I've got I've got to ask you you you've been to Kansas before haven't you been through Kansas I've actually spent one night in Kansas to so as you as you were leaving Kansas did you have the opportunity to turn to whoever you were with and say we're not in Kansas anymore. No, we loved it. I said we went to a place called Wilson, Kansas and Wilson, Kansas is by coincidence the name of one of the biggest country in Western SARS of the nineteen seven. Oh, is that right? If it's not, it should be. It should be. It shouldn't be. There's a great name. Okay, so if you spent all this time in Kansas, have you seen a real twister in real life? I saw a twister in Colorado. Yeah, very small in the distance and it was it hadn't touched earth yet and I don't think it ever did. So what you mean is it was a pointy cloud? It was by now you could see the funnel. You could see it moving. It was quite eerie and I was at a party. We were just watching it and no one was concerned. It was raining just a little bit where we were and I was told by some know nothing that you can't have rain and a tornado at the same time in the same place and I'm not going to talk about the veracity of twisters yet. But the film. But I think it you can have rain. I think we had for my students, I brought in a meteorologist recently and I asked that same question and he said, no, you can have rain and twisters yet and they can produce rain. I should always should have done was ask an English person. They would be able to tell you that of course wind and rain can exist at the same time because that's what we say at the window for about 260 days of the year. So yeah. Is this when the music comes in? Yeah. Hello and welcome to the two real cinema club. I'm James Zieke. My name is Andres Lorente and I'm the two real cinema club. We love watching movies and then we try to see some new ones and match them to an old film. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. There might be a character in common or an animal in common. This time there's a storm maybe in common. There's a weather phenomenon in class. Yes. Weather for now. Weather phenomenon cinema club. On my notes here, I've called this podcast a mighty wind because we've watched, so this week we've watched new wind based sequel Twisters and we are comparing it to a version at least of the film that Twisters keeps referring to. Yeah. The Wizard of Oz. Well, is it? Did we watch the Wizard of Oz? What are we going to call it? We watched, well, I called the episode Twisted Wizards personally, but that's me because the Wizard is Twisted, isn't he? No, we do call it the Wizard of Oz. Yeah. I think that's correct. 1939 film and a 2024 film. When was it? I've called it Dark Side of the Rainbow because I watched the Pink Floyd version. Oh, you did? I never sat and watched that. I started it, but I don't think I had timed it properly, so it didn't work too too well. And I only did the first 30 minutes or so. But it was, yeah, it's fun. Did you watch it both ways? Did you watch it with the sound? I just watched it with Pink Floyd first. Oh, man. There's just a little bit of Dorothy in the background. Oh, I want to hear what you're doing. We'll talk all about that in a few minutes. I got stuff to say about that. Tell me a little bit, though, about the original Twister because I did not see that and I think that was 2001-ish. Yeah, so I have not seen the original Twister either, but I do remember, like a late 90s, early 2000s film, it has a cracking cast, isn't it? Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, and directed by Janda Bond. I think the main reason that that film got off the ground at all, no pun intended, was because it was a showcase for these new breed of digital effects, which meant they could simulate wind. Sure. And I don't know whether the original is particularly fondly remembered. I think it's kind of, it's one of those films that's considered fine. Yeah. And I did read, I think Helen Hunt for a while has been trying to get a sequel off the ground. Oh, man. I'm going to keep saying that, aren't I? Oh, it's great that she made the bank. Use it while you've got it. So I think she envisioned it as a directorial project for her that she, for a while, has been pitching to direct the sequel to Twister, but that hasn't really come together. So this time around, it's finally made to the cinemas, because of a pitch by Joseph Kazinsky, who is too hot to touch following Top Gun Maverick. So I think he pitched the idea, it was taken up, but he ended up just producing and not directing. So the new Twisters, the 2024 Twisters, has been directed by Lee Isaac Chung. How do you know him? I know him from a totally different film, which was really good and very literate, and I was very surprised to see that he directed this, because Manari was his film a couple years ago and was so good and not full of special effects, and not by paint by numbers rewriting either. It was really very original and very good. And I think it was very personal. I believe it was sort of based on his own life story. Did you know his work before? A little, but I have not seen Manari. I did read his pitch for directing Twister, involved a scene where he had intercut a scene from Manari, where two characters watch a Twister with scenes from the original Twister. And I think that was his pitch document to say, come and let me do this movie. I know him from something considerably less hybrid, which is The Mandalorian, The Disney Plus, TV series. So he directed an episode of Season 3, which I think is the weakest so far season of The Mandalorian. I'm sure Manari is great. Season 3 of The Mandalorian really is not. So he's having an interesting career going from something which is personal and authentic, something which is disnified and kind of not so hot. Twister has been written by Mark L. Smith. I don't know whether you're aware of his work. He is not in the Manari mold. So he wrote Vacancy and Vacancy 2, which are kind of motel horror movies. He wrote the US remake of Martyrs. I've seen the original, but not the American remake, which is supposed to be very poor. He wrote Overlord. I think he's written a couple of George Clooney films, The Midnight Sky and The Boys in the Boat. I have him down as having written The Revenant. Is that right? Oh, yes. He did write The Revenant. You're right. I didn't put that in my list. I was being so scornful and rude and dismissive that I forgot to put down the good film on his scene. He did write The Revenant. The best scene in The Revenant, though, would have been fairly easy to write on paper. Bear attacks Leo. Yeah, but then doesn't he cut the bear open and gut it and then sleep inside it or something like that? That's good stuff. That had been on my mind for years. I was finally glad to see that, but I didn't really like the film very much. I feel in my head, I'm getting The Revenant mixed up with the Empire Strikes Back there, which also surely features the main character cutting up in a large creature and sleeping inside it. I better look at this. You're talking about the wrong film. I think it's right. So, Twisters, 2024. Shall I tell you the story? Yes, please do. I guess you would call it. Is this a meteorological action film? What does this count under? It's almost. By the end of the movie, it's kind of a disaster movie, but it takes a long time getting there, so I'm going to call it a meteorological action picture. That's kind of you, very kind. Kate, played by Daisy, Edgar Jones, British actor. I think all she Irish, she's British. I think British, yeah. She plays Kate, a naive meteorology student who is conducting research with her equally young and enthusiastic buddies into using desiccants to quell whirlwinds. I'm pretty sure that's what their experiment is as they open the movie, but when the experiment goes wrong, most of her friends are killed and she is devastated. Although, frankly, nobody watching the movie ought to be all that surprised that all those characters are killed in the beginning of the movie, because if you've gone in to see the film, you've noticed that none of those people are on the poster, so not a big surprise. So, she matures, and there are five years later, we catch up with her as she is working as a sober, sensible, besuted, office-based meteorologist until her old student buddy, Yavi, and I'm going to take your advice on how to pronounce his name. Yavi, Yavi, I forget what they call him in the film. Yavi, I think we'd be for Javier. Okay, so I've already got it wrong, but they may have called in that list of people who have offended. Javi, did they call him Javi? I don't remember, maybe it was Javi. It's better it's Javi, it's Javi. Play by Anthony Ramos. So, Javi turns up asking Kate to help him to use a novel, military, sort of radar-style technology to study a spate of whirlwinds that's currently occurring in the Midwest. So, she agrees to come for one week, but she doesn't reckon with the new generation of YouTube meteorology influencers. Is that a thing, clearly it is. We were also in town, they are chasing storms for clicks, led by the photogenic and merch-selling Tyler Owens, played by Glen Powell. So, can Kate, tame Tyler, and the storms, or will she get blown away one way or another? Ooh, good. They should pay me to write these, shouldn't they? I should be doing these for free, yeah, you should pay me. I'm surprised you can say, will she come to Earth or touch down on her? Oh, that's good, that's good. Oh, you're really better, yeah, yeah. Now, I think both of us have seen this film in a slightly unusual way this time round. So, I went to see it at the Wandsworth Cine World, just a few miles from where we live, where it's showing exclusively as 4Dx presentation. So, I've never seen 4Dx before, just from the name, it implies, somehow, are you travelling through time? No, there isn't any time in travel. It's not even 3D, 4Dx cinema is basically a seat that jiggles you about while you watch the film, and there are little nozzles which will gust air and maybe water over you as you watch the film. So, it kind of turns the film into a roller coaster ride. And if ever there were a film made for 4Dx, this is definitely it. We got jiggled about an enormous amount, it was absolutely ludicrous. The sheer amount of jiggling about in our seats, we were going to get through and out of the seats at any moment. Wow. And for a film which is largely about driving around in trucks over bumpy terrain and wind, this is like the perfect viewing experience, I think this is what 4Dx was made for, it's all about bumps and wind. So, from my point of view, 4Dx was a success for this film, but I won't go on too long about it. We'll probably talk about the qualities of the film rather than the seats that I was in. How did you get to see this film this week? In a very uncomfortable seat in a nearly empty cinema that smells of sticky soda and popcorn. It's the regular experience, no wind, I wasn't misted by anyone. No one came around with a spray bottle to spray the mist over me to get me into the feeling of it. It smelled like a devastated corner of Oklahoma though. I will say, I did not pay money to see this film. So, how did you see this film? I had recently made a blood donation, so I paid for this film with my blood. So, they gave your voucher to see the film in exchange