Movie Review: Twisters (2024)

Twisters (2024) directed by Lee Isaac Chung

Tornado storm chaser Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) had a horrible experience in graduate school. She was working on her dissertation project, trying to create a way to stop tornadoes through science. She had a special chemical compound that would get sucked up into a tornado to stop it. Her team of friends helping her almost all died during an attempt to kill a twister in the Oklahoma countryside. She moved to New York City and worked at the weather service there. Five years later, the only other survivor Javi (Anthony Ramos) comes to New York with a proposal--he's been in the military and saw a new radar technology that will be able to map any storm (including tornadoes) in minute detail. He needs to prove it works and has a corporately-funded team back in Oklahoma ready for the field test. He needs her preternatural storm chasing abilities to find good storms. She reluctantly returns to Oklahoma where they run into other storm chasers, especially YouTube celebrity Tyler (Glen Powell), who has an entertaining shtick and a band of misfit chasers. She is immediately turned off by him but he is intrigued by her in a tornado-chasing-rivalry way. Their rivalry morphs as they learn more about each other and about Javi's sponsor.

This movie is quintessential dumb popcorn fun. There's the patina of science that is not at all convincing but is enough to move the plot along. There's the tragic backstory of the heroine who is estranged from her mother and her home state. There's corporate baddies. There's a charming, conceited guy who turns out to be a much better person than he is on his "This is not my first tornadeo!" t-shirts. The big, bad monsters (i.e. the tornadoes) show up at regular intervals, each time with some new revelation or different styling to make it seem even worse than before. Small children and dogs are saved from the big bad monsters. The only odd thing is the romantic subplot bring entirely backburnered until the very end of the film.

As long as you go into the movie with the proper mindset (brain shifted into neutral), this is an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. The acting is adequate, though I wished the main characters or performances were a little more charming or endearing. Other than the special effects people, it doesn't look like anybody (actors, director, writer, cinematographer, etc.) tried very hard. There's a lot of tornadoes causing destruction and people dealing with it. The original film had more charm, this one is just adequate.

Mildly recommended.

Cute Kid Pix December 2024

More photos and videos that didn't make their own posts...

My eldest had his first indoor track meeting of the season at a facility near the Washington Commanders stadium. I did not get to watch any of the competition since it started during the school day. I came to pick him up and got to see some other competitors before we left.

Prince George's County facility

Concert season was in full swing. My youngest is in a special county-wide orchestra for elementary school kids. They had a delightful performance.

GT Sinfonia

Zoomed in to my son

My daughter's school's orchestra had their concert a few days later.

High school performers

My wife got a special bonus at work and sent me to get a take-out lunch from Jailbreak Brewing. Since I had to wait twenty minutes for the order to be ready, I had a little treat while waiting. 

A little something for the mister

As part of an extra-curricular activity (where my daughter is building a machine), we visited one of the many trash wheels in Baltimore. We saw Gwynnda, the Good Wheel of the West and Mr. Trash Wheel, the original one in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

Kids and Gwynnda

Not enough flow for action

Feeder for Mr. Trash Wheel

A better look at Mr. Trash Wheel

Reading up on the fellow

Our dance studio, That's Dancing, had the Winter Showcase but the professional pictures or video haven't come yet. We did get a nice ornament from them!

Excellent ornament

We attended our last winter concert, my youngest's elementary school performance. 

Fifth Graders

My son

As part of our final year of cub scouts, we visited a troop...specifically my older son's troop. They were good hosts to potential new members.

Den members introduced to the troop

The day after Christmas I went to the grocery store and they were already putting out Valentine's Day items!

We already have enough candy in our house, thanks...

Battle of the Books 2025 Reviews: Last Cuentista and First Cat

My youngest is engaged in the Battle of the Books, a competition sponsored by our local public library. He has a team of classmates that are reading nine books and getting ready to answer trivia questions at a county-wide meeting in late April. I am reading some of the books too. Here's the first two I've read...

The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera

The Earth is about to be hit by Halley's Comet, so select people are evacuated, going hopefully to a habitable planet far away. One family selected is the Penas. Daughter Petra wants to be a storyteller like her granny Lita. The people will be put in stasis and uploaded with useful information on the centuries long trip. Storytelling is not a prized skill, so Petra is unhappy about the situation. The situation becomes much worse when she is woken up hundreds of years later on the ship by a group that has seized control and is called the Collective. It is an evil organization that has homogenized everyone's looks and erased their memories of Earth in an attempt to create peace and harmony for human beings. If the memory purge does not work on a person, that individual is purged. Petra has to pretend to be Zeta-1, a technician who will help to assess a planet that the ship has discovered and seems habitable. She really wants to save her family and escape from the Collective if she can.

