July Movies Part 2: Kinds of Kindness, Twisters, Deadpool & Wolverine

It must be summer because I watched a movie about chasing tornadoes, a Marvel movie with two superheroes, and...a weird little Oscar contender from Yorgos Lanthimos. Let's get into it!

Kinds of Kindness: I think that I like director Yorgos Lanthimos's movies when he doesn't write the screenplay himself. But he definitely wrote this movie, and I don't know what to make of any of it. This film is an anthology of three different stories that star the same cast of actors, and each tale is weirder and gorier than the last. You've got Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, Willem Defoe, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn, rotating through a series of increasingly weird and outlandish characters, and if you came here looking for answers, I'm afraid I have none to give you.

There's a lot of body horror in all three stories, and a lot of heightened comedy that plunges into abject tragedy. You have a lot of characters who think they have their lives all figured out only to face crippling doubts and then face heinous consequences as they try to forge a new path for themselves. Everyone's flying too close to the sun, and everyone comes crashing down to earth, and at the end of the day, you'll walk out of the theater going, "Well, that was certainly an experience!" Your mileage may vary, but if you're looking for an absolutely bonkers night at the movies, this movie should be your top pick.

Twisters: If you're looking for an absolutely predictable and entertaining night at the movies, then this is the movie you go for. Written by Mark L. Smith and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, this film follows two teams of tornado chasers in Oklahoma who have different agendas but will ultimately have to team up if they want to save some desperate townsfolk from the ravages of climate change. There's riveting action, there's great visual effects, and there's Glen Powell walking through the rain in a white T-shirt. Check, check, and CHECK.

Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, and Glen Powell play Kate, Javi, and Tyler, three separate storm chasers who are all operating under slightly different motivations. Kate and Javi go way back, and Kate has agreed to help him out for a week for a special project that she thinks could help people and Javi thinks will help him make money. Tyler is a YouTube star known as the "Tornado Wrangler," who likes to make theatrical videos of his storm chases, so obviously Kate thinks he's a moron. But if you've ever watched a movie or read a book before, you can imagine that their relationship is gonna take some...twists (sorry, I couldn't resist). This movie is a great popcorn flick, and it presumably has important things to say about the climate and taking care of our planet, but I don't live in tornado country, so I didn't really pay attention to that. I was more mesmerized by the white T-shirt in the rain.

Deadpool & Wolverine: Well, it's another Marvel movie. Directed by Shawn Levy, this film teams up the irreverent Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) with the grumpy Wolverine (Hugh Jackson), who are up against an evil stooge from the Time Variance Authority (you may remember the TVA if you watched Loki, but otherwise...just go with it), played by Matthew Macfadyen, who is certainly delighting in being a Marvel villain. If one British villain wasn't enough, we also get Emma Corrin as a secondary baddie, and there is lots of action and adventure and R-rated hijinks.

At this point, I definitely have Marvel fatigue, so I'm not going to pretend this movie was a rollicking delight. It has an absolutely banging soundtrack, and it featured some incredible cameos that truly perked me up, including a shoutout to Wrexham that was very cheering. But I could not keep up any level of enthusiasm for the 2-hour runtime of this movie. The whole snarky Deadpool shtick was novel the first time but has worn out its welcome at this point. It's less funny than just very silly, and while it was clear to me that this movie is probably going to be an absolute riot and joy to the die-hard comic book fans, if you're a casual Marvel movie fan like me, you're probably not going to care that much. The music and cameos were my personal highlight, but that seems like a bit of a waste for a movie that was supposed to make me excited about Deadpool and Wolverine instead.