for your blood? They gave me a link to a Fandango and I got one free ticket, so I had to pay for one to give for my wife who also saw it. But with my blood, I was feeling weak in the knees when I watched this film. So, the reason you got so short of breath during the climax wasn't because of the directing. Yes, I had a very average experience otherwise, so I didn't have the extras, so that probably shapes and colors the way we both enjoyed the film. It'd be interesting to hear. Yeah, so I have tried to scratch out the colors that have been influenced by all that sheer throwing around, but I probably will come back to it. So, we'll talk about maybe the opening image, which is the thing that I always like to whine on about when we start talking about these films. So, the opening image of this film, it's just an open field in the Midwest. There's some grass in the foreground and the wind is shaking the grass and we see Kate, the lead character, on her own, taking photographs of a storm. And I'm guessing that the opening image is kind of telling you, well, this film is about wind in the natural environment. And it's kind of about a woman who's facing a big force largely on her own. Yeah. I think that's the point they're trying to make with that opening image in it. Yeah, I think she's at home. I don't see your face in that opening image. I think she's walking away from us and into a storm. So, you know, it's spot on. It's a good opening image in a sense. It does give you a real metaphor for the whole film. As far as themes for the film overall, I must say, we will talk a little bit more about what actually happens during the main meet of the film. But I came away trying to figure out, well, what is this film really, really about? And I think I got to the end and decided it's probably about or trying to discuss the notion of processing trauma. I think that's what the film is about. We start out with this sort of conventionally structured first act. We get a whole bunch of happy-go-lucky students who are all smiling and having such a great time. It's obvious they're going to die in the next few minutes. They're shooting home video of each other. We see that Ha-ve, Ha-ve, he stays behind while the other students go ahead to drive right into the storm. And really sees big barrels of desiccants. He ends up being the only one besides Kate who survives. They have a big storm. Obviously, the one character from an ethnic minority dies first. And then all of the other characters die, except Kate. And I think the rest of the film is sort of attempting to be about her processing her survivor guilt and the trauma of losing these people that she was close to. And the circumstances in which it happened. I think that's what the film is trying to be about, whether it succeeds in exploring that theme is another question. Yeah, losing one group and then needing to form a new group or join a new group in order to process the trauma. Absolutely. And going from a group that had some non-white characters that died early and a geeky girl, right? To an all-white group, I think, isn't it? I guess, the entire group, there's one character of color, at least who drives the follow-up truck, I think. Okay, yes, that's right. And the guy who operates the camera, I think he is a Latino man, isn't he, I think. Yeah, you're right. Okay, so there's a good mix there. So they have tried to get a bit of a mix in. It's uncanny, though, when there's an Indian gentleman on the first team. And they happen to mention that he's already been struck by lightning. So it's pretty easy to knock him off in the first time with the film. But it's, I just said, okay, that guy's dead within a few minutes. You're going to be dead as a character in this film, not the actor himself. But it was just, yeah, it made me feel like we haven't made that much progress. But, ooh, such is life. But I love the fact that they talked about him getting struck by lightning already. Like, what's the likelihood of someone in a lifetime getting hit by lightning and being swallowed by a tornado? You know, obviously if you're a storm chaser, your chances go way up. But I thought if you got struck by lightning, it was a good sign. And if you survived, there was surely nothing that was going to kill you other than old age. It just means you've stabbed yourself as a focus for meteorological adverse events, haven't you? We have this kind of fairly conventionally structured film. There is a first act that sees, it establishes who Kate is. And then it's at the 14 minute moment exactly that we kind of start the second act, I guess, that she's on the subway. She works for the New York National Weather Service. Have turns up and he tries to persuade her to come and join him and she refuses the call. It goes through all these standard beats. Then she sort of wakes up the following day and she sees her TV news report about more devastation from bad weather events. So she agrees that she will join him for one week. Which gives the film a little bit of dramatic impetus in so far as all the events must happen within a week. We already have a ticking clock. We have all these kind of standard techniques and tropes. And it's also the story moving. The storms are close to her family home too, so that raising the stakes. I mean, we're probably going to talk a lot about hero's journey in this film, but the stakes are up. The refusal of the call, and I'll talk about this later during a certain segment, I think. I don't chase anymore. That's what she says to Have. I don't chase anymore. I mean, come on. That's a refusal to call. So it's that the ticking clock is there immediately. The stakes are up. It involves her family. The boy, the memory that she has in her dream is of her boyfriend. I guess his name is Jabb. And she has a nightmare of him. He's in bed with her and then she wakes up and realizes, oh, there's no boyfriend next to me. So I mean, a lot of, oh, God, we can't call them yet, can we? Let's not call them yet, but they're going to be busy, though. They're going to be busy. There are a lot of things that we've seen many, many times in film. So like the second act properly starts, I guess, when she goes to Oklahoma, she turns up. She's with Have and his kind of team of semi-scientific, sort of semi-militaristic storm chases in their uniform white vans, but then Tyler Owens turns up. So this is Glenn Powell's character. I think these days, whenever I see Glenn Powell, I'm immediately reminded of Mean Girls and that gag about stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen. Because I feel like I need to approach, you know, someone at Universal and say, stop trying to make Glenn Powell happen. It's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen. It's not. He's Glenn Powell. They're really trying hard again. He turns up. He's selling merch and he's kind of brought a little cast of characters with him, including a British journalist called Ben. I love his character introduction. The first time we see him, he steps out of the passenger door of Tyler's truck and he immediately steps into a puddle and he looks like he's never seen a puddle before in his life. And I love the notion of an Englishman. He's unfamiliar with puddle. But clearly there's one. There he is. And Ben, early on, he gets this line which got by far the biggest laugh in the screening that we were in. It was reasonably well populated screening that we went to. And when he's introduced as being from London, he specifies well from south London. Well, between Stretham Hill and what does he say? And West Norwood, that's it. He's between Stretham Hill and West Norwood, which is so badly not something that someone who lives in south London would ever say. And we watched it in a cinema. I checked on Google Maps. We were four miles away from Stretham Hill. Oh my. And it's got a really big laugh that anybody would introduce themselves as being from a place between Stretham Hill and West Norwood. Basically, that's like two streets. Why would you specify to someone like an American that you've never met before, which of the two streets that you happened to live on just east of Stretham Hill? Yes, so big laugh where I saw it. I don't know whether that means anything to the rest of the world, though. Not here. Again, it felt like a pretty overdone. The clueless British journalist, the fish out of water, it felt pretty on the nose. Yes. Yes. I was already choking with Ben by that point, though. And so after these characters get introduced, we have a lot of dialogue. There is a lot of dialogue in this film where people say "moisture" a lot. I've never heard the word "moisture" used so many times in a feature films group. Someone must say "moisture" at least 12 or 15 times in this film. They drive off, they chase the storm, Kate kind of completely bottles it because she has flashbacks. Tyler storms off into the storm, lets off some fireworks and live streams the whole thing. Wow. And one of my favourite lines from this, I wrote it down in my notebook from this sequence. Tyler turns to Ben, the English journalist, and he tells him "Ben, you're not in London anymore". Yes. This film is full of these Wizard of Oz references. Yes. And he's already said "You're a long way from home city girl" to Kate again. Right. Same line. Same line. And then the... The... Javier and his group have all named their radar probes after characters and the Wizard of Oz. You know, and their trucks are all named after characters and the Wizard of Oz. I mean, it's all kind of very, very... I'm going to say on the nose again, isn't it? Yeah. That's what it is. Well, they chase one storm, Kate bottles it, we have a little bit of a sort of down time, night time, and then we're back for day two. Shall we ring the spoiler bell do you think? Yeah. Definitely. There's much to spoil here, so... So, imagine this bell is falling from a poorly maintained church tower in Oklahoma City. Here we do. Yeah, I can hear it. They actually reverberate. Yeah. So, this is kind of like the beginning of what passes for subplot, I think in this film, that on day two, Javier and his crew are having breakfast with Riggs, who is a property developer. And the main kind of B plot of the film is that the property developer is moving in on people who have their property destroyed by a twister and buying it at a cut rate because they're either underinsured or they're not insured or they're desperate and they're lowest ab. Yeah. This kind of becomes a theme that will eventually change Javier's mind, or it'll be the focus of a lot of the conflict within that group. They chase some more storms, Kate gets her instincts back. You know, they find another twister, but then instead of tracking down the radar which has gone missing, they see that the twister is heading for a town and they instead decide to go and give food relief and help clear up the mess of the town which has been destroyed. And I guess this kind of counts as the midpoint. So, we have had, you know, two big storms and this is when we have our first kind of lull and we start to see some of the ground level effects of this kind of devastation. They give away food relief which consists mainly of Doritos as far as I can tell, definitely not product placement in this film. And then Tyler takes it to a rodeo where he tells Kate, you don't face your