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.
Tag Archives: Drama
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.
You Get Me (2017)
Netflix’s newest original film is a derivative and silly “Fatal Attraction” wannabe that wouldn’t even pass muster in a discount movie theater. “You Get Me” feels shockingly dated, almost like something released in 2001, and barely skids by as background noise. Its narrative is achingly paper thin to the point where the movie submits itself to endless montages filled with silly club and dance music. Even the finale is botched with a ridiculous ode to “Sunset Boulevard.” Director Brent Bonacorso struggles very hard to deliver a modern day digital version of “Fatal Attraction” when it barely registers as a “Swimfan” clone.
Man in the Camo Jacket (2017)
This documentary shows the rise to fame of The Alarm member Mike Peters, the slowdown of his career, his fight with cancer, and how he turned all it around by helping the cancer cause and getting back into performing.
Ricco the Mean Machine (1973)
“Ricco the Mean Machine” is a gruesome but unusual revenge picture, and it’s rare you can see a movie where two thugs are driving on a road and get a strip tease by a stranded woman who straddles the hood. It’s every bit as exploitative, sleazy, and weird as you’d expect from a movie made in 1973, and that’s probably why I enjoyed it so much. Demicheli’s action thriller is very unlike what you’d expect from a revenge movie. Sure, its hero is out for blood but not because of the reasons you’d expect. Ricco is released from prison to discover that his mob boss father was killed, but upon this discovery he really holds not malice about it. Continue reading
Beatriz at Dinner (2017)
Beatriz is a healer, a holistic health practitioner, whose car breaks down at a wealthy client’s house after she gave her a massage. The client invites her to stay for a celebratory dinner party her husband and herself are hosting that night. Like a fish out of water, Beatriz has dinner with three extremely wealthy couples with whom she has little to nothing in common.
The Substitute 3: Winner Takes All (1999)
Karl Thomasson is back and is still tortured by his days serving in the military. After flashing back to his old days with a military buddy named Macy who made him swear an oath before he died while imprisoned, he visits his Macy’s daughter. She so happens to be a teacher at a fictitious college where the dominant force is the school football team, all of whom are juicing up on some kind of experimental steroids. After she’s attacked by local drug dealers, Thomasson takes it upon himself to go undercover as a professor and begin investigating who attacked her. While trying to figure out the identity of her attackers, he uncovers a drug ring and begins learning about the dangers of steroids as players slowly either turn up dead or become increasingly violent.