Year after year, George Kuchar returns to the Motel Reno, twenty miles outside of Oklahoma City, to wait for a tornado. "It's kind of like lakeside property," he muses-there are so many puddles. Before long we are into some real weather, courtesy of the Tornado Report on the 24-hour weather channel that links George and his wet mutt Runt with the rest of this weather-beaten community. Kuchar's fascination with the microcosm (he sees the eye of a tornado in the flushing of a toilet) equals his passion for the tempest in the heavens. He is supremely uncomfortable here on earth, and then the mosquitoes come. ("Aren't I miserable enough?") But no one is more at home with a camcorder and a vision, filming, editing, narrating in one take, so that what we get is a real George and not a bad actor. Weather Diary 1 is a brilliant portrait of a stranger in a small panhandle town looking for answers in the atmosphere. Like the weather, no one could have predicted that this first videotape by Kuchar would have had an impact like El Niño.-Steve Seid