fears, you ride them. I feel like there are a number of lines of dialogue in this film which were written mainly with the intention of being log lines on the poster rather than genuine words that people would say to each other in an actual conversation. Surprise, surprise. There's another twister, there's more devastation. There is interestingly a cameo by the son of Bill Paxton, I think. I think he might be James Paxton, who is the rude guy in the motel. Oh. Who says, "I don't know, I have to give you a bad review." There's him and a cynical woman who climb into a car as the twister arrives and they are immediately confused. Yeah. Kind of a ghostbusters moment there that just gets sucked up instantly. They do, yes. Yes. Yes. They hide in a pool. There's devastation and Riggs turns back up again trying to buy some real estate. So we get Kate leaves everybody now, she's upset by all the devastation that's happening that she drives to her mother's house for a good montage. Kate looks around her mum's old barn, looks at her old science experiments, has to kind of explain to her mum why she hasn't spoken to her for months or years and then turns up in the middle of the night. Tyler tracks her down and immediately the mum is trying to get Kate to kind of set up with Tyler at the very moment he walks through the door and he looks good. Like a whole day passes. I think the film kind of implies that Tyler has maybe spent the night, but I don't really understand exactly what has happened there, but Tyler and Kate then kind of team up and they decide that they're going to go out together, find a storm, try some desiccants. There's a whole kind of romantic subplot in this movie, which doesn't really get going at all, I would say. I've written here in my notes that the romance is entirely without chemistry. I've read that apparently the two leads, they had a chemistry test over Zoom to check that they will be compatible on-screen and I can only assume that the chemistry to his test was a test about a copper sulfate on the melting point of mercury or something like that, because it doesn't seem to be any romantic chemistry between them. I'm guessing that's what they're kind of aiming for but doesn't really come through. We're charging, well past the midpoint now, towards the final big sort of third act. Set piece, we have a sequence which is a little bit like an episode of the A team where Tyler and his crew, they end up building rockets and buying more desiccant and they rigour aluminium, the trolley to release desiccants into the atmosphere. There's a really, really big storm and a number of action set pieces before finally, most of the cast are hiding in a movie theatre that's playing Frankenstein while Kate takes her truck alone off into the middle of the storm, releases her chemicals. Interesting that she takes her hands off the steering wheel and I think this is supposed to be her moment of letting go of, I think, I think of releasing the guilt that she feels on my hands to her crew before. The wall of the theatre is ripped off right when they're watching Frankenstein and right at the line, it's alive, it's the moment when the wall kind of gets ripped off, which is the finest breaking of the fourth wall I've ever seen in a film, I think. But she manages to quell the storm, everybody is rescued, it's all right and then the film ends with a kind of meat-cute at the airport. She is going back to New York after her promised seven days but she quotes back to Tyler with whom she has so little chemistry, something that he says as his catchphrase on his YouTube channel, he says, "If you feel it, chase it," and she tells him, "If you feel it, chase it," which means that he runs back into the airport and picks up a bag, I think I can't quite remember what happens but it doesn't seem very convincingly romantic. Did you come away with touchy-feely romantic feelings at the end of the movie? No, I thought it was kind of appropriate though, the film doesn't end on a kiss, which I was glad to see, but I figure right, we never see them kiss, there's not a lot of real chemistry in the film, it's sort of setting up the idea that storm chasing and storms brought these two people together and then when they solve the problem it's going to drive them apart again but then they're flooding a her flight, I'm sorry, she's going back to New York City, her flight is canceled by an impending storm, so again the storm has this effect on their relationship and gives them a chance to, they're walking out but I don't know if they're going to go to a restaurant and just get to know each other once again or develop some chemistry but there's some future there is what we're assuming, so it wasn't like these other films we've seen this year that are so dependent on that final kiss or the unlikely pairing of some people to make the romantic interest line of the story come together, so I appreciated that because I think they didn't deserve the kiss, they didn't really deserve the romance so it's still a little bit up in the air, I love the image of the tornado becoming the film because in that town when the wall is broken there it's actually the movie screen that disappears and all of a sudden these people are sort of in a theater watching this tornado, I agree with you, it's one of the most clever scenes I've seen in a long time because the tornado becomes the image that they would have been watching on screen, so it's pretty clever but there's not a whole lot of other stuff that's particularly clever in this story and I'm going to call it the B story or actually I'll call it the B-story because I think one of the best parts of this film is really just glossed over pretty quickly and I don't think it's important to the writers, the director at all, it's that Harvey's team is actually helping this real estate broker rigs to buy up all these properties and he's low balling them and as you mentioned they're people who've lost property, they don't have insurance and I think that's a great idea, I love this premise of capital capitalizing on others personal financial tragedies and this is you know again a fingerprint on the film, nothing more than that but it's something that the writer Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism and I loved that idea and I thought it was smart, it's in there but it's very, I think some people would have missed that, it's so, I won't say it's subtle because that's inaccurate but it's so cloudy that I think a lot of people would have missed that but I loved that because otherwise at times this film feels like a massive advertisement for Ann Houser Bush because there's Budweiser and Bush all over that, it also seems like an advertisement for the fossil fuel industry because how many windmills do we see go down easily in these, yeah these wind tar brands are very vulnerable, we could fix climate change with them or more chemicals as they're shooting chemicals into the tornadoes in order to dry them out and prevent damage, well it'd be a lot easier just to stop using as much fossil fuels, so I mean I think the climate change angle is completely ignored, I don't think there's any mention, there's no mention of why these storms are happening or anything like that, and that would be too smart a film I think for what these guys are aiming to produce so I won't fault them on that, it's not a terribly brave film, it's very conservative, it just follows the sort of hero's journey and all the plot points that we're expected to see, so it's not that interesting to me but there are a couple of good moments but I think they're so far and few between far between that they don't really have the effect that I would like to see, yeah but there's also, you forecast this thing immediately, this idea, I saw this miles away, I was already thinking if you combine the two skill sets of the main characters, right, Kate has these desiccants, she wants to get them up in the sky and this guy Tyler happens to for some reason send fireworks into twisters, so if they combine their two skill sets with a little bit of romantic chemistry, then you have the solution not only to the big problem with the tornadoes but also to their chemistry and romance difficulties, so I saw that coming very early on, I think that's what was disappointing about the film is that it was so formulaic, I just have it, and I think the average theater gore now is very literate in hero's journey, maybe subconsciously without knowing it, but you know exactly what's going to happen in films because no one has the guts to do something original, this is a recycled product from 28 years ago, this is the first twister, and people just are not very brave, I think the people who fund films want stuff that has these pat lines of dialogue that is just stolen or means nothing, this is a talky film at times but there's really no interesting dialogue I don't think, and people just aren't willing to take chances on interesting films, and this is one of those films where you could make, with this money you could make 10 really interesting films that are a whole lot smarter and they're not so dependent on cliches than the one big one, so that's kind of an overall view of the film, I hate to be so negative, I mean I didn't mind it, it was candy, it was easy to watch, I didn't really have a, you know there's nothing I really hated about the film, but there are a couple clever things that I like, there was the windmill thing that I didn't like, and then just a lot of it was just sort of like fat, I felt like it was a fat film. It's very interesting that the thing about climate change, because it seems like such an open goal that you know this film really should be about climate change, and yet you know I get to the end and I've written my notes, politics of film, colon reactionary, I think it's a very kind of reactionary conservative with the capital C film, there's this line I wrote down, Tyler says, "Cates from New York, you can't trust anything," she says, it's this kind of distrust of big city people, isn't there, her mum is kind of, she's happy to grumble about inflation, but not yet to have any kind of comment about climate change, I mean there is, I think a bit of an element of poverty tourism to this film, I think you know part of the, you know part of the gaze of the film is looking upon poor people who've had their homes smashed up, and yeah kind of Kate's journey very much seems to play with this notion of you know the city girl is someone who is less genuine than the country girl, when she's city girl she's kind of sort of bad, and she you know she kind of lies and deceives people and you know when she becomes country girl she's kind of on back on the team again, it's like she needs to remember who she was, you come from the country, you know don't listen to these New York elitist types, it feels you know like a kind of a you know a bit of a right wing film to me, which is a shame I think. I would also add like that B minus story that I talked about with the Real Estate Development, it's not really clear to me why there would be much money rebuilding something, I couldn't tell if you wanted to put new housing developments in these areas or what, but these are places that get hit by tornadoes all the time, it's not a place where you should really be investing, and honestly people who