Dwayne Johnson Carries It All in “San Andreas”
By Skip Sheffield
If anyone can carry the weight of a movie on his shoulders,
it would be the broad, beefy shoulders of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
Johnson saves everyone he can save from the first few action
moments in the earthquake disaster flick “San Andreas.” The movie begins with a
disaster of another kind: a teenage girl texting while driving on a twisty Los
Angeles mountain road. Joe (Dwayne Johnson) an LAFD helicopter pilot, is
summoned by 911 to rescue the girl hanging in a cliff. After a harrowing effort
that nearly crashes the copter, Joe saves the girl- all in a day’s work.
Meanwhile at Caltech, a seismologist, Dr. Lawrence Hayes
(Paul Giamatti) frets that no one will listen to him concerning his promising efforts
to predict impending earthquakes. “We’re 100 years overdue for a major
earthquake,” he warns. Dr. Hayes detects suspicious activity in the vicinity of
Hoover Dam in Nevada and dispatches an associate to the site.
So begins the first of the impressive computer-generated
images of destruction of well-known landmarks. So also begins the first of the
logical conundrums in Andre Fabrizio’s fanciful story and Carlton Cuse’s
screenplay. Wouldn’t a 7.1 Richter scale earthquake also wreak havoc on Las
Vegas, only 30 miles away? Who knows?
Instead we go back to Joe and his domestic problems. He
wants to take his daughter Blake (Alexandra Dabbario) up to college in San
Francisco, but his estranged wife Emma (Carla Gugino) has agreed to let her new
boyfriend, high-end real estate developer Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffudd, in
full slime mode) take Blake and Emma.
Meanwhile signals are even more alarming in the laboratory
of Dr. Hayes. Signs of seismic activity are showing alone the entire 800-mile
San Andreas Fault, which runs up the spine of California to San Francisco. This
is where a disastrous 7.8 to 8.3 earthquake destroyed the City by the Bay in
1906. Dr. Hayes is predicting a 9.5 quake, which would equal the greatest ever
measured, off the coast of Chile in 1960.
So Joe must rescue his wife, who has been abandoned by her
cowardly boyfriend, as well as his daughter, trapped in wreckage, and her new
nerdy British boyfriend Ben (Hugh Johnstone-Burt) and his kid brother.
If you like disaster movies, you will find a satisfying
level of mayhem, with Joe in a rubber boat miraculously avoiding one peril
after another. If you are cynical you will scoff at the Hollywood illogics of
pretty women who emerge unscathed from major mishaps. Hey, it’s only a movie,
and Dwayne Johnson makes a humanly appealing superhero.
Catherine Deneuve in “In the Name of My Daughter”
If you are looking for something a little classier and more
mysterious, acclaimed French director André Techine delivers “In The Name of My
Daughter,” a romance wrapped up in a murder mystery in the South of
France in Nice.
French cinema grande dame Catherine Deneuve is Renee Le
Roux, the imperious owner of a casino called Le Palais. Her estranged daughter
Agnes (Adele Haenel) has just returned from Africa, penniless, and she appeals
to mom for some help.
Renee’s chief advisor is a shifty lawyer named Maurice
Agnelet (Guillaume Canet), who is also her lover. Maurice is quite a womanizer who has several
lovers. Despite dire warnings, Agnes falls for the conniving creep.
“Name of My Daughter” will confirm all your worst suspicions
about scheming, manipulative, ambitious males. Making this all the more
disconcerting is the fact the screenplay is inspired by an actual missing-person scandal
case in France.
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