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    How ‘Twisters’ Destroys a Motel

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    The director Lee Isaac Chung narrates a sequence from the film featuring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell, in which a building is leveled by a tornado.Lee Isaac Chung narrates a sequence from his film, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell.Universal PicturesIn “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A grungy, empty pool becomes a motel’s greatest asset in this harrowing sequence from “Twisters.”The storm chasers Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Tyler (Glen Powell) find themselves in a predicament when a tornado descends on a motel and the two must lead a group to safety. They head to the drained pool to stay out of the tornado’s path, along the way dodging debris that includes a soda machine and a trailer.Much of the sequence gives the impression of a one-take shot, although it was stitched from different takes to best incorporate its visual effects. Those effects are a mix of the practical — one stunt performer was whisked 60 feet in the air — and the digital.“I really wanted to film a night tornado,” Chung said, narrating the scene, “because growing up around Tornado Alley, the night tornadoes were always the most frightening.”He said the intent of the scene and shooting it in this frantic, hand-held manner was to create “that subjective feeling of what it’s like to experience a tornado in real time.”Chung said that while filming his cast inside the swimming pool, crew members were destroying the set outside, so as the scene ends and the characters emerge, they are seeing a damaged version of the set they hadn’t seen going in.Read the “Twisters” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Twisters’ Review: When the Monster Is Real

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      Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones lead a stand-alone sequel to the 1996 hit — and times sure have changed.The 1996 mega-blockbuster “Twister” is pleasing in its almost childlike simplicity. It’s a monster movie where the monster is a tornado, which neither knows nor cares about the people chasing it down. A tornado does not have a vendetta. It’s not even hungry, like a zombie is. Its path is erratic but its behavior is predictable: It forms, it destroys and then it simply collapses.That means the real intrigue comes from the human side of things, and on that point “Twister,” with a healthy dose of mid-90s style tropes and an absurdly stacked secondary cast (including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, Jami Gertz and Todd Field, the future director of “Tár”), delivers mightily. The movie’s enduring status as a classic is due in no small part to its continual appearance on cable TV — and it works so well in that medium because you can flick it on at virtually any moment and know basically what’s going on. The estranged lovers Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton chase a tornado, hoping to deploy a device cheekily named “Dorothy” that will help them understand it better and save lives. No complicated back stories, no lore necessary.Nearly thirty years later, “Twisters,” billed as a stand-alone sequel to “Twister,” has a bit of a tougher hill to climb. For one, the era of straightforward original blockbusters ended a long time ago, swallowed up by superheroes and franchises. “Twister” has its fans, but the only character “Twisters” shares with its predecessor is the tornado.And tornadoes aren’t what they used to be either. When I left my screening of “Twisters” and turned on my phone, I saw a text from my mother, who lives in a region known more for its blizzards than tornadoes. The National Weather Service, as it turned out, was warning residents to look out for thunderstorms, flash flooding and … tornadoes.The words “climate change” are never uttered in “Twisters,” but as anyone in the path of extreme weather knows, things have been getting worse. This hurricane season is predicted to be an unusually bad one. If you tried to travel over Memorial Day weekend, you felt the real effects. And tornadoes now tend to rove in packs. There’s a reason the title of this movie is plural.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Watch Glen Powell and Adria Arjona Fight and Flirt in ‘Hit Man’

