BEFORE: Last day of September, with Dwayne Johnson carrying over again from "Baywatch". Under 30 films left in the year, everything's still on track, and I fixed my method of burning to DVD, so everything's full steam ahead, until I have to stop for Comic-Con, and then vacation, and then a big break in November/December. But other than that, it's still full steam ahead...
Here's a quick format breakdown for September, as my monthly proof that cable TV still has value, and that streaming isn't taking over the world, not just yet:
16 Movies watched on Cable (saved to DVD): Snatched, I Feel Pretty, Burlesque, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Higher Learning, Fist Fight, Top Five, Creed II, Cheaper By the Dozen, Cheaper By the Dozen 2, The Happytime Murders, The Boss, Central Intelligence, The Rundown, Baywatch, San Andreas,
5 Movies watched on Cable (not saved): The Old Man & The Gun, BlacKkKlansman, Always at the Carlyle, Life of the Party, Skyscraper
3 Watched on Netflix: Our Souls at Night, Triple Frontier, The Clapper
1 watched on iTunes: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Paterson
2 watched on Hulu: If Beale Street Could Talk, Sorry to Bother You
1 watched on YouTube: Exit Through the Gift Shop
1 Watched in Theaters: Toy Story 4
30 Total in September
See? Cable's back, baby, accounting for 21 out of 30 films, that's OVER 2/3 of my line-up. And I made it through the whole month without cheating by watching an Academy screener (for contrast, I watched 7 of those in April), but I did mess with the timeline by watching "Toy Story 4" back in June and counting it now. Hey, I didn't know if it would still be available to me in September, so I did what I had to do.
THE PLOT: In the aftermath of a massive earthquake in California, a rescue-chopper pilot makes a dangerous journey across the state with his ex-wife in order to rescue his daughter.
AFTER: Oh, I don't even know where to START with this one - it's disaster porn of the highest level. A few years ago I spotted the trend in modern cinema of putting all of our high-tech cinematic effects into the area of collapsing buildings - as in "Man of Steel" and "Batman v. Superman", "Skyscraper" is another obvious one, but this has been ALL over movies for a while now. It's like collectively we're working out some leftover 9/11 guilt issues and we think that depicting this quite graphically in movies is going to lead to some kind of catharsis or something. If we, as a species, would only channel like HALF the same effort we put into making these destruction special effects look good into something more positive, like fighting climate change or getting the plastic out of the oceans, just think what we could accomplish. And what would we lose? Just a few more films that show us cities being destroyed, and do we really need to see that, in the long run?
Now, you may fall on the side of, "But we NEED to see this sort of thing on film, because that's better than seeing it in real life, or it will prepare us for the coming weather-pocalypse." OK, fine, but if that's where you come down on the issue I think you need to take a hard look at your priorities. And speaking of priorities, most of the issues I have with this film deal with priorities. The lead character (played by The Rock, of course) is a pilot of rescue helicopters - which is very convenient considering that those skills he has are going to come in VERY handy later in the film. He's more than just a pilot, he's a trained rescuer, he rescues people. Remember that, because that's also going to come in handy later in the film. However, once the earthquake hits, he ONLY uses those skills to rescue his daughter, who's in the middle of it all going down in San Francisco. First he has to get from L.A. (coming back from the Hoover Dam) up to San Francisco, along with his ex-wife, and together they have to locate their daughter in the midst of all the madness, and make sure that she's safe.
I'm not a parent, I'll probably never know what it means to care about a child, and to worry about them when they're in danger. But I can imagine what that's like - however, I question whether a parent should be concerned about their child, and only their child, and want to find them and rescue them to the level of where it's a detriment to every other person in the city. Let me stress this again, this lead character has been trained to help other people, even by risking his own life (not an ideal situation, but certainly a possibility) to save another's. Yet for the majority of the film, he blatantly does NOT help all the people he encounters, because somehow his daughter's life is more important. This, despite the fact that she's been in contact with him by phone, and (at the time of the call, at least), she's out of immediate danger and in a relatively safe spot. But NOPE, he insists that she leave the safety of the abandoned electronics store and head for the incredibly at-risk location of Coit Tower.
Her parents are on the way to save her (even though she's in no immediate danger) and to do that, they've got to ignore the well-being of everyone else they encounter. Remember that saying that the problems of two people don't amount to a hill of beans in this world? This character, who's trained to HELP OTHERS, and do no harm, flies over a collapsing freeway, and DOESN'T even call it in. For shame!
Later on, he and his ex-wife end up doing a tandem sky-dive out of a plane, just because he can't land it at the airport. Now, he claims that the plane will fall harmlessly into the sea, once it runs out of gas, but how the hell does he know that? What if he's wrong, and the plane crashes and kills someone on the ground? Or if it does crash into the sea, how does he know that it's not going to crash into a small boat and kill everyone on board? What about the fish in the ocean, who don't deserve to have a plane blow them up? This is just stupid on top of stupid at this point.
It might not be so bad, except that every so often, Dad says something like, "She's a smart girl, she knows what to do..." Umm, OK, so why the rush to get to San Fran and rescue her? Why not help out some of the people you meet along the way? Look, there goes another building crashing down, there could be a thousand people buried underneath that rubble. Oh, well, those people weren't smart enough to be born into a family headed up by a helicopter pilot, so screw them, I guess. Look, I don't expect one man to stop an earthquake, or a tidal wave, or prevent 1,000 deaths in the city of San Francisco, but I at least expect him to TRY to save more people, and not just his own daughter. His actions are questionable at best, even borderline criminal, to NOT help other people that he sees are in need. Just sayin'.
The other story concerns a seismologist who's testing a theory for predicting earthquakes, something to do with magnetic pulses or similar mumbo-jumbo, and they go out to the Hoover Dam, a place where there have been a lot of these pulses. OK, umm, theory confirmed, I guess. But he isn't able to get this information out to the public in time to actually HELP anyone, either. Or does he? That isn't very well explained, like after the first giant quake hits San Francisco, he manages to get some students to help him to hack the broadcast networks, and they get a message out for everyone to evacuate the city. Ya think? The people who really needed to see this message, however, were probably already without power. So it would have been nice to see some indication on screen that his message saved lives, just a little narrative tip. But the film just couldn't be bothered to do that, because it had to show us more buildings collapsing, very important.
Well, my wife did warn me about this movie, and I didn't listen to that helpful advice, so I guess I got what I deserved. There are at least a dozen other technical mistakes made here concerning earthquakes and tsunamis (for example, an earthquake in one location could cause a tsunami headed AWAY from it, but this earthquake somehow creates a tsunami that heads TOWARD the earthquake location, which is impossible) but I didn't think of them, I had to look them up on IMDB. So I don't get credit for noticing these mistakes, but they still exist, and that's a big problem.
Also starring Carla Gugino (last seen in "Gerald's Game"), Alexandra Daddario (also carrying over from "Baywatch"), Hugo Johnstone-Burt, Art Parkinson (last heard in "Kubo and the Two Strings"), Ioan Gruffudd (last seen in "King Arthur"), Paul Giamatti (last heard in "The Little Prince"), Archie Panjabi (last seen in "A Good Year"), Will Yun Lee (last seen in "Spy"), Alec Utgoff (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation"), Marissa Neitling, Kylie Minogue (last seen in "Moulin Rouge!"), Todd Williams, Matt Gerald (last seen in "Bright"), Colton Haynes (last seen in "Rough Night"), Morgan Griffin, Arabella Morton, and archive footage of Chris Cuomo (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone").
RATING: 3 out of 10 looted flatscreen TVs
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