Word: twister
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...think digital surround sound is for sissies and you've got a spare $16,000, the Odyssee Motion Simulator may be right up your alley. Four hydraulic "actuators" rattle and shake your La-Z-Boy like an amusement-park ride in perfect synch with such action-adventure movies as Twister and Jurassic Park. The device moves your seat only five-eighths of an inch, but that's enough to convince your body that a certain T. rex is getting closer every second...
Shannon Mahaffey's experience is a case in point. He was living in Sweetwater, on the flat Texas plains that spawn tornadoes during the spring storm season. Often he would stay up nights watching the horizon as twisters cut deadly swaths nearby. Twice, he says, they touched down on his property, tearing up fences and farm equipment, though luckily missing his house. One night, while waiting up in a storm-induced blackout, he wondered whether there was a better way to warn people that a twister was forming: "I knew that the one thing that always worked in the disasters...
...season is nearly upon us, and millions of Americans will soon be turning to a dubious "remedy" widely available at health-food stores and pharmacies. It's called Oscillococcinum, a tongue-twister of a potion that, according to its label, provides "temporary relief of colds and flulike symptoms." It is the standard homeopathic treatment for influenza and goes for about $10 a box. But like other homeopathic products, it's basically worthless...
...golden rules of summer blockbusting are to have an old-fashioned star or to make a sequel to a popular movie. Five of this season's six top-grossing films broke the rules. In summer 2000, the genre was the star: toga epic, Twister at sea, comic-book heroism, a Scream ream and a cutesy Jurassic Park. Moviegoers were in the mood for unofficial remakes--familiar formulas with less famous faces. As CBS's Survivor took 16 nobodies and turned them into summer celebrities, Hollywood made big bucks with the B Team...
Fangmeier, like Petersen, hails from Germany and both speak with hefty accents, but the director didn't hire the f/x (Hollywood parlance for special effects) wizard out of Teutonic solidarity. Petersen tapped Fangmeier because of his impressive, all-digital work on Twister. Still, there were no guarantees; while water has been digitally drawn before (notably in Titanic and Waterworld), The Perfect Storm would require a level of simulation that had never been attempted. On Warner Bros. soundstage No. 16, a shipping vessel doubling for the Andrea Gail was harbored in a large tank 22-ft. deep (the same tank where...