Twister (1996)

Director: Jan de Bont

Cast: Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cary Elwes

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. When your family gets HBO for the first time in late 1996, you almost had to watch it. It was the law. I’m sort of sad that I didn’t catch it in the theater, as my memory includes a screening of the film at the Admiral Twin Drive in here in town had to be cut short due to—you guessed it—marital discord between Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.

That’s what the movie is about, right?

Did I Like It: This has got to be one of the flimsiest, silliest blockbuster films to exist, and somehow, almost kind of work at the same time. The marriage subplot is so thin that both viewers and the movie itself decide to pretty much forget about it before the third act.

The movie makes a mad scramble for an antagonist. One would think the tornadoes would be enough bad guy for a movie… about tornadoes. There’s even a moment, right at the film’s climax where I think we are supposed to believe the probes contained within Dorothy actually killed the final tornado? Was this the same tornado that killed Jo’s (Hunt) father? But it isn’t enough, there has to be a cadre of black hats, or rather SUVs. 

One might point to the special effects as worth a view, but I think the one-two punch of seeing it on television, combined with the fact that it has been 25 years since the film was released, even those moments have grown tame.

What more is there? There aren’t that many movies that take place in the place I came from, to say nothing of action movies. There’s also a certain dopey charm in the storm chasers. Sure, if you forced me to come up with the names other than Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, and that one guy who I’m fairly sure disappears before Paxton’s fiancée excuses herself from the proceedings. They’re a fun bunch and I have a vague recollection of there being development of a sequel in the years since. What would that have even looked like? Maybe they go after hurricanes? Or snow flurries. Yep. I can see the poster now. Twister 2: Snow Flurries. Released in 1999. Bill Paxton returns; Helen Hunt couldn’t be bothered. In that universe, the Twister saga displaces The Fast and The Furious. 

One shudders. I just won’t growl. That should be left to the tornadoes.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Director: J.J. Abrams

Cast: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Michelle Monaghan

Have I Seen it Before: Sure. Look, some people are down on Cruise as a person, but for the most part he isn’t interested in making a bad movie, so I’m there when that improbably ageless face is plastered on a movie poster.

Did I Like It: Yes, but at the same time…

I remember thinking after I initially saw this movie in the theater that this is a movie series that has found its perfect calibration. Some have said that the plot of the first Mission: Impossible (1996) was too byzantine (it isn’t, but it may take a viewing or two to fully enjoy), and that Mission: Impossible II (2000) was as insubstantial and dumb as a movie as is likely to ever be made (it is), whereas this one blends the stunt show qualities of the latter with the actual spy fun of the former.

That’s true, but it all feels less somehow after it’s had a decade to simmer in my head. Abrams makes his directorial debut here. There is nary a lens flare to be found, which undercuts a lot of dunderheaded criticism of his cinematic output, even if the lens flares have never bothered me as much as others. He has brought his TV skills to bear here, offering the closest thing to an Alias: The Motion Picture as we are likely to get.

I just wished I liked Alias more. It’s a fine show, but it never lit my imagination on fire, and so it is also with this film. The stunts are here. The intrigue is here. I just wish that the ambition to bring some of the better qualities of the television series to the big screen had stayed. I wish the films were closer to a heist movie, and less an attempt to give the world an American James Bond. I also wish that the IMF team was less an elite team of CIA employees and more of the disparate team of skilled civilian contractors that Phelps and team were. The previous films don’t aim for this, but it struck me more here. What we have here is certainly better than the nadir of the second film, but there is still a lot of material left to be mined. Unfortunately, the success of the this entry and subsequent attempts in a similar mold indicate that that is probably not going to happen any time soon.

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener

Have I Seen it Before: I’m not entirely sure I’ve stopped watching it at this point. The film is so amorphous that I seriously wondered if Kaufman was still shooting the film, years after Hoffman died, and with a ten year head start, is still sending reels to upload to Netflix. 

Did I Like It: After saying something like that, I have to say no, right?

There are a lot of interesting visuals in this film, and they illicit a lot of feelings ranging from melancholy to deep melancholy. Some may say that Kaufman—a screenwriter making his first, and to date only directing attempt—is a gifted storyteller in need of a visual stylist like Spike Jonze to complete the package. This isn’t the problem here. He needed a tighter screenplay, which, honestly, he has provided other directors with far less effort.

That crack about melancholy above is maybe unfair, but only just so. There is much to identify in here. At it’s core, it deals with the blurring of lines between fiction and reality (I think) and that is a topic I have spent at least a little bit of time working out myself. The yearning for some kind of human contact beyond simply the romantic (again, I think) cuts deep with anyone on the north side of thirty and has spent a goodly chunk of their life in the same committed relationship.

Even the image of the schlubby Hoffman wandering through his life trying to write something real, while trying to find the right person to play himself (again, I can only guess) feels like I’m personally being called out, but that can’t be universal, right? It even took me most of the first forty-five minutes of the film to get over the fact that Hoffman and I essentially have the same haircut.

I just wish all of that could have fit into something I might understand as a story. I know Kaufman can create brilliantly structured stories, and that makes whatever I just saw all the more disappointing.