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      The director Richard Linklater narrates a pivotal sequence from his rom-com thriller.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.The following includes spoilers for “Hit Man.”Actions speak louder, and more flirtatiously, than words in this key sequence from “Hit Man,” the rom-com thriller from Richard Linklater now streaming on Netflix.During the movie’s screenings at film festivals last year, this particular scene had audiences erupting with applause for the feat that it pulls off. It’s “kind of a performance within a performance within a performance,” Linklater says in his narration.At this point in the movie, the lead character, Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), is at a turning point. He has been working undercover with the New Orleans Police Department as a hit man named Ron. In that role, he developed a secret romantic relationship with a woman who initially tried to solicit Ron for his services. Her name is Madison (Adria Arjona) and she was going to hire Ron to kill her abrasive husband, but Ron talks her out of it.Madison’s husband later ends up dead, and the police think that Madison is the killer. One of the officers, Jasper (Austin Amelio) has seen Gary and Madison together in public and has suspicions about what’s going on with the two. He decides to put a wire on Gary and send him to talk with Madison in the hopes of creating an entrapment scenario. But to save Madison (and himself), Gary thinks fast and comes up with a way to warn Madison that they are under surveillance.He types out information to her through his Notes app on his phone and directs her through what to say, and not say, in their conversation, in an exchange that is both sexy and flirty, while also being a tense high-wire act.“It’s fun to see your hero, the guy you’re invested in, kind of figure his way out of a really sticky, tight situation that I don’t think any of us would be quick enough to find a way out of,” Linklater says.“It’s a dance, and it’s just fun to see them figure it out as they go.”Read the “Hit Man” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      The Animosity Tour and Other Promotional Movie Campaigns We Love

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      For Jennifer Lopez, Sterling K. Brown, Dakota Johnson and others, the standard publicity push isn’t so standard anymore.In the 1999 rom-com “Notting Hill,” the sheepish bookseller played by Hugh Grant goes to a hotel expecting a date with the megawatt star played by Julia Roberts. He is surprised to find he has arrived at a press junket and looks adorably flustered as he’s shuffled from room to room, pretending to be a reporter from Horse & Hound to interview the stars of her space movie.The sequence is a handy introduction to this strange custom of film publicity: actors sitting in sterile suites for a parade of brief interviews. But these days that almost seems quaint. The press tour has taken on a life of its own, with stars like Dakota Johnson, Jennifer Lopez and Zendaya making news for the tour itself with quippy sound bites, inscrutable looks and fashion moments.It can be grueling for celebrities. Lupita Nyong’o recently described junkets as a “torture technique” in an interview with Glamour. But these cycles can be more entertaining than the movies themselves. Grant’s bookseller would be baffled to learn that you can categorize the tours as follows:The Animosity TourFlorence Pugh was pointedly not at the Venice Film Festival news conference for “Don’t Worry Darling” in 2022.Jacopo Raule/Getty ImagesThe promotion stops for nothing, not even cast members who appear to hate being in one another’s company. This seemed to be the case during the cycle for “Atlas,” Netflix’s new sci-fi flick starring Jennifer Lopez and Sterling K. Brown.During joint interviews, Brown seemed unable to help himself from making fun of Lopez. In one viral moment, he feigned surprise when she said she was Puerto Rican, before repeating her comfort meal of “rice and beans and like, you know, chicken” in overemphasized Spanish. In another moment, he jumped in and helped her out when her own Spanish failed her. After supplying the right word, he did a little dance. That clip prompted social-media users to wonder what J. Lo did to Brown. During these interactions Lopez looked perturbed, leaving plenty of room for observers to jump to conclusions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Adria Arjona on ‘Hit Man’ and How the Production Surprised Her

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      The actress, who stars with Glen Powell, said that with the contract-killer movie, her ideas were finally valued in a writer’s room.Editor’s note: Spoilers ahead.Adria Arjona doesn’t like doing what she’s told.The co-star of the new Netflix romantic action comedy “Hit Man,” Arjona accompanied her father, the Guatemalan Mexican singer-songwriter Ricardo Arjona, on tour from the time she was young. It was a musical mentorship opportunity, so she ended up deciding early on: Music was out.He also made her read the poems of Pablo Neruda and the work of Gabriel García Márquez, so naturally, she said, all she wanted to do was listen to ’N Sync.“I do everything backwards,” Arjona, 32, said on a recent weekday morning over sparkling water at the Whitby Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “That’s just my personality — I just listen to my intuition. It’s not like I’m doing it on purpose or trying to be rebellious.”In “Hit Man,” directed by Richard Linklater, Arjona is Madison Masters, a desperate housewife who tries to hire a hit man, played by Glen Powell, unaware he’s a police operative. The rapturously reviewed movie is the latest entry in a 12-year-long acting career that has suddenly become white hot.She broke out in 2022 as the mechanic Bix Caleen in the streaming “Star Wars” series “Andor,” playing Cassian Andor’s fearless friend. (Season 2 of the Disney+ series, which she’s finished filming, is expected next year.) She also appeared as the betrothed daughter in the 2022 reboot of “Father of the Bride,” after roles in “Pacific Rim: Uprising” and Season 2 of “True Detective.”Arjona with Glen Powell in “Hit Man,” the Netflix action romantic comedy.Brian Roedel/NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Twisters’ Star Glen Powell Intends to Play the Hollywood Game

