52: The Twisters Vibe Check

as well as the recommendations...

In this week’s edition, I’ve got some recommendations and an essay where I vibecheck the movie Twisters, BUT FIRST…

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🔓The Commodification of Personal Information 🔓

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We moved Bonnie the Barn into our front yard so that we can begin turning it into a home office.

My goal is to power it with solar panels (thanks, Prime Day) because I can’t handle the noise of a gasoline generator. We’ve got a little bit of weathering to repair, some insulation, and we’re painting it to match the color of our shutters, but other than that, Bonnie should be operational in time for Fall weather.

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🎧 Listen Up 🎧

Jason and I recorded an episode for later this week about the Olympics, and next week, we’re talking about Vince Vaughn’s new TV show as well as Tim Chalamet becoming Bob Dylan, so PRETTY PLEASE make sure you are subscribed to never miss out on these, and all future episodes.

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🎉 The Recommendations 🎉

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📺 Land of Bad

WHERE: Netflix

WHY:

Look. Is this a GOOD movie? Probably not. But is it very much a “dudes being dudes in camo and cargo pants” movie? UH YEAH.

I call this genre “Cargo Pant All-Stars” because it’s just a bunch of guys doing military stuff in cargo pants and there’s something soothing about it for me. You might have your Dance Moms or Real Housewives and that’s fine. This is my version of that.

The story follows a group of special forces operatives on a mission in a dangerous war zone. When their mission goes awry, they must navigate through hostile territory, face unexpected threats, and make difficult choices to survive. It’s vintage Milo Ventimiglia, grumpy Russell Crowe, and a creatined-up Liam Hemsworth.

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📚 God of the Woods

WHERE: Amazon / Audible

WHY:

This a mystery novel set in the summer of 1975, revolving around the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl named Barbara Van Laar from a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains. Barbara is the daughter of the camp owners, and her disappearance mirrors the mysterious vanishing of her older brother fourteen years earlier. The novel intricately weaves multiple timelines and perspectives, exploring not just the central mystery but also themes of family dysfunction, class structure, and societal roles during the 1950s and 1970s.

Ashley and her book club made this next month’s selection, so I stole the suggestion and read it for myself. I was super glad I did because I loved the mystery vibe.

It’s a very sprawling read that spans different timelines and character perspectives. While some of the perspectives and timelines worked more for me than others, I appreciated the texture all the perspective-shifting gave to the story.

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✍️ MINI-ESSAY✍️

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A Twisters Vibe Check

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“They should have smooched.”

Ashley and I saw Twisters last week and that was the first thing I said to her. Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar Jones should have smooched.

Granted, the discourse around Twisters has gotten a little weird. It’s supposed to have solved climate change and it also had to kowtow to Gen Z’s weirdness about smooching so I’m not surprised that curious narrative decisions were made as a result. AND YET, of all the movies I anticipate having a sermon to preach or an urgent message to convey through art, Twisters, was not that movie. I just thought it was going to be people trying to survive killer tornadoes?

And maybe that was the bigger purpose of the movie: to highlight the contrast between people genuinely vexed and pre-traumatized by existential threats VERSUS the people who are just out there L-I-V-I-N-G, shooting firecrackers up a tornado’s butthole¹ and wanting to see people smooch in movies.

I’m not saying movies can’t preach a message or emphasize a larger truth other than what exists within the story.

When they made Enemy of the State, no one worried about the existential crisis it would throw millennials into as the first generation living through the possibility of a global and technological panopticon. THEY JUST MADE IT because the idea of Will Smith on the run with Gene Hackman was rad. AND IT WAS.

Sure, the movie was prescient about how technology’s encroaching consumption of our privacy, but we only realized that after the fact and I think that’s because Enemy of the State wasn’t freighted with the expectations of the writer and director having to take a stance on the catch-22 of technology gifting us with access and information but at the cost of our privacy.

I say all this to say that, in terms of function, Twisters is a serviceable reboot in that like most reboots (for a recent example the newest Mean Girls, Road House, or Furiosa iterations), they aren’t meant to move the ball forward on the story or in extending the universe as much as they are meant to remind you how much fun it is just to have the ball at all.  

AND NOW FOR THE VIBE CHECK…