Every week, Kristopher Pollard from Milwaukee Film and Radio Milwaukee’s Dori Zori talk about movies — because that’s what you do when you’re Cinebuds.
In this episode, we take a very special trip … to the Bizarro World.
Imagine a place that is the opposite of the Cinebuds universe. A place where the two main characters are awful to their very core. A pair of people who hate everything, including each other. A couple who are … gulp … married.
The duo at the center of Roald Dahl’s novel-turned-Netflix-movie The Twits are truly the Bizarro version of Dori and Kpolly, who are notoriously nice and do not hate indiscriminately and are definitely NOT married. They do, however, manage to disagree about The Twits movie adaptation in their own agreeable way.
It may come as a surprise that their reaction to the film doesn’t have much to do with the source material. The task of adapting a beloved book is a no-win situation because you’ll either live up to the high standard and get a modicum of credit, or you’ll fall short and shoulder the blame. From where Kpolly sat as he watched, The Twits managed to avoid the latter and actually surpassed the former.
Phil Johnston gets a hefty amount of credit for that as the film’s director, producer and co-writer. He took the classic Dahl approach — kids are the best, and adults are mostly morons and/or evil — and added some heft to the 100-ish-page book that’s essentially a series of practical jokes at the expense of Mr. and Mrs. Twit. We get a poorly run amusement park, mythical creatures and the outlandish idea that a dangerously unqualified person would run for public office with the sole intent of benefiting themselves financially.
Helping flesh out those additions are a cast that includes heavy hitters like Margot Martindale, Natalie Portman and — the biggest star of all — Elm Grove’s own Charlie Berens. Their performances, along with the likes of reliably excellent voice acting from the likes of Alan Tudyk and Jason Mantzoukas, were one of the few areas where our Cinebuds hosts found common ground. But Dori’s enjoyment didn’t extend much beyond that.
Maybe you’re more like her and will have trouble disconnecting the plot from certain real-world events or find the Twits “a little bit too much.” Maybe you’ll dig it in a big way like Kpolly. Find out for yourself by listening to the episode in full and checking out The Twits on Netflix.
