(From IMDb.com)

You can’t go to a reboot of the late 1980s TV beach ogler Baywatch without expecting a whopping serving of cheesecake shots and cheesy lines, plot and setups.

The old school version, original network run and for years in syndication, gave America the team of David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson as Mitch Buchannon and C.J. Parker, lifeguards who guarded their Southern California beach with a passion for detective work, slow-motion jiggle and, well, whatever the show-makers thought they could get past the censors.

Director Seth Gordon and screenplay writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift have a new age and R rating to play with for their big screen vision.

And so we get Dwayne Johnson as Mitch, Kelly Rohrbach as C.J., and a whole lot of the same cheese, different varieties.

Johnson’s main partner in patrol turns out to be a guy, a former Olympian gold medalist who…

Standing out there in the downpour, beyond the green rows of a new garden. He was bent far over before the flat gray sky in what appeared to be an attitude of prayer or adoration, his arms at his sides. The rain had plastered his shirt to his back and his short black hair glistened. He did not move at all while I stood there, fifteen or twenty minutes. And in that time I saw what it was I had wanted to see all those years…The complete stillness, a silence such as I had never heard out of another living thing, an unbroken grace.

~ Barry Lopez, from “Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren”

Notes:

• Inspired by: 5:08 a.m. 55° F. Quiet. A cool breeze flows through the open window. The pitter patter of soft rain falls on the Earth on this Memorial Day, May…