The story has an interesting (if unoriginal) premise. Petra truly loves her family and misses her times on Earth with Lita. Her storytelling is what keeps her going and the book has plenty of flashbacks to Lita telling stories and giving advice (sometimes telling a story to give advice). Lita encourages Petra to make the stories her own, which winds up being a little narcissistic. Petra tells stories to some of her shipmates as a way to keep them on her side. Often she recasts the stories to make herself seem heroic or to get the outcomes she wants, as if the stories are meant to serve her rather than have value in themselves. So the further I got in the book, the less I liked her. The Collective is so clearly and blatantly evil that it might excuse Petra from "making the stories her own," (advice from Lita) but I was a lot less sympathetic with her by the end of the book. I still had sympathy for her and the final action is exciting.

Mildly recommended--the story is very entertaining but Petra turned out to be less of the hero than I wanted her to be. 

The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza by Mac Barnett and Shawn Harris

Scientist discover that the moon is being eaten by rats. If they go unchecked, the moon will disappear entirely! They decide to send a scientifically-enhanced cat to deal with the rodent infestation. The ship has a quirky robot guiding it and a toe-nail-clipping robot for some reason. Once they make it to the moon, they have various adventures on their way to confront the rats, including meeting the Moon Queen, who becomes an ally.  

The story is about as silly as the premise, though the cat does not speak English, it just meows significantly, so there's a tiny nod to realism. It is entertaining  and creative but very light-weight and definitely aimed at kids. 

Barely recommended--I probably would never have read this if it weren't for Battle of the Books.

Geocaching December 2024

My geocaching month started with Name That Flag!, a mystery cache by a ball field. I tried to find it on a weekend in November but kids were playing on the field. There was no way to be stealthy then. A weekday made the find much easier.

I am working on finding more mystery caches, so I found the Series of Unfortunate Events-themed cache An Unfortunate Location, which was randomly at the side of the road. I also avenged a DNF at I wanna be the very cache, a Pokemon-themed mystery. 

Pokemon is somewhere here

I started working on the Warriors and Brothers in Arms Trail in Bowie, with a lot of mystery caches based on military history and the men and women who served our country. My first was POW, then I found Battle of the Bulge, which was my 1600th cache.

Cache 1600!

Nearby is Horselover Bridge with a horse head on it.

A hard selfie to snap

I had some time to kill while my youngest was doing his concert dress rehearsal so I found Glory Days, Leaf Me Alone!, Life Among the Dead (a cemetery cache), Milestone #1 A Book at the Library (by a library), and another in the Cluedo series MD Cluedo 4 of 10. This series is going slowly--I've only found three of them and don't have the notes of which clues were in the first one I found.

This is better camouflage in the spring and summer

The graveyard

I placed a new cache, You Shall Not Pass #5, while I was doing a maintenance check on an earlier cache. The new cache was found within hours of being published.

After another Monday morning meet-up, I found Define Definite Definitions #1, a puzzle that was not too hard. The next day was very foggy but I still came up with Bowie - 100 Souvenir Challenge. The Covid-19 "Mini-Jasmer" Challenge requires cachers to have found twelve caches that were published in the twelve months of 2020, the year of Covid. I qualified and made the find. A regular Jasmer challenge is to find caches hidden in every month since the beginning of geocaching, not an easy accomplishment.

Back on the Brothers in Arms Trail, I found Specialist James T. Davis and Robert's Ridge. I DNFed the ridge the week before and, after consulting with the cache owner, I put up a replacement cache. Nearby I discovered Wooden You Know It, a regular cache.

I found my 1000th traditional cache with the untraditionally named Gur dhvpx Trb-Whfgvpr Ntrag whzcf bire 13 ynml qbt. With that milestone completed, I went for OCCT #14 A Mere 1000 Traditional Challenge cache. 

GZ for the challenge

After another Monday morning meet-up, I went for Park n Ride n Cache #1 in the outskirts of Annapolis. Also in the neighborhood were two Random Wiki Puzzle hides: Land and Titles Court of Samoa and Torres del Paine National Park. 