live there probably know that they shouldn't be living there if they want to be completely safe, there are dangers to it, so it's kind of it, I don't even know if that plot, that subplot really works because I can't imagine anyone really wanting to invest a lot of money, you might be able to do something low budget, but you wouldn't be paying a lot of money for places that are going to get swooped up by the next tornado, because according to this film there are a lot of tornadoes in one week, you can see 10 of them easily, and some of them are twin tornadoes too, we saw a twin tornado at one point. I don't really understand why Riggs needs to pay for a big load of sort of scientific equipment when all he needs really is you know a pair of binoculars and you can sport where the twisters are. He's going to head over there after the twister has left and you know offer people money for their property, doesn't need a team of scientists to help them do that. It doesn't really quite work, it's like you can sort of see the idea they were aiming for, but you need to develop a little bit before it actually kind of made sense. On one level it's definitely a fantasy film because I don't think there are, I mean maybe I'm living in a rock somewhere, but I don't think there are that many YouTube teams, influencers who are going out chasing storms, I don't think there's this unified network of people who are going to compete with one another to get into these places of great danger in order to produce content. I mean it seems kind of ridiculous so it's definitely a fantasy film and I think it sort of rides dangerously close to reality and that's why again there's something disappointing about it in that way because it's just not good truth, it's not even good fantasy I don't think so it's just riding this weird seam I think. Speaking of not good truth and not good fantasy, I wonder whether we should phone up big city law enforcement. Should we find the cliche score? I thought you'd never ring them. So this film is kind of this full of cliches but I've just written a small number on my list here after a while. Earlier on I noticed and you've spent more time in New York than I have, am I right? Just every corner of New York have a guy setting hot dogs because that's the way they're walking on the street in New York. It seems to me like there's an awful lot of people setting hot dogs on the corner there. That's how you tell people it's... The gourmet interests of the average New Yorker have changed somewhat so there's a lot of very interesting food on the streets of New York. It's dated, that's a dated cliche absolutely yeah that's the problem. I didn't notice when early on when Tyler appears like a whole bunch of YouTube channel fans turn up, filled with agitation and one of them is I think a Japanese tourist who jumps out of a car but he's kind of making Japanese noises and wearing a pakamak with a big kind of camera and it seems... I can't believe this is kind of horrible Japanese tourist cliche. It feels like it belongs in a Mr Bean episode from 1985 that's coming up here now, our idea. And then there seem to be lots of kind of you know down home good old boy, Duke's a hazard, Oklahoma cliches like you know the mom kind of drinking a beer and it's like she's like someone who pays more attention to cows and she wears a lot of plaid and there's a lot of kind of hillbilly y-horring going on which strikes me as just not quite authentic I think. I just feel like those characters all come from central casting. Definitely yeah. There's a certain level of poverty pouring there perhaps yeah. That's what I've got on my list after I slightly ran out of energy writing down because otherwise you end up annotating the whole film anything else leap out at you. Oh yeah definitely it's cliche heavy it's cliche dependent I think that's one of the things that it's a problem with the film. The bumbling journalist are just you know these journalists are they're well trained they go into war zones they know what they're doing so the fact that the British journalist is completely unprepared and as you said steps in the mud as if he's never seen it before or vomits because the the ride is very rough or panics because there's no safety belt I mean that character is cliche all over it's sad. I think for me probably the biggest problem is heroes journey in general I think it's become a cliche at least for me. Someone who sees a lot of movies and thinks about them and writes them the refusal of the call has become such a cliche now but it's just like you have to have the refusing of refusing the call of duty in everyone the big films these days so I think that's just it's it's just too played out by the by now and I think you know again I think audiences are either so trained at this point to see these things or just so numb to buy them that it doesn't maybe make a difference but I think I think people are catching on to this for sure and it just makes watching movies a bit more dull I think. Here's one that's it's it's a film trick but I think this film really over does it and I'll talk about it in some detail but lots of photos lying around to tell stories. There are way too many in this film when they go to that bar and there are all the pictures of the gang when they're happy and young and alive and now Kate's you know lamenting because her friends are dead and in this film they're even more of them in the credits it comes back again so and that's the problematic part for me because they're they're kind of these these little bits of exposition everywhere either on newspaper clippings or on photos and the very last bit sort of undo the and does the entire film because every this is a totally farcical story I'd love to talk to some meteorologists and some scientists but I don't think we're ever going to throw desiccants up the the funnel of a tornado and avoid disaster but the at the ending it's sort of this predictive exposition it's building this future story where Tyler and Kate are working together and everyone's just succeeding at changing the way that we approach tornadoes and storms and it sort of gives you magazine articles about all the great work they're doing and it's just sort of this like I don't know if they're setting it up for a blue dare I say sequel twister zizzes and then okay so I think it it's bad enough when it's just happens to be there on the table when you need all these photos to tell the story but I think when you go to the end credits and you're still telling the story and setting up the sequel and that's just a step too far for me so and then I would say yeah ultimately I think the whole hero's journey has sort of become a cliche at this point just these steps that you have to hit these beats that you have to hit and right into your script in order to get at me and I think again it's that conservative approach to filmmaking people want stuff that just works even if it's not interesting it's something an audience can follow on it works and I think the hero's journey has kind of become uh speaking of a horse that we beat too much I suppose yeah that that horse is tied and thin yeah yeah nearly dead I'd like to euthanize it where's my gun that's uh let's let's have a break yeah I'm gonna dry my shoes off after stepping in a puddle and we will come back and talk about probably a rather better storm based fantasy yeah we would take a visit to the dark side of the rainbow (music) James are you familiar with the pledge of allegiance in the United States? I feel like I've seen it in in every movie about about school children in the States yeah oh good because I had to say it a lot as a school child I still hear it I just don't do it anymore in school don't report me it goes like this I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America it starts out kind of innocently but there's this weird profession of loyalty to a piece of colored fabric yeah I've never understood that but then the metaphor comes along this and to the republic for which it stands and then the place the pledge goes on to one nation under God indivisible liberty and justice for all but ever since I was a kid I thought that which it stands was which is stands like they have some sort of lectern from which they profess things and I fell in love with the idea of which is stands so I did a quick search on the internets and I checked in with my friends at the Friends of the Freedom from Religion Foundation it's a fundraising arm that actually works with the Friends of the feline facial recognition and retina imaging group or as we know furry also a sponsor of the two reals in a nightclub and I learned that they have a joint fundraising venture this is awesome you're gonna love this and three new products for sale so I'm gonna talk about this first one yeah and then well in subsequent weeks we'll come back to them one of which is guess which is stands so it's a lecturing tripod it's tripod which is oh it's better it's better listen to this it's a lectern with a built-in state of the dark arts microphone that filters out the shrill and off-putting sounds of a witch's voice this miracle microphone I think it's produced by the the good people at Blue the Eddy Microphone that we use here on the two reals in a nightclub another sponsor of the program another sponsor this dark arts microphone filters out the shrill of these sounds of witches voices and the miracle microphone is mounted upon a plus-sized podium that conceals broomsticks bicycles scooters or other communist forms of personal transportation which is stands podiums are available in red oak teak ebony mahogany and of course american witch hazel the american civil liberties union or the ACLU here approves of this free speech friendly furniture the microphone is also sensitive enough to temper the pagan wickin and radical messages therein making them more palatable palatable to lay person's ear the teleprompter screens on witches stands multitask to camouflage warts unsightly nasal bone structure and angular chin bones associated with witchdom and warlockdom in short witches stands make free speech more equitable accessible and sonorous for its speakers look for witches stands at your local furniture stores or dark arts gatherings and pagan festivals near you it's the rostrum for those with too much rostrum while some days are by gone these daisies are here to stay and here to say witches stands finally making it easier for witches to articulate and communicate the ideas for which they stand now that is a massive on tap mark and that's incredibly good man we are back uh welcome back to uh to the dark side of the podcast the other side of the rainbow we have watched the well a version of the film reference so very many times in twisters yeah we've gone back and watched the wizard of Oz from 1939 but at least i haven't just watched the wizard of Oz i've done the thing which all stoners since about i think it was 1995 yeah i have done with wizard of Oz which has watched the film while listening to the pink floyd album dark side of the moon yeah so this this is apparently i did some research on this apparently this notion of playing the album while watching the movie was first discussed at an article in 1995 wow uh by Charles Savage who was a kind of i think he's like a um uh defense journalist largely now uh so