Plus: Shannen Doherty, great new games, 'Longlegs' and the Emmys

View this email online by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when Bob Newhart died. And Bernice Johnson Reagon. (And Richard Simmons, and Dr. Ruth.) And it was the week when the Emmy nominations came out, of course. Let's get to it. Is Twisters as twisty as Twister? The good thing about a disaster movie is that, much of the time, the title tells you exactly what absolutely real phenomenon you are about to see. Volcano. Armageddon. Geostorm. Sharknado. And, of course, Twister. Twister (in 1996) had a couple of different trailers, but one of them was perhaps the best I've ever seen. It doesn't show you any of the stars of the movie. It doesn't show you anything that happens in the main body of the movie. It doesn't, strictly speaking, tell you what the movie is about. When it showed in theaters, it had one purpose: to make you say, "Oh, [gosh], I gotta see that movie." What's funny is that, to a great degree, that trailer would make just as good a piece of promotion for the new sequel, Twisters. Because Twisters, too, is less about its plot than about its terrifying storm sequences and the general sense that if you think Godzilla is scary or stampeding dinosaurs are scary or sharks are scary, you should see nature's wrath as it actually appears in real life. Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones play rival storm chasers in Twisters. Universal Pictures Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Kate, a tornado scientist who (like tornado scientist Jo in the 1996 film) experienced a terrible tragedy at the hands of a storm. But where it made Jo an eager battler of weather, it's made Kate skittish. It's not until her old colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos) coaxes her out of retirement to help him collect data on a new and explosive storm system that Kate gets out in the field again. And when she does, her well-funded institutional team runs up against another team, a group of YouTube storm chasers led by Tyler (Glen Powell), who are prone to non-science related stunts like throwing fireworks into tornadoes just because they can. You might think that Twisters, by definition, has a lot more twisters than Twister, but that's not really true. Twister had a good number of twisters in it and could have been called Twisters as easily as Twisters can be. In other words, Twisters has twisters, but so did Twister. So let's think about it another way: Perhaps the question isn't the number of twisters; it's the number of twists. Which is more twisty, Twister or Twisters? (No big spoilers for the new movie, promise.) There weren't really many twists in Twister. The story was about Bill (Bill Paxton) and Jo (Helen Hunt), weather scientists in the process of getting a divorce. They clearly still loved each other, but because (it seems?) of her insistence on dangerous storm-chasing, they have drifted apart. He now has a new fiance (Jami Gertz, who frankly kills it in one of the most thankless roles of the '90s), a therapist who is about as far from a storm-chaser as one can get. But Bill gets sucked back into working with Jo's scrappy team (played by an eye-popping group of actors including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, and Todd Field — yes, the Todd Field who was nominated for an Oscar for directing Tár). Cary Elwes plays the bad guy, who is not named the Dread Weather Pirate Roberts but should have been. He is the arrogant and underqualified storm-chaser trying to cheat Jo out of her discoveries, buuuuut things do not end well for him, so that is not a twist. It is more the precise measuring out of karma in keeping with what you would expect. Twisters, however, has a couple of actual twists. One has to do with the team Kate starts out working with in the opening sequence, which is not the team she is working with a little later, which is not the team she is working with by the end of the movie. There is less of a bright line between who is good and who is bad, in part because this film is obviously setting up a big flirt between Kate and Tyler, while Twister was not setting up a big flirt between Helen Hunt and Cary Elwes. Thus, both her more conventional style and Tyler's more flamboyant style must have a role in the game that Kate, like Jo, is (figuratively) destined to play: Punch! That! Tornado! Also, it must be said that these twists are responsible for some of the tension that, in Bill and Jo's story in 1996, was supplied by poor Jami Gertz, who had to get driven around by Philip Seymour Hoffman while she screamed and took calls from patients on one of those cell phones where you had to pull out the antenna. Thus, some poor sap was probably saved from having one of the most thankless roles of the 2020s, playing ... whatever, maybe Kate's boring bean-counter boyfriend who keeps yelling at her to come home. I liked Twister. I liked Twisters. But yes, strictly speaking, Twisters has more twists. Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend I was impressed with the documentary Sorry/Not Sorry, which is about allegations of sexual misconduct by Louis C.K. that were reported on by the New York Times. (C.K. ultimately acknowledged the stories women told about his behavior were true.) Eric Deggans reviewed the film last week and wrote about it very well, and I second everything he said – from how moving it is to how ... not heartening it is. NPR has a new feature on the best games of 2024 so far — check it out and get your thumbs and fingers ready. I had some mixed feelings about Lady in the Lake, Apple TV's adaptation of the Laura Lippman novel about a white housewife in 1960s Baltimore who wants to become a journalist and inserts herself into the stories of two disappearances: a young white girl and a Black woman. Starring Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram, the series sags a bit in the middle, but that's true of so many streaming series that I'm beginning to think it's just a function of the format. Ingram in particular is very good, including in the voiceover in which she speaks directly to Portman's character about her appropriation of other people's stories to serve her own career. Speaking of Apple TV, it is now time to circle back to the complicated discussion we had about the adaptation of Presumed Innocent starring Jake Gyllenhaal. I think it would have been better as a thing released all at once rather than week to week, but what do I know — I truly didn't think anyone would care about a fresh take on a crime novel from the '80s, but I was wrong. It's done well enough that Apple has now renewed it for another season (apparently focused on a different case). This Wednesday, July 24, they will drop the first-season finale (which I have not seen). So if you heard about it and thought, "I am not patient enough to wait for eight weekly episodes in order to find out the answer to a mystery," this is where you jump back in. Listen to the Podcast Sponsor-Free Support your favorite pop culture junkies AND listen without sponsor interruptions with a subscription to Pop Culture Happy Hour+! Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org/happy. Learn More What We Did This Week Catch up with Glen's House of the Dragon recaps. Ollie Upton/HBO With the able help of tireless editors and producers, your four PCHH hosts were all over the place this week. Glen continued his recaps of House of the Dragon. I wrote about baseball and why it's only right that you, like me, should be a fan of the Philadelphia Phillies. I also wrote about the icon Shannen Doherty, and I talked to Juana Summers on All Things Considered about her legacy. Stephen covered the rapidly evolving story of Ingrid Andress' rendition of the national anthem at the Home Run Derby and hosted New Music Friday at All Songs Considered with friend of PCHH Daoud Tyler-Ameen. Glen talked to Jordan Morris and Kristen Meinzer about Longlegs, the creepy-sounding movie with the creepy-sounding title. Stephen checked in with Regina G. Barber and Jeff Yang about the Netflix animated series Exploding Kittens. On the Emmys front: Glen previewed the Emmy nominations on Morning Edition, while I recapped them for All Things Considered and Aisha did the same for Here & Now. On the podcast, the three of us had a chat about the nominations, from The Bear to Shogun to the problem of category fraud. And Stephen and I got together with Marc Rivers and Shea Vassar to spin our way through Twisters, which, you will not be surprised to hear, involves a lot of twisters. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Shea Vassar: Watching the WNBA Marc Rivers: Criterion sale at Barnes & Noble Linda Holmes: The God of the Woods by Liz Moore Stephen Thompson: Celebrities throwing first pitches Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. 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