One of the random GZs

I went back to the WB&A Trail to find Fix Bayonets! on a hillside. The next day I got The One That Got Away in Annapolis. The day after I avenged a DNF at The Mall in Columbia's Hook, Line, and Sinker. It was one of those finds where I thought, "How did I not find this last time?"

HLaS

MY LITTLE GIRL is a tribute to a cacher's daughter who got married earlier in the month, so it's fun to find a new cache. I was the fourth to sign the log. The next day, my wife solved the mystery cache Welcome to Koreatown, an Ellicott City cache in an area with a lot of Korean stores and restaurants. The next day, The Ghost with the Bloody Fingers - SSTTITD #4 was an easy find on a failed outing to get donuts. 

Christmas Eve I went to a nearby park that was the beneficiary of some new cache hides thanks to the 2024 Maryland Geocaching Society Holiday Party. The party is always on a Saturday in December; I always have kids' events on Saturdays in December, so I have never made it. Maybe some year? The park has mystery cache Toys of the Season and two traditionals--Things You Find in the Woods (a burial site for the Owens family that used to live on the land) and Unbreakable , If you Gno, you Gno (odd spacing and spelling included).

Some snow for Christmas Eve

Owens family resting place

Christmas Day I didn't go caching but I found five on the day after up in Sykesville during a run to the landfill. Troop 719, Trail in the Woods, and Parched are on the Linear Trail that runs through a neighborhood. I also found the mystery cache A Few of Our Favourite Things (British spelling in original) and The Guardian. It was a fun set of finds.

Library on the trail

A house by the trail with awesome decorations

The next day I found Non-Traditional One Calendar Month Challenge, a mystery where the finder needs to have found a non-traditional on every day of one month. I had done this last February, so I was good to sign. Another easy mystery was A Butterfly Whispers in the Wind... which was a solve-at-home cache about chaos theory.

On December 30 I found Quarry Place Puzzler: One Fine Day and The Answer is Always C, both mysteries I solved at home. The quarry also has a traditional named Quarry Place Throwdown #6, which is part of a series? I don't see any others listed.

The quarry

View from the other side with sunshine on water

The quarry does have rocky bits

The final day of December we traveled just north of Baltimore for a Christmas present. While my son was on his excursion, I found a bunch of caches, including It's a Mother Beautiful Bridge, Amped Up, No Need to Forze It, and baltimore crossroads. I also found the remains of Sharp Street UMC, a virtual that made me take a picture. After my son was done, we went to visit Community College of Baltimore County Essex for a bunch of caches, mostly along a fitness trail. Contained was the trickiest one; the others (Quid est?, Fitness Trail - Trunk, and Fitness Trail - Four) were simple finds for experienced cachers. 

Me and the UMC

On the college fitness trail

I end the year with 1650 caches total and 629 for 2024, so more than a third of my caching was done in the last year! December 2024 had 55 of those caches. Can I keep up this momentum in the new year?

Book Review: Death of Wolverine by C. Soule et al.

Death of Wolverine written by Charles Soule and illustrated by Steve McNiven

Wolverine has lost his healing factor and has become the target of every enemy who ever wanted to get even with him. He spends his time fighting off bad guys and visiting the smartest people to see if they can help. Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four can't immediately help but he is sure that he can. Wolverine is not patient enough to wait. Also, he discovers that a contract has been put out on him, not to kill him but to bring him in alive. Logan realizes that the only way to end the constant fighting is to figure out who is putting up the money and put a stop to them. 

The story wanders through a lot of Wolverine's "greatest hits" including visits to Japan and Madripoor. The finale is a bit disappointing as he seems to be able to avoid dying, though death has been his wish for a while. The plot moves so quickly that the four issues fly by. The art is quite good. If only the narrative had lived up to it. 

I read this because the Daredevil series I am currently reading crosses over with the next narrative, Hunt for Wolverine. Because who really believes that Wolverine is dead and gone? That's the problem with popular characters. They might get killed only to be brought back from death (which has happened with Batman three or four times since 2000). 

Barely recommended--it looks great but it doesn't read great.