it was early in his career uh he was working on the Fort Wayne journal gazette uh and he had spotted uh on a pink floyd news group do you remember those news groups the early days of the internet you'd spotted the suggestion on a pink floyd news group that you should watch the film uh the wizard of Oz while listening to the dark side of the moon uh so that was the first time it was published in the mainstream and it's you know and it's become a thing yeah uh which i've never done now you were telling me that you had actually done that in a cinema or a movie club yeah big kind of sat down and watched it the big movie house with a great audio system and a big screen so that's i think that's the only time i've done it um i did for this podcast i did the first side of because albums used to have sides so it's what the first five or six tunes on dark side of the moon and uh it worked pretty well but it wasn't the same effect i mean i remember being so impressed um when i saw in the big theater because it worked really well and then you've got the audience reacting to it so you know people would giggle when they um when Dorothy comes home and he goes home home again and then yeah yeah the stoners make the noise yeah um so i uh i had a great first experience and i tried to duplicate it it didn't really work but i'm glad you did it i'm glad you did so i i definitely want to hear everything you have to say about the dark side of Oz or the wizard side of the moon or whatever it's called i don't know because you had a special experience you're having the special experiences this week you had the 4DX and then the dark side of the rainbow and all that so this is not better normal week at the cinema so pretty pretty banal for me so maybe i should ruin this story by telling it really blandly um the other thing i did was i read the book the wizard of Oz as well of course who did uh Frank Elbaum. Frank Elbaum written in 1900 why didn't you realize didn't realize that so the book predates the film by 39 years yeah and there's a series right it's a series of stories or books it was a series so okay the book stood alone originally but there was a Broadway musical based on it um in 1902 oh um that the musical was i think fairly different to the book and the film yeah uh and it was kind of like a musical comedy uh the book uh it was the book that we still read now the musical largely concentrated on the characters of the scarecrow and the tin man who became much bigger more popular characters as a result of the musical so the the sequels to the original books were written largely to take advantage of the popularity of the the 1902 musical and the sequels were all broadly based around the popularity of the scarecrow so he became a much more important character and dorothy was less important in the sequel i think there are a whole bunch of oz books yeah um i have only read the first one i presume did you read it as a boy if you read it before i've never read it nope um the the book is interesting the book doesn't do a lot of the things that make the film most interesting yeah um you know the book very quickly sees dorothy fly up in the sky and end up in oz and it doesn't have the film's first sort of 10 minute pre-amble yeah you know set set in the black and white canes yeah it's crucial um and so you know and so then that the film doesn't uh sorry the book doesn't have the the punchline at the end of the movie which is that all the characters and oz yeah actually the the real life characters that she was just dreaming about yeah um so in a way i think the the book is missing this really important um dimension that the film brings yeah um so you watched the hold of the film without the pig fluid soundtrack this week so i watched um i watched the first act twice because i watched it with the pig fluid soundtrack and then just gave up on that went back and watched the whole film it's only an hour and 40 minutes so it's not right yeah i mean you do end up hearing if you're doing the pig fluid you hear the first side if you are thinking in vinyl which i am you hear the first side three times i think in the second side twice yeah well the so i watched a version of dark side of the rainbow on youtube which is kind of does something slightly different so it starts the starts the dark side of the moon on the third roar of the line yeah there's the way that you're supposed to that's what they are and then it just plays the album through once oh and comes to an end with dorothy listening for the tin man's heart oh um and then and then doesn't continue it just plays the album once oh with the with the film to illustrate it rather than playing the whole film yeah playing the album several times okay interesting that's not the way i saw it so we had different experiences huh do you do we need to get but do we need to tell the story of the wizard of all's we probably need to stop this podcast and then we both go back and watch it again and listen to me again but i mean i will tell the story i'm only going to really work on the the first act i think um you're right this is a 1939 film that everyone on the planet has seen more than once so uh and i'm assuming that because you saw twisters first that's why you decided hey we've got obviously watched the wizard of all's it's it seemed like the obvious comparator you see more interesting that comparing it to the twist uh um it it has an interesting setup in the sense that it's directed by victor flemming but king v-dor was influential he had a he's kind of credited depending on where you're looking and then george kukor another great director of the time was in there too so there were a lot of people who had a look at it and this this is really like a either accidentally or intentionally this is a massive collaboration because you had a number of directors working on it in terms of screenplay yes you're using um the bound books but uh no a Langley is yeah credited Florence Ryerson edgar allen wolf yeah um and then others like augton nash and even haramankowitz worked on it so they're just a lot of hands in the pot here or cooks in the kitchen um so and it sounds like you know the books had been around for third years there was a there was a musical out there too so there's a lot of source material and a lot of people who knew the material and worked on it so that might be a good thing in this case i don't know sometimes usually if i see a bunch of writers or a bunch of directors i think something is inherently wrong but this comes off well it's a classic yeah exactly it works yeah so judy garland is of course uh dorothy frank morgan plays the wizard and captain marvel uh rebulger is the scarecrow ultimately burt larr is the lion jack hayley as the tin man and Margaret hamilton the wicked witch of the west um it's so appropriate that are one of our sponsors now who create the witch's stance it was the sponsor for this episode go figure um also the singer midgets as the munchkins and there the munchkins are interesting because i think there are a lot of children in there too but there's sort of a core group of um of uh true boy munchies true midgets, true doors um and then there were some kids so if you look at that film carefully you'll see some young people as well but um and yeah does anyone really need to hear me summarizing the wizard if i was probably not but i'll i'll do a quick paragraph on it it opens in black and white on dorothy and her dog toto a cairn terrier i thought it was a west high limb it's a c-a-r-n cairn terrier apparently not a west island area um they are nervous together and running around on a dusty canvas road it's a farm road under ominous skies um as her family and their farm hands are readying the grounds for this forthcoming storm no one has time to listen to dorothy uh communicate about her plight after toto has been upsetting the gardens of their neighbor missus gulch that's also Margaret Hamilton who plays the wicked witch later on who apparently is a nice woman i have a friend whose grand for whose doctor is her grandson on his book very highly of her but that's her most probably her most famous role so um playing against her personality anyway um there are traits of brains courage heart and cowardice they're not so subtly foreshadowed among the farm hands which is good i think it sets it up so um we definitely know that these characters are going to play a part in the next section that's not in black and white um feeling neglected dorothy breaks into somewhere over the rainbow implying that there must be a better place for her uh dorothy has a fall she falls into the pig pan actually and has a knock on the head um miss gulch confronts the family and takes toto a way to be destroyed oh dark but she foolishly fails to secure him her or them i don't want to misgender the dog um doesn't properly secure the dog inside her basket on her bicycle and uh the dog escapes that's just asking for travel isn't it yes um especially with i care and teary or my god uh dorothy who the brash teenager at heart decides to run away with toto only to be gently directed back home by the traveling sudse or professor marvel dorothy and toto get caught in the disastrous flirtation of a beautiful studio tornado oh my god and dorothy is ultimately knocked unconscious by a very flimsy and poorly mounted window sash and sent into a storm dream hellscape of persistent memory and misadventure when she awakens dorothy opens the door to a technicolor world at the beginning of act two dorothy will have a chance to explore that rainbow world of somewhere else and determine if it's better or worse or if it's some place like home so yeah as soon as that door opens uh classic end of the act um goes from black and white to color and apparently my neighbors on the coals ancient when i was a kid they were ancient they bought their first color tv and the first thing they watched was a wizard of ours and they were so upset because they thought it wasn't working they were black and white they're hammering on the thing with their fists trying to get color and then eventually it becomes a color film so uh that's the wizard of ours there's lots of other stuff that happens after that but uh we can talk a little bit about it um the first thing i would say is just i'm amazed at the studio i mean this looks like a big sound stage in that first act especially um and the camera moves are great it's one of these things where there's not a lot of cuts there's a lot of camera rehearsal you can tell um so that like the somewhere there over the rainbow sequence is really lovely and there's barely a camera uh there's barely a cut in there so it's this this days of cinema where they would rehearse moves and block actors and um it's just a beautiful film and it was really really impressive with the photography on such a big stage and just engaging camera moves i really liked that you can just see how practiced everyone on the crew was i think it's even more impressive they're moving the camera around when you learn how big the technical of cameras were yeah so it was enormous so i think they were they were shooting three different synchronized wheels for each of the three colors weren't they yeah so it was like having three mechanisms in one and apparently the technical of cameras they were using were about the size of wardrobes yeah