Alright pop quiz: Vacation. Indiana Beach. Movie fan. In between the sun and sand and hotel, a drive-in is playing a double feature for the ages: True Lies and Speed. You're asked to come along. What do you do?
Jump up and down in excitement of course!
At the time I was an Arnold fan who counted Terminator 1 & 2 amongst my favorites. Will this Cameron/Arnold collaboration be three times a charm? Turns out it was. What I wasn't counting on was the second feature: Speed. I had no idea who Jan De Bont or Keanu Reeves were. Or Bullock and Hopper for that matter. My wave of interest was mostly through cultural osmosis. The movie about a bus that will blow up if it goes under 50 mph. What made it even more pleasant was that it lived up to that hype. Two years later, Jan De Bont would chase down storms in the 1996 blockbuster Twister.
Now that I've gotten the appetizers out of the way, let's get to the main course:
Tornadoes have been used to great effect for the endings of A Serious Man and Take Shelter. One of my favorite sequences in Wizard of Oz has one. The storm in itself isn't enough to hold my interest. The first viewing confirmed this. It also created a sour taste in my mouth. Flying cows, driving through houses, poor effects. The stuff that culture picked up on from the movie were the very things I didn't like about the movie.
Storm chasers who count themselves as fans of the movie have said the one thing it nailed was the storm chasers themselves. Forget the impossible science of surviving an F5 by using a belt tied to a pipe. It's that intoxicating sense of chasing danger. And for any one scene to capture it better, it would have to go to the one where our cadre of misfits go to Jo's Aunt Meg's house for food. They crave sustenance.
It is at this point where it becomes a hang out movie. A scene so lodged in my memory that anytime I watch it it gives me a sense of what could have been. You don't get this kind of chemistry from any type of acting group. So let's look at who's at the table:
Bill Paxton- Established from a cameo in The Terminator, Aliens and True Lies, Paxton was the Ace card in James Cameron's backpocket. Going into Twister, Paxton was the one actor in it who I was a fan of.
Helen Hunt- She'd become Oscar winner Helen Hunt a year after this movie.
Philip Seymour Hoffman- Twister would be the first film I would see him in. His character Dusty oozes off the screen with charisma. Every line he says just puts a big goofy grin on my face. Out of all the new faces, this was the one I was looking out for. It paid off. Probably...no definitely my favorite actor from my generation.
Jeremy Davies- A consummate character actor who just so happens to be in two great TV shows: Lost and Justified. As much as I love him in those shows, his career performance is in Herzog's Rescue Dawn.
Alan Ruck- For many of us, Ruck will always be Cameron Frye. "Rabbit is good. Rabbit is wise."
Todd Field- Beyond just getting a substantial role as Nick Nightingale in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Field became a director in his own right. Gifting us too solid dramas in In the Bedroom and Little Children. What happened to this guy?
Add it all up and you have a group of actors able to harness an energy that jumps off the screen and into the audience. There's the gravy that is practically a food group. Rabbit's realization of where all the beef comes from. The backstory of a naked 'Evil Bill' chucking a bottle into the air and "it never hits the ground". All this fodder adds up to an A+ scene too good to be included in a movie that otherwise is around the B/B- range of enjoyability. It's a hang out scene imprisoned in a disaster movie.
There's only one other scene that can go toe to toe with the Steak and Eggs scene here. And that is the Tales From the Crypt episode What's Cookin'.
So if you just woke up and have a hankering for some beef, you could do no better than watching Twister back to back with this TFTC episode. Let that gravy run all over the plate.
Until next time kiddies, restauranteur in peace!
-Luke
I was at odds with my mother and sister since the day this movie opened: I disliked it for all that you mentioned, but they absolutely adored it. the only thing we could all agree on and bond over was the fact that Aunt Meg's sustenance was the best part of the movie.
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