greatandimproving

White Lotus travels to the Far East for Season 3. The cast bring all their personal baggage to a new resort as they re-calibrate their lives among friends, family, co-workers and spiritual mentors in Thailand. The remote location, trees with forbidden fruit and a host of tropical animals produce an oddly familiar tone. Just add some torches, an immunity idol and a few sightings of Jeff Probst and it could pass for the next season of Survivor.

The characters are fun but their relationships are mostly transactional. They're either givers or takers, with one side taking advantage of the other. The tension gets tiresome when the dynamics fail to evolve- which is most of the time.

The bigger problem is the predictable writing, though. From murder to adultery, theft, financial embezzlement, bribery, "questionable behavior between family members" (it wouldn't let me write the word lol) to Buddha knows what else, Season 3 is a dropdown menu of crime and impropriety. Everything is thrown into the blender in a desperate attempt to create drama, which only poisons the shake. Moreover, the threat of extreme violence is ever-looming, to the point that when anything does happen you're more relieved than amused. Which shouldn't be surprising when the main payoff is murder - murder! - as seen in entertainment columns while the season was being aired: "Who will die on White Lotus?" Has it been reduced to this? Is this the only reason we watch anymore? To see which character is on the chopping block?

Wait, this might really be Survivor.

I'm being snarky here but it's not totally unwatchable. Laugh-out-loud funny in spots. The characters' misery is entertaining; the cast clearly have their comedic chops and make the most of the crumbs they're proffered by the script. Career-oriented Laurie (Carrie Coon), frat boy Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and, above all, Saxon's cursed poppa Timothy (Jason Isaacs) are worth the price of admission. Episode 4 merits a special shoutout too, since I felt that one was particularly strong. The storylines moved with purpose and actors could finally spread their wings. So the White Lotus formula is still there, no question, and if that's your thing you won't be disappointed.

But for me, the handful of enjoyable moments are like putting lipstick on a lizard (or having one friend on the Survivor jury?). They just don't amount to enough. Interludes with monkeys, colorful birds and other exotic creatures to denote "animal instinct" are way overdone and obvious. Too much time is spent setting tone between scenes. It's like attending any performance: excessive banter encroaches on the actual music, and there's a lot of 'banter' here.

The time wasting is also on display when scenes are practically repeated. In one case, middle-aged Rick (Walton Goggins) finally shares with his young girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) his longstanding plan to fly to Bangkok to slay some personal demons, and she's wholly supportive of the idea. Fast forward ten minutes and they have almost the exact same conversation, only now Chelsea doesn't want him to go. Later, B-list celeb Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) is asked by the hotel owners to stand for a picture that the White Lotus can use for promos: "Absolutely." Before the scene is over they ask for another picture, as if it hasn't already been done. These missteps aren't show-killers, but if you're paying attention you do get frustrated by the duplication that is either meant to fill time or, worse, reveals sloppy production. For it becomes clear that these as hourlong episodes with 30 mins of material; an eight-episode series that could've fit neatly into four or five.

Shot discontinuity plagues the show as well. Characters often make notable facial expressions before a jump cut to another camera angle shows them looking aloof in a different direction- which is a thumbnail for the season: the photography is sublime but the editing is not precise. And the fact that I'd even notice such gaffes reflects how the story is not holding the audience's attention.

Put it this way, my spiritual brothers and sisters: Season 3 is like a single droplet of water flying upward and separated from the giant White Lotus consciousness below. It eventually descends back into the ocean again. Its 'death' is a happy return, very much like coming home... I just wish this droplet's flight were less formulaic, had better writing and tighter editing, and provided more suspense than who'll get voted out at the next White Lotus Tribal Council.

First-hand accounts of the monster tornado that ripped through Joplin, Missouri in 2011. From people at work to meteorologists, storm chasers, visitors from out of state, students at graduation and locals on the road, we get an array of viewpoints to put that night in perspective. It starts out like any other natural disaster doc before we're given actual footage from cell phones, security cameras and the like, at which point it becomes more real and unique. The storytelling is solid, the pacing tight, and the melodrama not overdone. I thought it was well produced for a Netflix project.

I even liked the name: not Twister, but THE Twister. Forget about the rest, this is the tornado you need to know about, this one takes the cake- along with the buildings and cars and all worldly possessions within a five-mile radius. But not the town itself. Joplin's soul was sheltered the whole time, and lived to share its story here.

"It went from we were chasing the storm... to it was chasing us."

Pablo Larraín's "Jackie" covers the week following the JFK assassination in 1963 and is based on an unpublished interview of Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) by Life Magazine. Finally released upon her death, the notes were blended with several other interviews to create this screenplay by Noah Oppenheim. For anyone interested in understanding the widespread panic and "what-now" of the time, you'll appreciate this film.

The scene ideas are painfully simple, though highly effective. From sharing the impossible news with her kids, to deciding when/how to move out, to asking million-dollar questions of the priest ("What kind of God takes a father away from his two little children?"), the movie includes moments we all know must have happened to Jackie but were buried under the public hysteria around the event itself. As intoned by the funeral planner, "The world's gone mad."

Jackie makes small talk in the hearse with Bobby Kennedy while her dead husband (his dead brother... America's dead president) lies in the hulking casket between them, causing our focus to oscillate between the weight of what we hear and what we see. Later, as she staggers through the White House at the end of the longest day of her life - still donning her blood-soaked pink dress that would soon find a permanent home in infamy - Jackie personifies crippling isolation in body and in mind. The non sequiturs that tumble out during these dreadful sequences ("How will we afford to put the kids through school now? Maybe we can sell some of the furniture?") are as heartfelt as they are ludicrous. No matter where she is or what she's doing, Jackie reacts like any commoner would. She just happens to be doing so as the First Lady.

The film works because Portman is the most believable Jackie O ever put on screen. From the outset, she is in total control of her confusion, fear, helplessness, exasperation, guilt, long-held duties as a mother, brand-new duties as a *father, alongside her esoteric responsibilities to the nation. Portman puts on an acting clinic by conveying her predicament through nuance. We learn as much about Jackie's state of mind from what she doesn't say as from what she does, because no matter how carefully she speaks or how badly she wishes to be understood, it becomes clear that no words could ever meet the moment.

Characters often stare pleadingly into the camera's eyebrow, as if searching for an escape hatch from the audience. The score is populated by discordant whole notes that produce similar unease. Even the photography is at once stunning and unsettling, given the underlying darkness that has eclipsed the light of society. In the end, we feel the world on edge, suspended in time, waiting for normal life to resume. This film concerns the looking back required before it is possible for Jackie Kennedy (or for any of us) to make sense of the loss and start again. The same looking back required "to let them see what they've done."