they're big so it's so it's so it's not trivial to move these cameras around exactly so it's true you know you have to admire the ambition of deciding yes we're going to have like a big crane shot here yep because uh there would have been plenty of people in the studio to asking you know do we really have to do this could we do this a simpler way yeah it's this necessary um to a certain extent i feel like we suffer in this day and age because you know cameras are basically phones and people are like like they move them like tornadoes they're moving all over the place they're spinning and twirling and they're here and there and then people are just cutting film cutting cutting cutting whereas in the old days you'd see composition i think and i don't i don't think you see composition in the same way that we used to every director has that one show off move these days where they moved the camera long and steady for like 35 seconds or whatever but most filming is not nearly as elegant as uh the old days where you had the clunky machinery and you had to make it work if you watch the pink floyd version then uh that technical moment when Dorothy steps out into the world of ores is to the beginning of money isn't it i think yeah and yeah and it's you know a cute musical moment lyrically it doesn't really make any sense no um it's just that uh you know a few of the things that happen in the film happen to happen at the same time as a few interesting musical cues on the album but it's uh it's hardly a perfect parallel i must say no but it's i think uh the thing that's striking is that such a you know most of the songs on that record have very very distinct and different sounds and money is no exception as it's you know like it's really changing the mood um just as the film changes at the same time so that i remember that one was working pretty well there's some there's some heat big moments the ding dong which is dead is this huge highly choreographed old hollywood like showstopper with the huge colors and a big cast and it's just something you don't see very often anymore um and i wasn't i wasn't impressed with all of the songs i think there are a couple of great great songs but there are some other there's some clunkers in there too but the film just goes right along um and i think it works really well and it's it's one of these things where your allies on the journey there's definitely heroes journey stuff here too but um you know picking up the scarecrow who's looking for something the tin man who needs a heart the line is like everyone's looking for something everyone needs something so there's motivation among everyone on the team and the ultimate punchline is that the thing they're all looking for the things that they already have anyway yes so it's like which is you know it's just a lovely story uh reading the book for the first time having never read it before and having you know seen the film a couple of times yeah um it's uh interesting to read those bits of the the book which they have kept for the film and those things which they have thrown away and there's a foreword at the beginning of the book where um Frank L. Baum says that he wanted to write you know a book for children that leaves out the heartaches and nightmares uh um seen in so many children's books yeah so he wanted to write a book which was just all nice all the time and he completely fails because there's lots of nightmarish things that happen in the book you know and in the film you know the flying monkeys terrifying yeah okay thank you for mentioning that yes as a kid that was scared from the moment i saw it and they're like these flying gargoyles and they go off and kidnap Dorothy and they take the entire brainless heartless and cowardly parsley with them and uh they take them out it's um very scary yeah yeah yeah very big nightmarish yeah um and i i kind of hadn't really kind of quite realized until reading the book that uh it borrows an awful lot from the odyssey doesn't it as well i think i think this book kind of is or this story kind of is the odyssey really you know it has this kind of perilous long journey yeah in the book there there's like a long boat journey there are lotus eaters there are fearsome beasts there's like a number of quite odyssey like events that haven't made it all the way to the film yeah um but you know it feels you know fairly explicitly like the odyssey when you read it on the page yeah the other thing it's probably worth worth saying is that uh so having read the book it feels very much like a sort of a Marxist socialist parable uh i mean i i haven't read what other people's opinions are about the book so i'm i'm going to assume this is so obvious that many other people have drawn the parallels before but it's it's it's very clearly this parable about a socialist collective defeating capitalism uh because like each each of the characters you know we've kind of so they will have they all have this thing they desire and they all have an abundance of this quality that they desire already right from the start of the story so the scarecrow says he wants a brain but certainly in the book he has the best brains of the group he comes up with all the best ideas he's like the intellectuals you know he was kind of he's like a sort of a country-born intellectual literally born in the fields he's like a working-class intellectual yeah the tin man yeah um he's like the tireless worker the working proletariat like the like the lion who you know he says he is cowardly but actually is brave i think of his as like it's a it's a he's like an iconoclast he has the bravery to challenge ideas and to progress and then dorothy is like she's a lone woman trying to get on on in the world on her own terms she's basically is the woman's movement yeah um so so it's like so it's it's uh the four of them it's the scarecrow the tin man the lion and the mop and dorothy it's the intellectuals the proletariat the iconoclast and the women's movement they're the four pillars of progressive socialism and between them they defeat the three enemies of the people so they defeat the wicked witch of the west you know who is like it she's like a robber baron basically she's enslaved her workers she's forced the flying monkeys yeah into slavery they defeat the wicked witch of the east this is my favorite bit she's literally killed by a property crash isn't she it couldn't be more explicit she's like the landowner's all of her work is invested in property when the house comes crashing down out of the sky well that's the end of her and then the end they kind of they sort of outwit um Oz like the pretend wizard who i feel is like the stories equivalent of elon musk or sam altman or something like that he's like the kind of the technocrat yeah um you know they pull back the curtain you know an oz or elon or sand or whoever it is shrugs and says ah yeah you got me okay i was just hiding behind all this technology now you can see me for the swindler i am and then he he probably flees by balloon to some sort of safe sanctuary a bit like jeff bezo is getting at a private jet and running to his exclusive compound in new zealand um so it feels to me like this is very explicitly you know a parable about you know a socialist collective defeating the evils of capitalism there is a problem though which is in the book in the final third of the book that there's a whole third of the book after where the point that the film ends yeah um and that bit of the book completely subverts any of these socialist themes because then each of the part of me each of the characters becomes a king in their own land oh so um so it kind of it remains your fabulously socialist until that point and then it just becomes uh capitalist again that's uh but otherwise that really amused me i thought oh my goodness yes this is this is you know a proper little bit of sort of Marxist this is this is Marxist for preschoolers yeah i think yeah boy you're i think you're spot on Dr. Azika for sure um the i i think the context is important to know if the books were written in 1900 um and then the film is 1939 so you're talking 10 10 years after the great depression and the start of the stock market crash i mean if you see it in that context it makes great sense because this is the this is the period where labor unions were really happening and there was definitely an anti-capitalist um feeling against the robber barons who were making so much money in late 1800s so i think seen in the context of the time that it was conceived as a book a series and then the musical and then finally a film absolutely um and you know we we sort of just in twisters we talked about you know that one subplot that wasn't anti-capitalist enough or wasn't damning enough i think against the bad guys and then this film um just does it that's a perfect way of doing it you know it's a children's story it's a very universal story um but it sneaks a great idea in there so well done for sure yeah um the one thing i would add though is that the wizard has created um the emerald city and the emerald city does seem like this real utopia and and the the travelers are very well treated when they get there and everyone seems freaking happy and they're all in these fantastic green garments and such everything is emerald emerald um so it's it's it's a little odd that the wizard um has this sort of uh monarchical um identity even though he's created this sort of what looks like a sort of a socialist utopia sort of scene but um i think everything he said is in there for sure makes the film that much better for me there's uh there's some there's some other things that aren't so good though i i think there's a little bit of there's a bit too much uh deus ex machina in this film right yes um yeah especially with the uh oh she's the the nice witch of the north i guess you know you got the evil witch of the east is dead due to the um housing market crash as you say um the wicked witch of the west boy they are very excited her minions are so happy when Dorothy kills her um but there are these things where like the witch we could the witch of the north the nice the nice witch who's named gilder something i thought i thought ever you couldn't i think it is she has another name she's not really a witch i guess she's a she's a good witch but um she sort of appears at the end is you know what have you learned everything you need is right in front of you so it's like like it's kind of a let down another all Dorothy had to do is click her heels three times and say there's no place like home because she probably accidentally clicked her heels three times at some point and should have ended up in Kansas um so i i didn't like that that there's every once in a while there's just this really simple solution that is based on you know some sort of higher power whatnot um and also there's the the incompetence that has to go along with that sometimes which is like the wicked witch of the west has Dorothy in her clutches but for some reason she decides to take this sand was at an hourglass yeah right yes just we talked about the use of a ticking clock in the first film i mean she turns over this hourglass is if okay i'm going to give you this much time for some really unclear reason you've got this much life left but that's going to be enough time for total to escape because