BESTWORLD

The July/August issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

...includes the 2024 edition of "Best of the Valley." Your Humble Narrator is proud to have once again been among the authors. As always, I invite you to read it carefully and see if you can guess which eleven entries were elegantly composed by me.

LET'S TWIST AGAIN...

Opening this weekend...

Twisters--This isn't a look behind the scenes at the raw, fiercely competitive world of people who play the Milton Bradley party game. No, this is a pretty belated sequel to Jan de Bont's Twister, the 1996 adventure yarn about storm chasers. It follows roughly the same plot template: A midwestern heroine with a personal grudge against tornados tries to devise a way to combat them. In '96 this role was played by Helen Hunt; here it's a waif called Daisy Edgar-Jones.

After an opening tragedy while she's trying to deploy the "Dorothy" technology from the original film, our meteorologist heroine withdraws to New York. Five years later she's tempted back into storm chasing in her home state of Oklahoma by an old crony (Anthony Ramos) with new high-tech charting equipment and a crew and budget. He wants her tornado whisperer skills in helping them get close enough to get the essential data to figure out how to dissipate a tornado in progress. She reluctantly agrees to join them for a week.

She and her new colleagues finds themselves in competition with a rowdy, showboating band of YouTube storm chasers, led by the cute, cocksure cowboy Glen Powell. They look like insufferable clowns, but as our heroine trades banter with him and gradually gets to know him better, and to learn more about his motives...Well, you can forecast where this is heading.

I guess I wasn't aware that Twister, which also starred Bill Paxton and Jami Gertz, was such a beloved film that there was a burning desire for a sequel. I remember thinking it was okay, if a little CGI-ersatz, and that the "bad" meteorologist in the black SUV played by Cary Elwes was a little corny. I enjoyed it, but certainly didn't feel any great need for another chapter.

The new film, directed by Minari's Lee Isaac Chung from a script by Mark L. Smith, has the same merits as the original, and the same weaknesses. The storms and the destruction they wreak have the sterile, unreal quality of wall-to-wall CGI effects. I'm not sure what the alternative would be; it's hardly fair to ask the cast and crew to work with actual twisters. But the tornado that sucked Dorothy up to Oz in 1939 has, for me, more physical menace than the virtual twisters here.

That said, Chung handles the big showpiece action scenes excitingly, and he keeps them coming. Edgar-Jones, Powell, Ramos and the other actors are amiable enough, though the dramatic and romantic side of the film isn't much more substantive than that of, say, a Hallmark holiday movie--Powell looks like he'd be a natural for those.

All throughout Twisters, it's continually exasperating to see that, in the midst of what we're told is a record-setting tornado outbreak, the small-town Okies are still going to rodeos and street fairs and baseball games. At one point our heroes even seek shelter from the storm in a movie theater which, this being a Universal picture, is showing the original 1931 Frankenstein. If they must get flattened in a theater, at least they get a worthwhile flick.

THE LADY IN THE FAKE

In theaters this weekend:

Fly Me to the Moon--Scarlett Johansson plays a Madison Avenue marketing hustler brought to NASA in Florida in the late '60s to help re-sell the Apollo moon mission to the public, and thus to an increasingly reticent and tight-pursed Congress. Soon the astronauts are sporting Omega watches in print ads, and Tang drink mix is being touted as the beverage of space travelers.

Those of us who go back that far may remember this advertising blitz; I certainly consumed unhealthy quantities of Tang around that time--any quantity was probably unhealthy--because of its supposed outer space connections. But in this lavish period romcom, it's the highly fictitious set-up for the meet-cute between Johansson and Channing Tatum, as a serious-minded NASA launch director.

He falls for her at first sight, then when he learns who she is he's outraged at her interference. And it truly is outrageous; she even hires actors to play some of the less charismatic or more camera-shy NASA staffers in TV interviews, Tatum included. But of course, over time his resistance is worn down by her adorableness.

Johansson is pretty adorable, at that. She wears the chic '60s outfits like she was born for them, and her purse-lipped, mischievous little smirk is winning as always. Tatum is in his comfort zone here, too; likably bland and dim and stalwart. The stars have a comfortable romantic rapport, and they're well supported by a roster of character players, like Woody Harrelson as the jovial mystery man who hires Johansson, Jim Rash as a prima donna commercial director and Ray Romano as Tatum's loyal sidekick. There's also a gorgeous black cat.

Between the cast, the vintage atmosphere and retro styles and settings, and a terrific soundtrack, the movie, directed by Greg Berlanti (of Love, Simon) from a script by Rose Gilroy, would be ludicrous and fluffy but inoffensive enough, even charming. But in the middle of this buffoonish burlesque of NASA history, there are attempts to generate genuine drama and poignancy over the earlier tragedy of Apollo 1 in 1967 that strike a sour note.

Worse yet, in the severely overlong second half, the plot goes off the rails. Harrelson's government spook makes Johansson stage, you guessed it, a fake moon landing, as a contingency in case the real one fails. She reluctantly goes along with this, unbeknownst to Tatum, as the real landing is taking place, even though she feels like she's betraying him.

This extended finale is clumsily staged, but that's not what's offensive about it. The "Fake Moon Landing" narrative is one of the quintessential paranoid American folk legends, likely arising, I've always suspected, among the many people who insisted that the moon landing was a ridiculous folly and would never succeed--arising, like so much else in our toxic national discourse, from the common American inability to admit it when we're wrong. Fly Me to the Moon means it all facetiously, of course, but this doesn't strike me as the most auspicious time in our country's history to lend even that much credence to a conspiracy theory.