George Kuchar checksinto the Motel Reno, twenty miles outside of Oklahoma City. "It's kindof like lakeside property," he muses-there are so many puddles. Beforelong we are into some real weather-courtesy of the Tornado Report on the24-hour weather channel that links George and his wet mutt Runt with therest of this weather-beaten community, hiding out in trailers and townsuntil TV tells them to head for higher ground. If Kuchar's 1977 WildNight in El Reno was a melodrama of weather, Weather Diary is more likea soap opera: slow, meditative, self-renewing. ("Dark clouds were goingWest, or maybe going South, and then we saw Chuck," a neighbor.) Hisfascination with the microcosm (with spiders and cereal boxes) somehowequals his passion for the tempest in the heavens. Using a Sony 8mmvideo camera with a built-in editing device, Kuchar achieves elegantvideo images, in the wet and dry world of skies and fields through whichhe romps with Runt, and in the dreary little room he has made into hisown visual metaphor. (He sees the eye of a tornado in the flushing of atoilet, a cinematic wipe in the closing of a shower curtain.) George issupremely uncomfortable here (and then the mosquitoes come-"aren't Imiserable enough?"), but no one is more at home with a camera and avision, filming, editing, narrating in one take, so that what we get isa real George and not a bad actor. When it's all over, George checksout. But he'll be back.