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.

DUMBDOG MILLIONAIRE

Opening in Phoenix today; wide on October 6:

Dumb Money--As with 2015's The Big Short, there were plenty of twists and turns in this movie that my finance-challenged brain had to struggle to keep up with. Also like The Big Short, this chronicle of the weird January 2021 boom in GameStop stock is waggish fun. But it's easier to root for the heroes here, because, as least as this movie tells it, they're ordinary people sticking it to rich hedge fund jerks rather than rich hedge fund jerks sticking it to all of us.

GameStop, a Texas-based video game retailer that had been a mall mainstay since the '80s under one name or another, had been in decline since the rise of online game purchasing. The COVID pandemic seemed like the death knell for the company, and hedge fund short sellers were moving in.

Dumb Money's focus is on Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a small-potatoes analyst and broker from Brockton, Massachusetts. Gill had a day gig at MassMutual but spent his evenings in his basement making funny YouTube videos on investing, and posting on other social platforms that I don't understand. He believed that GameStop stock was undervalued, and his enthusiasm helped to cause an explosion in its price that made the short sellers sweat.

But the "dumb money"--apparently that's what hedge fund folk call individual small investors--was sweating too, of course. The movie, directed by Cruella's Craig Gillespie from a script by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo (based on Ben Mezrich's's book The Antisocial Network), jumps around among a variety of GameStop investors who were riding the wave with Gill, and resisting the temptation to sell as a matter of economic principle, to the horror and bafflement of their families and friends. These include America Ferrera as a struggling Pittsburgh hospital worker and single mom; Talia Ryder and Myha'la Herrold as Texas college students besotted both with the investment and with each other, and Anthony Ramos as a GameStop employee who buys in.

I presume that some or all of these people are fictional "composites" representing the online rabble who collaborated on the short squeeze. They're nicely played and sympathetic. The millionaire and billionaire vultures are based on real players: Seth Rogen as Gabe Plotkin and Nick Offerman as Ken Griffin and Sebastian Shaw as Robinhood's Vlad Tenev and Vincent D'Onofrio, extra-creepy, as Steve Cohen. A scurvier bunch of parasitical cruds you'd have a hard time finding. Shailene Woodley is touching as Keith's supportive wife, Kate Burton and Clancy Brown are believable as his parents, and Pete Davidson is a perfect fit as the idiot brother.

Driven forward by a lot of stately, foul-mouthed hip-hop on the soundtrack and tricked out with split-screens and montages, Dumb Money cruises along absorbingly and, despite copious comedy, with an ambiguous tension--I wanted to see the hedge fund guys squirm, but I was anxious for the everyday people when they didn't sell. They, after all, need the money. The incidental backdrop of COVID adds to the unnerving atmosphere; the masks and empty malls and streets create an almost sci-fi flavor at times. It may be the first pandemic period piece.

Although the GameStop boom had fans as diverse as Elon Musk and AOC, I was never sure, watching this movie, that I wasn't falling for a simplistic interpretation of the events--the little guys banding together to take the big boys, who have rigged the system so only they can win, down a few notches. Is there another side here? I mean, no doubt GameStop was undervalued, but was it really that undervalued? Did this amount to a whimsical, sentiment-based pyramid scheme, even if it was motivated altruistically rather than as a con job?

One of the posters for the film reads "THE TOP 1% THINKS YOU'RE DUMB." No doubt they do, and as far as finance is concerned, in my case they aren't wrong. So if there's another, more negative, legitimately dumb side to this story, I'm not smart enough to see it.

In any case, I'm not prepared to shed a tear for the hedge funds. Despite the hit some of them took, in the end, the well-connected big investors appear to have pulled strings and avoided ruination; the film resigns itself to the game being rigged. But it also suggests that the big boys will think twice before they ignore the dumb money again, and it claims this as a triumph. As the movie presents the story, it's all but impossible not to invest in it--invest emotionally, that is.

HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS

In theaters this Friday:

In the Heights--The Lin-Manuel Miranda musical before Hamilton was this interweaving of the lives and dreams of residents of the heavily Latino upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, over a few summer days including a citywide blackout. It opened on Broadway in 2008, with the ridiculously talented lyricist and composer Miranda in the lead.

For this film version, directed by Jon M. Chu, an older Miranda has wisely given himself the relatively minor supporting role of the "Piraguero" and turned the leading man duties over to Anthony Ramos, who played Laurens in Hamilton on Broadway. Ramos plays Usnavi, who runs a bodega but dreams of returning to his native Dominican Republic to open a beachside cantina. The characters around him also dream of business or artistic or academic success, and of course circumstances and relationships interfere with these.

The storylines, in themselves, are fairly conventional, and Washington Heights is presented, rosily or not, as such a paradisal place to live in this movie that it's hard to see why a person would dream of "getting out." But the numbers through which these stories unfold are thrilling in the way that only a beautifully written, well-performed, well-directed, well-edited musical can be; that is to say, about as thrilling as anything in the performing arts (with the possible exception of really well-done Shakespeare) can be.

Ramos is a delightful master of ceremonies, and he handles Miranda's peerless, slippery run-on rhymes superbly. The standout in the cast, however, is Olga Merediz, from the Broadway production, as the "Abuela," a matriarchal figure in the neighborhood. Her big number "Paciencia y Fe," about coming to the U.S. from Cuba as a kid with her mother, is a knockout; emotionally direct and potent without a trace of Broadway-style pushing or straining.  

I've heard a lot of bitching over the past year or so about how contemporary movies are either too fluffy or too horribly depressing. If you're of this mindset, In the Heights may be for you; it's in touch with the conflicts and hardships of the world, but the tone, beginning to end, is joyous.

Streaming on TubiTV:

We All Think We're Special--Charlie (Jared Blankens) is a raging alcoholic; after a particularly wild binge, his more mild-mannered drinking buddy Ed (William McGovern) suddenly decides to forcibly detox him in Charlie's rambling house (which he's about to lose, as his late mother willed it to AA!). Charlie resists but Ed is implacable, and as the hours and days go by and Charlie gets sicker and more distraught, he shrieks out a lot of invective.

At the beginning we're told that this is based on a true story, that it offers us "neither medical advice nor wisdom," and that we shouldn't "attempt substance withdrawal unless under the care of trained medical personnel." Uh, yeah. The two actors are strong, especially Blankens, and even manage to inject a little wit and warmth into the proceedings, and the direction is moody; there's no denying the movie has some power. Overall, though, it isn't much fun. But it did convince me not to ever try a DIY detox on one of my friends.

Streaming on YouTube:

Hamlet/Horatio--Director Paul Warner and screenwriter David Vando had the intriguing idea to build an adaptation of Shakespeare's masterpiece based on the intimacy between the Dane and his school friend and confidant Horatio. At times Horatio seems almost like an imaginary friend or longed-for absent lover here; the "To be or not be" speech, for instance, is a duet between the two men.

Horatio is, unquestionably, a fascinating, ambiguous character. But this stripped-down version, played in a mix of modern dress and Ren Faire costumes with a "meta" device--a baleful, chalky-skinned cameraman observing the action, played by writer Vando, who also plays the Gravedigger--suffers from uneven acting and a somber, glacial pace.

More painfully, most of Shakespeare's language has been translated into very prosaic, CliffNotes-style modern English that lands with a thud (in 1965 Rouben Mamoulian published a modern-English version of Hamlet as well, and it too has somehow failed to replace the original). Trying to improve the text of Hamlet is, I'm afraid, more madness than method.