphs into a war-time espionage thriller, adrift in smoke and mirrors; a folktale set in the ruins of a Buddhist temple, involving a thief and a trickster god; a tragicomic riff on “Paper Moon,” about a con artist and his orphan apprentice who allege they can identify playing cards by smell; and, finally, a woozy romance between two young lovers—one seemingly a vampire—on the eve of the new millennium, this last part playing out as another of Bi’s virtuosic long takes.
The ambition, as we’ve come to expect from him, is overpowering. “Resurrection” is alternately a sci-fi picture, a monster movie, a film noir, a cryptic parable, a crime caper, and a gangland romance — and it’s sometimes all of the above, blurring tones and textures to suggest a certain metamorphic potential within each of the stories as the Deliriant experiences them. Yet there’s a curiously draining quality to Bi’s film as well, one that feels related less to its sprawling scope than to the repetitive, riddling nature of the segments therein. As a procession of characters is transmogrified in strange ways, or otherwise meet surprising ends, across a series of abstruse set pieces that function primarily to pay homage to various techniques, Bi’s dominant mood is one of plaintive desolation, and this wears thin as quickly as all the willfully ersatz dialogue he invites audiences to puzzle over.
Bi’s reverence for the century of cinema he references throughout “Resurrection” is indisputable, and the sheer opulence on display will leave some enraptured. Certainly, in terms of production design and cinematography, he’s assembled an intimidating contraption made up of far too many moving parts to track upon initial viewing. But the effect of this outsized ambition is often mannered, even mechanistic.
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For all its waxing lyrical about the need for humanity to keep dreaming through cinema, all its technically polished tributes to film history, its showmanship lacks emotional substance. If imitation is the sincerest act of flattery, here it also proves flattening; as in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Bi enshrines his influences through recurrent motifs and symbols, through one assured demonstration of a recognizable style after another, but in doing so he also entombs them, creating a film that feels like less a work of imaginative possibility from an ascendant master than an act of preservation by a dutiful curator.
Paradoxically, for a film about the undying essence of the movies, what’s missing is any more molten, organic sense of processing that would evoke the true surreality of dream states. In place of an artist’s passion, Bi’s cold touch carries an undertaker’s sense of ceremony. Without a deeper subconscious drive behind his construction, it also lacks the intense aura of mystery and desire one would welcome in a grand monument like this. Instead, Bi has erected a series of simulacra, a hall of mirrors that reflect one another endlessly yet also indifferently; its images only seem to grow smaller and smaller as they recede into infinite distance. “Resurrection” is ravishing in its command of shadow and light, but it studiously hollows out any sense of soul beneath the surface.
“Resurrection” is now in theaters, via Janus Films.
