Twisters: Prepare to be blown away!

Twisters (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for intense action and peril, fleeting profanity, and disturbing images

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.21.24

Although this film leaves no doubt that it’s a summertime, popcorn-laden rollercoaster ride — and quite a suspenseful one — there’s no denying the cautionary message also embedded in Mark L. Smith and Joseph Kosinski’s storyline:

 

With an EF5 (Enhanced Fujita Scale) tornado about to blow into town, Kate (Daisy
Edger-Jones), Ravi (Anthony Ramos, center) and Tyler (Glen Powell) try to determine
the safest place to hunker down.

Climate change is real, and those who ignore Mother Nature’s increasingly catastrophic warnings, do so at their own peril.

Because, as this thriller distressingly depicts, there will come a time when the financial damage, and tragic loss of life, become too great to dismiss.

 

(I’d have thought this was blindingly obvious years ago ... but certain segments of humanity do have a distressing habit of burying their heads in the sand.)

 

Anyway...

 

This sequel’s power comes not merely from special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher and visual effects supervisor Ben Snow’s awesome action sequences, but also the crucial attention paid to characters and their interactions. That’s no surprise; director Lee Isaac Chung earned two well-deserved Academy Awards nominations for 2020’s Minari — easily one of this decade’s most sensitively emotional dramas — and he also helmed a 2023 episode of television’s The Mandalorian, which likely served as a testing ground for this big-screen feature.

 

Let it be said: Chung and editor Terilyn A. Shropshire move things along at a breakneck pace.

 

But as always is the case with such films, the best ones succeed because we grow to admire and care about the people involved. That’s definitely true here, since the viewers at Tuesday evening’s sold-out preview screening were riveted, worried and at the edge of their seats, during this saga’s ferocious climax.

 

But that comes later.

 

A prologue finds Muskogee State University graduate student Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos) heading into Oklahoma’s “Tornado Alley,” in order to test a theoretical chemical invention that she believes could squelch small twisters, before they become larger monsters. Their team includes Kate’s boyfriend, Jeb (Daryl McCormack), and students Addy (Kiernan Shipka) and Praveen (Nik Dodani, recognized from his supporting role on the Netflix series Atypical).

 

(In a nice touch of continuity, Muskogee State was the alma mater of the characters played by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, in 1996’s Twister. Indeed, that film’s writers — Anne-Marie Martin and the late Michael Crichton — are granted credits here.)

 

Alas, the experiment ends in tragedy.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Explosively tense

How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity and drug use

Available via: Amazon Prime and other streaming services

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.8.23

I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more films like this one, during the next decade.

 

Director Goldhaber’s riveting ecological thriller unfolds with the intensity of a ticking time bomb … which, climate-wise, intentionally echoes the status of Earth these days.

 

Xochitl (Ariela Barer, far left) and four of her colleagues — from left, Alisha (Jayme
Lawson), Theo (Sasha Lane), Shawn (Marcus Scribner) and Dwayne (Jake Weary) —
wait, at a safe distance, for the next phase of their plan to be executed.

Despite sharing its title with Andreas Malm’s 2021 book, the two have nothing in common. Malm’s nonfiction work argues the futility of moral pacifism and expecting change from “the ruling class” — i.e., Big Oil — in favor of more aggressive climate activism in pursuit of environmental justice. (It’s not a “how to” guide akin to William Powell’s notorious 1971 classic, The Anarchist Cookbook.)

Goldhaber, along with co-scripters Ariela Barer and Jordan Sjol, instead have fashioned a non-linear nail-biter very much in the mold of Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 crime thriller, Reservoir Dogs. Both films feature eight primary characters; both intercut the suspensefully developing climax with flashbacks providing key details that explain what draws these folks together.

 

The film opens by following Xochitl (Ariela Barer) as she walks along a city street and, unseen, slashes the tires of a parked SUV; she then slides a one-page manifesto beneath the windshield wipers. She becomes the prime mover behind what takes place soon thereafter.

 

Xochitl grew up in Long Beach, Calif., surrounded by polluting refineries and chemical plants. She became radicalized following the recent death of her mother, during a heat wave likely exacerbated by insufficient air conditioning.

 

Xochitl later joins the others — Shawn (Marcus Scribner), Michael (Forrest Goodluck), Theo (Sasha Lane), Alisha (Jayme Lawson), Logan (Lukas Gage), Rowan (Kristine Froseth) and Dwayne (Jake Weary) — at a deserted cabin in West Texas. They’re prepared for a brief but intense stay, having brought food, supplies … and all the elements required to make two large cylindrical barrel bombs.

 

Their efforts reflect meticulous — and quite clever — planning, along with a rigorous attention to detail. During this initial phase, they work under the guidance of Michael, who lives on a North Dakota reservation. Infuriated by how a nearby refinery has imperiled his people’s land, he taught himself how to make increasingly sophisticated bombs and triggering devices.

 

We eventually learn that Xochitl and Theo grew up together. As children, they’d gaily play in the rain … and then suffer, hours later, from chemical burns on their exposed skin. Theo recently has been handed a death sentence of leukemia, which prompts a sense of can’t-lose fatalism; it also further fuels Xochitl’s wrath. Theo’s girlfriend Alisha, horrified by their behavior, tries to be the voice of reason … but ultimately succumbs to the developing plan.

 

Hearts Beat Loud: The healing power of music

Hearts Beat Loud (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and much too harshly, for fleeting profanity and mild drug references
By Derrick Bang

Unexpected little charmers, such as this one, are the reason I love this job.

The core premise has been can’t-miss ever since Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney made the immortal suggestion — “Hey, kids; let’s put on a show!” — back in 1939’s Babes in Arms.

Whatever else might be happening in their lives, Frank (Nick Offerman) and his daughter
Sam (Kiersey Clemons) always experience joy when making music together

The format shifted a bit over time, these days generally attaching itself to gentle relationship dramas, where a shared love of music paves the way toward love, reconciliation and/or inner peace. Recent examples include director John Carney’s delightful trio: Sing Street (2016), Begin Again (2013) and the incomparable Once (2007).

Director/co-scripter Brett Haley’s Hearts Beat Loud definitely belongs in their company.

Haley has quietly been building an indie career characterized by unabashedly sentimental dramas such as I’ll See You in My Dreams and The Hero: gentle little films no doubt mocked by condescending viewers who sprinkle cynicism on their breakfast cornflakes, but which are adored by those of us seeking relief from lowest-common-denominator Hollywood bombast.

Haley makes films about people: folks you might know, and certainly would like to know. And if they happen to have an artistic streak, well, that just makes them more interesting.

Frank Fisher (Nick Offerman) owns a one-man record store in Red Hook, Brooklyn: a relic more than a generation out of date, whose shelves are lined solely with vinyl. Customers are a long-vanished species; the shop is approaching the final few seconds of the last track on Side B. Frank has just informed his landlady, Leslie (Toni Collette), that he’s packing it in.

The decision kills him, because music has long been in his blood. He met his wife while both performed in clubs: She sang, he played backup. She’s years deceased, under tragic circumstances that Haley and Marc Basch’s script reveals cleverly, subtly, delicately.

Their daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons) is the second apple of Frank’s eye: an ambitious, hard-working student with plans for medical school. She has thus far spent the waning days of her final summer, before college, cracking the books in an effort to get a head start in what she knows will be a highly competitive environment.

It’s a double loss for Frank: his shop and his daughter.