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      In a town littered with would-be superstars, he’s trying to beat the odds by giving studios what they crave. It’s no coincidence he’s everywhere.The cookies weren’t selling.It was a blustery day in suburban Austin, Texas, in 1996, and Lauren and Leslie Powell had a sales quota to meet for their Girl Scout troop. But it was that cookie time of year: Thin Mints and Caramel deLites were seemingly up for grabs everywhere.Glen, their 8-year-old brother, suggested a marketing gambit. “He had us make signs that advertised ‘free gift with every purchase,’ and we put them up around the neighborhood,” Leslie recalled.Glen was the gift.“He would hide in some honeysuckle bushes and pop out after a purchase to perform Elvis songs,” she said, laughing. “That’s my big brother. Ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.”I confess: Until I heard stories like that one — and spent time with the hound dog himself — I didn’t have high hopes for this profile. Glen Powell? I figured he was a dumb jock who coasted into a movie career on his all-American good looks. Boring.Yes, fine, Powell has been having a bona fide Hollywood moment. He stood nude on a cliff top with Sydney Sweeney in “Anyone but You” at Christmas. He is currently starring on Netflix in “Hit Man,” a comedy-drama-thriller-romance. And in July, Powell will be outrunning big-budget tornadoes in “Twisters.”But a superstar in the making?C’mon.I met Powell, 35, for breakfast in April at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, Calif. He showed up in a tight blue polo accessorized with a chain necklace and chest hair. (Perhaps he was in character, I snarked to myself, as Good-Looking Frat Guy, a bit part he played in “Stuck in Love,” a 2012 romance.) An omelet was ordered. Tabasco sauce was summoned and squirted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The True Story Behind Glen Powell’s Character in ‘Hit Man’

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      The romantic shenanigans are the stuff of Hollywood, but the film’s fake contract killer is based on a real man profiled in a Texas Monthly article.“Hit men don’t really exist!” an exasperated undercover pretend assassin says in Netflix’s new romantic action comedy, “Hit Man.” But the very existence of the film, which is loosely based on a seemingly strait-laced community college instructor who moonlighted as a fake assassin for the Houston police, proves just how much they fascinate us.Though plenty of officers have worn wires and impersonated hit men in murder-for-hire investigations, the film’s inspiration, Gary Johnson, was the “Laurence Olivier of the field,” according to a 2001 Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth. Over a decades-long career, relying on a bevy of accents and a penchant for being a sympathetic listener, Johnson, who died in 2022, managed to ensnare more than 60 people who tried to hire him.That’s just the kind of character that’s catnip for a leading-man-in-the-making like Glen Powell, who plays a version of Johnson in “Hit Man.” Of course, the actor and his director Richard Linklater, who wrote the script together, added a few Hollywood touches, including a rom-com plot involving the fictional Johnson and a woman (Adria Arjona) hoping to hire him to kill her husband.But some of the movie’s most outlandish plot elements — like the teenager who tries to pay Johnson partly in Atari computer games — did really happen. Here’s the story behind the movie and a look at hit men in real life.Who was Gary Johnson, whose life inspired the film?To his neighbors, he was a mild-mannered, middle-aged man who lived alone with two cats and worked in human resources at a company downtown, as he told them. (The baggy jorts and love of birding are Hollywood inventions.)In reality, Johnson, who spent a year as a military policeman in Vietnam, was an investigator for the district attorney’s office in Houston. On the side, he taught classes in human sexuality and general psychology two nights a week at a local community college. (The film switches it up, making Powell’s character a professor working for the police on the side and relocating the action to New Orleans.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More