A philosophy master student is pondering life and what her master thesis should be. With the help of her teacher, she finds a subject and starts following perfect strangers to find the meaning of life. As she does this, she lets her subject become an obsession and discovers a few things about herself.
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Director Jon Watts handles the element of Peter Parker’s life that the previous “Spider-Man” iterations didn’t, offering a compelling coming of age high school drama, whose main character is a super powered being trying to live up to impossible standards. When we meet Peter Parker, he’s a typical teenager vlogging his experience in “Civil War” where he brushed up against a slew of heavy hitting superheroes in an effort to help Tony Stark. When the movie begins Peter is returned to Queens to go back to being just a teenager who happens to be Spider-Man. Peter is a young man always trying to do what’s right and noble, he’s the true underdog of the Marvel Universe.
12 Feet Deep: Trapped Sisters (2017)
At eighty five minutes in length, “12 Feet Deep” has a dilemma it can never seem to get past. It sets up a premise that is only able to keep up momentum for forty minutes. The next forty five is very reliant on a ham fisted and hackneyed plot device. What the writers pose as a crisis of conscience and a woman reflecting on someone similar to herself instead feels like a desperate means of stretching a movie that could easily have been under an hour without the goofy filler. The movie could have easily shrunk down to twenty five minutes if our characters ever acted rationally. “12 Feet Deep” is another attempt at a survival thriller where characters are marooned in a very monotonous spot and have no means of escaping. Rather than being a white knuckle fight like “Frozen,” it instead becomes about people just making things more difficult than they have to be.
Baywatch (2017)
Like the original series, Seth Gordon’s “Baywatch” is an anomaly. With the original television series, it was a silly, and moronic action drama that most people weren’t sure should be laughed at, or taken seriously. The same can be said for the movie which itself is never sure if it wants to mock the original series, or create an earnest action movie around the frame work of the show. The Baywatch lifeguards work outside of their jurisdiction and seem to work hard to remind audiences that it’s incredibly far fetched for lifeguards to be investigating gang members and drug smugglers, so the film hops back and forth from slapstick satire to straight laced action comedy.
CHiPS (2017)
“CHiPS” was never a masterpiece of a cop show, but it definitely had its merits. It was a fairly mediocre crime show about two high way police officers going on various adventures revolving around highways and roads of all kinds. What Dax Shepherd does is gut the premise to deliver a generic buddy cop comedy that is also one of the worst movies of 2017. I’ve never seen a movie so ashamed of its own source material (despite “Wild, Wild West”), before. “CHiPS” seems to not only work hard to ignore the fact it’s an adaptation, but also seems to punish the audience for investing time in it. Shepherd’s direction is listless and uninspired, his performance and everyone else is phoned in, and the three man penned script is void of anything interesting or remotely comedic.
The Bootleg Files: Raintree County
BOOTLEG FILES 596: “Raintree County” (1957 epic with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor).
LAST SEEN: We cannot confirm the last exhibition of this film.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: A VHS video and LaserDisc release only.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Out of circulation in the home entertainment channels for too many years.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: It is possible.
There are some films that seem to be doomed from the first minutes of their inception through the last seconds of their release, and the 1957 epic “Raintree County” is one of the more notable examples. The story of its creation is far more complex and tragic than anything on that appeared on the screen.
Supaidāman (Spider-Man) (1978)
What was once considered just a passing joke by Spider-Man fans has managed to gather some cult acclaim over the years, and has even been embraced by Marvel (yes, it’s canon, now) and Stan Lee himself. “Supaidāman” is the Japanese incarnation of Spider Man that bears almost no resemblance to the character we know from the US. That doesn’t mean it’s terrible though, as the 1978 action science fiction series is quite entertaining and has a lot of innovative ideas we’d see in future Super Sentai series. Sure it’s cheesy and goofy in some way, (including the opening theme song) but there’s a lot to like if you can divorce yourself from the Marvel Spider-Man and think of this character as something from another universe.