that's what total does um and then you know he's going to go around up the posse of the the lion the scarecrow and the and the tin man and they do a great thing they impersonate the guards um the lion is scary for once the tin man uses his axe really well that bust this chain and like raise the door to the moat that and the castle or something um the scarecrow catches fire um and then of course when Dorothy tries to put out him on fire um she actually hits the witch with the water and it's like well who would have thunk that water is going to kill the witch does that mean she she can never hydrate properly because it will kill her and suddenly the tyrant is dead so i mean there were there are a lot of these really fast style sort of solutions in the scripts and maybe that's too many hands in the in the kitchen in the pot and the soup um and then yeah again at one point oz is just gonna oh suddenly i'll take you in my balloon back in time and place to uh to your home and it's like she misses her uber because again toe-to escapes because that's what toe-to does everyone should realize toe-to is gonna do this again and he's gonna mess things up or she or there or whatnot um so it's um there there are a lot of moments like that which i think are kind of let bounds but um ultimately there's the great reverse house crash because she lands back in bed in black and white in Kansas and the technicolor dream is over and you know we end up with this theme of again yep there's no place like home it's not necessarily a good place but there's no place like it even if it doesn't like you that's what i learned um so yeah like the ultimate message of the film is be satisfied with your dot yes essentially right like you've got everything you need and i mean that's for a lot of people that's not enough in this day and age when you can have so many things so cheaply and so easily um but the truth be told i think that is a great message that you've got what you need you just need to repurpose it somehow you need to dream differently or think differently and i think that's uh a beautiful message and uh perfectly in line with everything you said earlier but i did say i did learn like if you get a care interior double leash that dog and just have leashes everywhere i wouldn't you don't let the dog off a leash just keep it in a cage or a leash at all times um i i i will say one other thing about the the dark side of the rainbow oh yeah good um insofar so i mean you you know there are these kind of cute parallels oh i kind of like you didn't find it super impressive uh you know but i was you know listening to it at home with my headphones on and maybe if i've been in a big theater with a big sort of quadrifonic yeah sound system but did you have the qc 45s were you using the bows qc 45s product placement product placement well the noise for the noise canceling headphones for dogs you mean yes total loves them uh but i did look it up a little bit so so um the phenomenon basically is it's called apofenia okay this is like the human inclination to spot patterns yeah so it's the same part of your brain that makes uh makes faces out of the fronts of motor cars yeah um so you know it's it's normal to to spot patterns where there probably are no patterns because you know a large part of how humans interpret the world is through pattern recognition with pattern pattern recognizing machines yeah that's what we're good at and so we will spot patterns even if they're not there i think it's it's a particularly enjoyable experience when you watch dark side of the rainbow because you know it is a great great film yeah it is a beautiful film and dark side of the moon is a great great album yeah so you've put in these you know two terrific bits of of art together so there's always going to be something interesting um a to appeal to tickle the brain um so i did a little look up but about this on the internet so i was having a search well are there any other similar phenomena so my standard to search these days i got a chat gpt and asked chat gpt well are there any other similar album and film parallels yeah and surprise surprise chat gpt really didn't understand what i was talking about but it kind of suggested basically some fairly random looking examples it suggested um metropolis and a daf punk album discovery because it was saying oh similar themes they both contain robots um and it also suggested uh night of the living dead versus the suburbs by arcade fire which i think was a big um that was a big film school album when we were there i think yeah definitely was yeah um and uh having a search on on the internet i can't find anywhere where people suggest oh yeah you should listen to you should listen to discovery by daf punk as you watch metropolis um so i think this is something which chat gpt has made up yeah but i tried it oh so i sat down and i watched metropolis and put discovery on by daf punk and you know what they go together perfectly oh there's this like opening sequence of machinery yeah in metropolis which is timed perfectly with the beat of of the opening song on on discovery and then the opening lyric is one more time which comes on just as the big clock at the beginning of metropolis appears on the screen yeah uh the lyric don't stop the dancing is timed with all the workers swaying out of the elevator and all moving in time together oh yeah it just fits together perfectly so i thought while i'm on to something here yes so i did watch night of the living dead while playing the suburbs by archive arcade fire and you know what it works perfectly um so it opens with this lyric um in the suburbs i learned to drive so grab your mother's keys we're leaving and just as the characters drive by in a car and the camera follows this car as it goes across the screen uh and then and then they get to a cemetery and the lyrics are move your feet from hot pavement and into the grass just as the characters they walk off the road and they head into the grassy cemetery i mean it's just perfect it's perfect and it's not intentional and it is utter coincidence but basically this is my brain happily smiling at little coincidences and splining patterns where they don't exist i reckon you can probably put uh any album on with any film yeah and chuckle away at the remarkable uh coincidences so it's just it's just it's just a it's a it's a feature of the human brain is it a feature or a bug i'm not sure so career advice for you upcoming bands out there get your favorite film watch it as a group with the sound off and then just jam create a soundtrack to it and then get it out to the chat gbt so that it can be recommended maybe maybe if you made a soundtrack to twisters with the sound down you might improve the quality of that film i don't question that at all i think we're just going on well uh in a minute well let's see whether we can draw we can draw a few parallels between truly the wizard of ours and twisters but before we do shall we quickly play my favorite game i'm going first okay let's let's play who am i who am i i want to go first you go first you go first you go mid i was i was forced my way to the front of the key i'm gonna let you go first i'm going first because i know that you are ben the bumbling british journalist but i am also ben because i'm i'm not really suited to that kind of adventure this isn't the twisters film i'm trying to extract something literate and worthwhile from a dull existence in a dumbed-down world i'm uncomfortable and awkward weak-stomached clueless but able to find the real story in all the madness and not the type or write a single thing but still be called a writer i've never yet these writers never actually do any writing in the movies but which i find just i wish i had that skill yeah just be great to submit articles without actually having to write anything yeah you just think it onto the screen or into the paper it's brilliant well we we need to get you a flat between stratum hill and west norwood then no we're at the top journalists live yeah i i i wish i was ben i suppose i'm not as tall and i don't have such good teeth um i i i came away from the films this week thinking that i think there is a bit of the scarecrow and a bit of the tin man and a bit of the line in all of us i think i think i think that is a big part of the enduring appeal of the wizard of ours i think all of us i certainly commonly feel that i wish i had a brain and i wish i had a heart and i wish i had a bit more courage yeah um so i i feel like i am all of dorothy's friends and the wizard of ours i think i think that's sort of how the film works isn't it i think that's sort of what it's for yeah you're the allies yeah so i i i'm hoping that's kind of you know that the film working as intended but i you know i came away i yeah they're good characters you know i are enjoyable and you know i i i feel i feel for their deficits although i haven't persuaded myself that i have the characteristics that they feel they lack yeah even though they have really all right well let's let's um we'll play the jingle yeah play the triangle we'll try and uh for we'll try and blow these two films together somehow we'll spin them together until they mix like a twister uh so i you know i've written on my notes i've written here two films about wind two films with female leads you know who kind of gather a team around themselves there are two films about trying to get home to Kansas really yes yeah nobody's like home yeah and they are also that two films with basically no romantic subplot of any kind yeah it's a little creepy i think there is a little scarecrow dorothy thing happening there doesn't she she she sort of lingers on him when she's saying goodbye and then i think when she's in bed at the end doesn't she put her she put her hand on him or something like that it was a little but yeah definitely not a not a true romantic interest let's put it that way i think you're you're agree i agree i think dorothy's first i was totally yes for for yeah for all the science there's very little chemistry in the in the twisters film um i did kind of come away that for all the parallels that they have very opposite political stances though so you know the wizard of ours to be seems progressive yeah so it's it's it's about the triumph of intelligence and compassion and bravery and it's about women's empowerment i think yeah actually a lot of you know powerful women in that film it's you know it's about how you how it's possible to move forward through collective efforts it's a film about you smashing the oppressors freeing the working class you know i can get behind all of the my fists are in the air as you speak whereas twisters on the other hand like we said before it just feels so reactionary to me it's kind of twisters tell it's quite folds its arms and it says well city bad country good yeah and you can twist us has this kind of attitude that education is bad that your hands on experience that's what you know real learning is and you know you city types have just gone to university you don't really know anything and you know and also i suppose um twisters you know by ignoring climate change it basically instructs you do not seek to change what is causing you ill just react to it yeah you know in twisters inflation is the real problem climate change is not something that