Movie Review: Wicked (2024)

Wicked Part 1 (2024) directed by Jon M. Chu

Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is born to a well-to-do family in the Land of Oz (the one ruled by the Wizard of Oz) under strange circumstances. She is born with green skin and has an uncontrolled magical ability that makes things happen when she is under stress. As a child, she is a bit of a family embarrassment and is involved in an accident that causes her sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) to be wheel-chair-bound. When they grow up, Nessarose goes to Shiz University, a school for the well-to-do that includes a magic teacher named Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). Elphaba comes along to drop off Nessarose and naturally draws attention for her skin color. She runs through her usual speech about how she isn't seasick, etc., but the crowd of students is more inclined to laugh and tease than to sympathize. Elphaba has one of her magical outbursts for which Morrible takes the blame. Morrible also takes an intense interest in Elphaba, pulling strings to have her become a student immediately. There's a chance Elphaba might get to see the Wizard, who might grant her deepest wish--not to be green anymore.

Elphaba winds up roommates with Galinda (Ariana Grande), a spoiled blonde girl obsessed with herself and her social status at the school. They hate each other (Galinda was supposed to have a private room and they tussle over who gets what part of the room) though Elphaba is clearly Galinda's intellectual superior in the story and sympathetic superior for the audience. Through awkward circumstances they become friends just as a new cute young man (Jonathan Bailey) shows up at school. He is just as vain as Galinda. His bad boy attitude leads them to adventures outside the school. Eventually, Elphaba gets the invitation to see the Wizard where everything could, and indeed does, change.

The movie is based on the Broadway musical based on the novel. When I heard about the premise of the novel back in the 1990s, I was not interested. Telling The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West seemed like the another in the line formed by the Gone With the Wind sequel and the Les Miserables sequel. For the first thirty minutes of this film I did not like it. I thought the characters were shallow and unlikeable...until the party scene where Elphaba and Galinda make a connection that pulls them into friendship. They became human beings rather than caricatures. The rest of the cast was less interesting, probably from a combination of the writing (which is mediocre) and the performances (some of the actors are better at the acting part than the singing part). 

Of course, the movie is visually amazing, with no special effects scrimped on. The sets are impressive and have the scale and whimsy of other Oz productions. I'm glad I saw it in the theater on a big screen. 

The story does have some weird bits. There's an animal rights subplot that seems to be there to make other characters less shallow. And the Munchkins are too tall. Maybe I would have forgotten about that problem but one of the students at Shiz University (couldn't they come up with a better name?) is a Munchkin and he is a significant minor character so he keeps showing up. At one point he stands on some books to look taller which is unnecessary since he is certainly shown as tall enough to pass for a regular person. If he had looked shorter, so much of his situation would have been more poignant and believable. The movie has a lot of other nit-picky problems like that.

Mildly recommended--I'll see the second half of the movie when it comes out but I am not in the "can't wait" crowd.

TV Review: A Man on the Inside (2024)

A Man on the Inside (2024) created by Michael Shur based on the Chilean documentary The Mole Agent

Charles (Ted Danson) is an elderly gentleman who lives alone since his wife died a year ago. He had taught engineering at college, so he lives a regimented and orderly life. His daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) is concerned for him since he has no social life. She encourages him to get a hobby. In his the daily paper he sees an ad from a detective agency that wants someone from 75- to 85-years old for a job. Private investigator Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) has a client whose elderly mother has lost a valuable necklace in a retirement home. The client thinks it was stolen and wants the theft investigated, but stealth is required since the client does not want the mother or the home's staff to know what is going on. Charles is one of many candidates for the position but he's the only old guy who can actually work his cell phone to take pictures and video, so he gets the job. He is excited to be a spy and becomes more socially engaged with the retirement community, which includes making friends, enemies, and unrequited loves. He also does his spy routine.

The show's premise is fun and a bit off-the-wall. It is base on an actual incident in South America that got its own documentary. Danson is very charming in the role and works well with the other actors. Some episodes have a couple of scenes at Emily's home dealing with her good-guy husband (Eugene Cordero) and layabout trio of sons. The bits with them are funny but seem like padding to fill out the episodes.

The writers do a good job creating conflicts and comedic situations, throwing suspicion around and pointing out the foibles of everyone in the story. The blend of comedy and drama works very well here, with a lot of honesty about people's situations and how they deal with their problems, those caused by others and those that are self-inflicted. People resolve their problems in more realistic ways than you would expect. I was really charmed by the end of the show and am looking forward to a second season.

Highly recommended--it's both entertaining and has heart.

As I write (January 2025), this is only available streaming on Netflix.