Twister(s)
I watched Twisters (2024) yesterday and like any normal person, I became obsessed with the beautiful camera strap that the main character (played by Daisy Edgar Jones) was wearing.
Anyway, you can find it here, available for the low, low price of $300: https://roseanvil.com/products/lone-bandit-camera-harness
...I don't even have a camera. Why would I need a camera strap.
Prior to watching this, I watched Twister (1996) on discord with some friends. We'd all grown up with it on VHS. It was perhaps one of the biggest CGI blockbusters of its time. My mother was always fond of the "Cow...another cow" line; it broke her into peals of laughter.
Twister (1996) still holds up. In fact, I recommend it. It's clean and direct in its drama, the set pieces are amazing, and the CGI aged beautifully to this day. I think Helen Hunt plays her character a bit more convincingly than Bill Paxton, but these are believable performances, and you even get to see more (haha) of the late Philip Seymour (get it) Hoffman. It is a movie that tries as genuinely as it can. The heart is always there.
Twisters (2024), in comparison, feels like a modern day Call of Duty game. The setpieces never seem to stop. Compared to the original, the CGI scenes are brimming. Everything overflows. Too much crammed into one screen. If you've watched the original before this, you'll catch some lovely references. 'Lovely' being the keyword here, because none of them are overt: a mention of Dorothy here, another horror movie screen there (Frankenstein!), and a small line at the end that nobody caught except for me, and when I explained it to my friends on discord I got a collective and joyful 'oohhhhh'.
Twisters is a good movie though. It's failings may be its ambitions, but I would not fault it that much. It tries to be more dramatic, sometimes reaching. The dialogue can be...again, I bring up the Call of Duty comparison here, because the main character constantly gets explained things on the way to the mission in the most basic, audience coddling terms possible, when we know she should've long been briefed before this. I have some...gripes about the music choice and how it fails to blend closely with the original soundtrack. The transitions are overt. Jarring. And it's not just my dislike of country music. The music and the editing of certain sequences can punch you right out of the film. I can only describe my feeling as whiplash.
But it's a good movie. I had a great deal of fun with it.