you should talk about so you know they're they're how many years apart are they 85 years apart 85 years apart and we have moved from you know from comfortable middle left to comfortable middle right in those years yeah i um i wrote down the same thing here is journey for women yep uh no place like home yep allies both of these films are about allies and putting back together a crew of allies when you've lost them in twisters yep um but i felt like the kinship is much stronger in the wizard of ours than it is in twisters um and in part because it because of the quasi romantic story there i think you know we we you've got your classic meet cute they hate each other they kind of fall for each other they're supposed to hate each other again and then they fall for each other at the end right and i think that gets in the way of the build-up of a true uh core uh group of allies so i think that's a problem um yeah for me there's a big difference between the films in in the terms of in terms of protagonists like i think um in in the wizard of ours you know you've got ghosts in the machine as i mentioned earlier and they kind of fix things and when they need fixing there's this result that's positive for the protagonist and it's kind of it's this danger of inactive protagonist i actually think they do accomplish stuff but there's a lot of help along the way whereas i think that the i don't think inactive practitioners are always a bad thing and as writers were told though they've got to be you know facing their problems and taking action to to solve them i think the protagonists are kind of too active in twisters whenever you're driving into the center of a tornado and then drilling down into the earth using these sort of um stabilizers that are attached to hydrolically hydraulically to your truck and then shooting fireworks into the the the core of the tornado i think that's a little too active for a protagonist um which is very funny because there's no real mention of you know fixing what the real cause of the tornadoes is but um you can only go in with a big truck and fix them for yourself so there's almost too much action for the protagonists in twisters um and you know is that more human empowerment is my question in twisters and a little less human empowerment in the wizard of ours which is sort of this fantasy film with magical characters i don't know i definitely preferred uh Oz to twisters um and as i said i don't mind the fact that they're kind of inactive because what they are is they're a very realistic group of people thrown together and trying to solve problems and they you know they make mistakes they step in the mood and they get through it basically so i they prefer Oz for that reason but i think there's definitely a lot of ally stuff in both of these stories and i think um particularly in wizard of Oz but even even in twisters there's this acceptance of others on the journey and helping each other on the journey and they're different people you've got the munchkins in the wizard of Oz you've got all the emerald city people you've got the very different characters with their very real strengths and real shortcomings in the wizard of Oz and there are some very different characters um in twisters too i think it's stronger the message of acceptance of of the various people is much stronger in the wizard of Oz but there's some of it in twisters for sure right yeah so i can believe that the people who made twisters watch the wizard of Oz at least absolutely and we got yes yeah maybe they didn't pay attention to all the fine details though yeah there's i mean there's very early mention of uh in in twisters of muscles and brains similar to the beginning of Oz as you said the the the um the one of the machines that Harvey has in twister twisters is named Dorothy and then the his later gear is called tin man's um two men's fan and lion i think so it's all there was it lion is it lion the third skin yeah what's yeah lion was there truck i think yeah so i mean they definitely stole from it but i think they could have stolen the better stuff you're gonna steal the better stuff right damn it they stole the wrong bit well they stole names there's nothing in a name really uh okay so they stole the wrong bits i think that should be the title of the podcast we have just got time to talk about also what has also been playing at this theater you go first you go first okay i am gonna go first this time uh so uh we we had a nice holiday way and little coalition of the country with hat which had no internet ooh the other week so i had to order some DVDs to take it was amazing they had a DVD player but no internet so we got there and on the first night after we'd unpacked all our stuff put the DVD on we watched 12 angry men from 1957 uh and oh my god it's a very long time since i last watched that film and that is just a masterpiece so good yeah i really think it is a masterpiece um in 1957 Sydney Lumet's Henry Fonda yeah i had forgotten what a beautiful film it is yeah truly yeah i mean it is kind of you it is like a filmed play yep uh but the black and white photographers yeah can be just fantastic it's a short scene towards the end of the film where there is a show of hands yeah and to each character puts up their hand and so you get 12 different shots of a man's hand raised in the air and each one of them it's like a little it's like a cash portrait or something like that beautiful perfectly lit black and white photograph of a hand yeah and they are all different and they are all beautiful it's just fabulously well shot it's yeah just it's a masterpiece it's fantastic really true correct me if i'm not remembering something correctly but i think you can even see sort of the facial hair grow on these guys like the makeup department is good too because they've been sequestered in this room right and they're you know they get stubble over the course of the film it's just uh they certainly get sweaty yes yeah i love that yeah yeah so great film yeah good choice did the kids want you to that they did i think um yeah Edward liked it Alice is a little bit annoyed because she finds the way that people talk in black and white films a bit too stagey yeah um and you know fair enough that is like that that's that's the kind of uh a culture clash hump that you have to climb over i suppose yeah but yeah find us so good though it inspired a bit of conversation yeah among the family so it's you know it's it's actually really i think a very good uh critique of the judicial system in this country yes it's amazing how it's still made in 1957 still could largely have been made today there's yeah very very little about it that feels dated it feels very very contemporary still yeah and what's that the last scene where they just wants to know what's your name who are you right yes yeah yep beautiful okay beat that oh i didn't see any movies watched it i watched a number of episodes i finished season i think it's 11 of curb you curb you're enthusiasm which is a big show here with Larry David who's done many seasons over the course of i think 20 something years maybe it's done 11 seasons i might have the number wrong but so we watched the final season of that and then i watched um boy i've been watching a lot of public television jeez yeah i'm a donor we have to give money for public television here um so we watch a lot of documents on the documentaries and the ocean and specifically hear the Gulf of Maine which is one of the fastest warming bodies of water on the planet um and then i watch the Lance Armstrong documentary it's on Netflix i think it was done originally for ESPN it's called 30 by 30 so it's supposed to be 30 minutes uh they sort of suckered me into three hours because this guy's so complicated um and interesting that they ended up um doing two like one and a half hour pieces on him um i don't know if you remember Lance and i'm strong he was a cyclist yeah i won seven consecutive tour performances and um of course uh was later found to be doping as all cyclists were the era in that era um interesting documentary i've been working on this thing for decades now um which is sort of about a cycle racer um on drugs so it was it was homework for me as well but it was really i thought it was really good not because he's a likable guy necessarily but because he's a very human guy and he's one of those guys you don't like he's kind of detestable in some ways but he can still relate to him i think it's interesting so it's some good experiences but i did not see another movie i started rmn n last night have you heard of that that's that's like the beginning of the name of a film is that how does that work that's the entire i don't know why it's called r&n it's a Romanian film maybe that's what it is rumin ruminia it's a prequel to uh uh uh i oh boy all right yes it does cut alphabetically it would be a prequel because it comes before r r r but it's a different country it's actually as i said a Romanian film um the same director who did four months three weeks two days or something that right okay yep yep um some years ago i don't remember uh the director's name off hand and couldn't pronounce his name probably but um it interesting so we started that on hulu last night we'll finish it up tonight and um i'm going to recommend it even though i haven't seen the um the end of it and in part because it's it's a very it's pacy it's oddly pacy it's one of these films that you know that there's not a lot of big action moments but it's it moves quickly through story so it's a very interesting balance of like a thoughtful what you would in the hands of many directors and story writers would be the kind of slogging kind of over-detailed thing and it's pacy it's surprisingly pacy so r and then r and and it's nice to have a bit of pace yeah yeah so pacy they couldn't even put any vows in the in the name it was too much of a hurry moves so quickly they couldn't give it like a long name uh on instagram we are at two real cinema club read the blog at two real cinema club dot com comment on our youtube channel or email us we love your emails we are uh two real cinema club at gmail dot com next time oh you yes we just we just decided yeah yeah but i've already forgotten oh oh we're going into space we are going alien alien Romulus is coming out on friday yes we're gonna see that and we're premier on thursday release on friday we're gonna go see that these films are going to compare it to thirty five years apart is that right the original alien is you said nineteen seventy seventy nine yes wow talk about intellectual property that just keeps living into the space age here we go i'm looking forward to it because it's been a long time since i saw the first one i just there's that scene there's the dinner scene i think you guys know what i'm talking about i i haven't seen that first one for a long time i am looking forward to revisiting it i remember it you know being good i hope my memory uh is accurate i want to say john is it john hurt we just john hurt yeah poor john hurt good man it's a good man so don't eat before seeing the film join us next well we're going to go to the popcorn counter next week and talk about uh something and then uh we'll be in space that we go after that so i join us for that looking forward to it still there next time bye everyone [ Silence ]
