I haven't been reviewing movies for some time now... I guess the easiest excuse is that I'm busy, which is mostly true, but it isn't the whole truth. I've still been seeing movies every week-- a lot of the times, two. I've seen:
Challengers (Yes)
Furiosa (OK)
Bad Boys: Ride Or Die (Yes)
In A Violent Nature (OK)
Maxxxine (Idk)
Longlegs (Yes)

I would have liked to have taken a little extra time to review them all, because I actually had quite a bit to say about all of them. But sometimes you have other things to do. Enough of these excuses though.

TWISTERS is a movie about tornados. It's a sequel to the 1996 tornado movie, TWISTER, although there are no recurring characters-- I guess one of the tornados may be from the original, but it never directly states that.

The movie follows Kate, haunted by past tornado-chasing experiences, now a New York tornado expert, or something like that. Originally from Oklahoma, she now wears pantsuits. An old friend from her old tornado-chasing days, Javi, tracks her down, asking her to come join his new tornado-chasing thing back in old Oklahoma. You see, Kate has some kind of psychic expertise for tornado tracking; she's able to sense which fronts are going to bring heavier storms, etc. But since losing friends to a tragic tornado-chasing accident as a college student, she has retired her ways. She denies Javi's want to, but then changes her mind, and then does it. Javi explains that there's this crazy storm front in Oklahoma happening that week, and that they were popping up out of nowhere, for no reason. So she does it anyways.

I don't think I've seen the original since the Bush administration, but I remember being scared of it, being a little kid in Missouri. We had tornado sirens going off every summer. Fortunately the worst that ever happened to my household was having to sit in the crawlspace and look at spiders. The new one isn't scary because there aren't tornados here in New York.

TWISTERS is a hell of a summer blockbuster, and for all the stuff I have to say about sequels, remakes, and requels, this is just a fun one. It's certainly geared for a midwest audience; there is an exclusively radio-country soundtrack, there are Gosling-looking yeehaw types who film themselves chasing tornados for Youtube (these guys are cool), a bunch of lowkey digs at New York liberal types, and even a British journalist type who is wimpy. It's two hours long, which seemed like a lot going in, but they manage to pack in like seven or eight different tornado action scenes. And really, they're all pretty damn amazing, and the effects crew went the hell in on it. Each of those scenes feels comparable to death scenes in a slasher movie, and instead of victims (although there are victims), there are rural towns, and they get decimated to hell. There's one scene that takes place in a small-town rodeo which is fucking incredible; horses run down scared townfolk, people take shelter in an abandoned motel pool, and cars get thrown up hundreds of feet in the air. It kicks ass! It's easy to take an anti-CGI stance, but here it's wonderful. And there really isn't much wasted time between, either.

There is a budding romance between Kate and the main Youtuber guy, Tyler something, and I guess the Youtube/Vlog direction is a pretty easy way to modernize the original, but it works here. Tyler and is crew is stupid but likeable. They say stupid crap a lot but Kate does too, really ("oh, not an overpass! that's the worst place to be in a tornado!")

There is a lot of forgotten-America type of imagery, and the film likes to lowkey praise the salt-of-the-earth Oklahomie types, which I don't think related much with the Delancey/Essex Regal Cinema that I attended the movie at, but it moved me some. I wish I had seen this in a theater in the midwest. I often think about moving back to Missouri, but honestly the tornados scare me too much.

Some of the bonding between Kate and Tyler goes on for too long, and there seems to be a long-ass time spent at her Mom's farm, but not too damn long. There is also a plot going on with her old friend Javi, who has this seedy real-estate deal going on in exchange for tornado-ravaged towns, which doesn't make that much sense to me, and it seems more like a placeholder for the audience being mad at liberal-types; again, it knows it's audience. And to be frank, I like the radio-country soundtrack.

It would probably be fun to see it with some friends on a Tuesday. I saw it on a Thursday night by myself. I had earned enough points through the Regal Unlimited program to afford me a free Pepsi and small popcorn. I had a seat to myself in the top row, on the far right. I had my shoes off and the recliner going. I saw LONGLEGS two nights before that, and seeing two really fun movies (that couldn't be more different) back-to-back like that felt so good... I've seen some stuff this year that made me so unhappy, but weeks like this make me optimistic about stuff.

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