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jarcheese2012
Reviews
San Andreas (2015)
Could this be the worst film of the year so far? Without question it is.
San Andreas is truly a disaster of monumental proportions.
The main character, Ray (Dwayne Johnson), is a divorced Search and Rescue helicopter pilot who is still in love with his estranged wife. Not only can he fly helicopters, he can also fly light aircraft and drive speedboats at the drop of a hat. In fact, he can do anything and if the scriptwriters (and I use that term loosely) hadn't been able to provide a vehicle for him they would probably have given him the power of unaided flight.
His estranged wife is about to move in with a mega-rich architect, who you are pretty sure will turn into a cowardly arsehole and meet a predictably sticky end.
His daughter has no personality knows everything about survival, something which, I assume, she has gained from her father by means of osmosis.
His daughter's love interest (Hugo Johnstone-Burt), a young British man (and by British I mean someone who is not British but is putting on an obviously fake British accent) who, despite being an engineer, is fairly stupid and follows her like a homeless dog would follow a tramp with bacon in his pocket. He also has an annoying kid brother.
The love interest's kid brother (Art Parkinson), is so annoying that you desperately want to see him die in horrific and (preferably) painful circumstances at the earliest opportunity, but unfortunately he doesn't.
The main characters are all rich, WASPish and thoroughly dislikeable, and bear no resemblance to anyone you would want to care about. Or meet. Ever.
There is no plot to speak of, just a series of unbelievable escapes that takes suspension of disbelief to a whole new level.
In one scene Ray's estranged wife is having lunch in a restaurant on the top floor of a skyscraper (where else?)when an earthquake hits. She phones Ray, who is about a hundred miles away and who tells her to head to the roof and wait for him.Ray flies to her rescue, ignoring all the other people requiring his assistance and when he gets there the building is starting to collapse. As she runs toward the helicopter the roof caves in and she falls about six storeys down, but amazingly she survives enough to run up the rubble and jump on to the helicopter.
Now, all this would have been fine if her character had for years been hiding her secret identity of Supergirl from her husband, but unfortunately she isn't the Man of Steel's unnecessary cousin. This is a woman who has just come from living the high life of the idle rich, and let's be honest here, if you were a Search and Rescue pilot whose wife had (presumably) been shagging this mega-rich arsehole for months and was about to move into his grand house with him, a house, by the way, that you could never afford in a million years on your measly Search and Rescue pilot salary, would you go out of your way to rescue her? I know I wouldn't. I'd be hovering over her rooftop rescue point in my helicopter shouting, "Burn bitch! You had it coming!"
The scene on the rooftop with Ray and his estranged wife takes place within the first thirty minutes of this CGI-heavy film, and as it plods inexorably and excruciatingly on the situations get progressively ridiculous and unbelievable. It's all spectacle and no substance, and the spectacle's nothing to write home about because the special effects are nothing you haven't seen before in other superior disaster movies. When are the people who produce these insults to intelligence going to realise that CGI effects are not a replacement for a solid screenplay and good acting.
But what about the dialogue? Well, I know this is difficult to believe, but it's even worse.
When Ray is whinging on about how he couldn't save his daughter from drowning (that's the first one than drowned), his wife says to him, "If you couldn't save her, Ray, no-one could."
Really? I bet they could have. An Olympic swimmer probably could have. Or a dolphin. Besides, throughout the film Ray proves that he's a pretty useless Search and Rescue pilot, choosing only to save members of his immediate family and annoying numpties with fake British accents. I wanted to include all the bad dialogue in the film in this review, but that would have meant printing out the entire screenplay, and I didn't have time for that.
The worst chunk of dialogue comes right at the end of the film. Ray's estranged wife looks at him with dreamy eyes (that's right, she's fallen in love with him again because he's so MANLY) and asks, "What now?" And, as the Stars and Stripes unfurls before him, he replies, "Now we rebuild."
Yeah, woo-hoo! Let's take the dumbest film of the year and add a bit of patriotism into the mix to make it doubly dumb.
I wish the San Andreas Fault had split open and swallowed up every extant copy of San Andreas. Preferably about a week ago, so I wouldn't have had the misfortune of watching it.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2015)
Excceeded My Expectations
About seven years ago I had to work away from home for three weeks, so I needed a decent book to read. I decided on Susanna Clarke's massive, doorstop of a novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It was recommended with a glowing review by Neil Gaiman and that was a good enough recommendation for me. At over a thousand pages I thought that it would keep me company for the entire three weeks and more. After ten days I needed to find another book. It was the first book in years that I had been totally engrossed in and also one which has stayed with me for much longer than the ten days it took me to read it. I have championed this book wherever I've lived and it is certainly one of the top five books I've ever read. I'm not a huge fan of fantasy literature, finding most of it turgid and unreadable, but because Susanna Clarke grounds her fantasy firmly in its own reality it was totally original and unique, like nothing I'd ever read before or since, and so when I heard that it was being adapted for television I was at first excited then worried that they would mess it up. After watching the first episode I can now say that not only did the BBC NOT mess it up but it exceeded my expectations. It was brilliantly designed, capturing the the flavour of the book's feel and it was superbly cast - Eddie Marsan is good in anything he's in, and he perfectly captures Norrell's isolationist magician. Bertie Carvel, who I've never heard of, was the flibbertigibbet Jonathan Strange I imagined from the book and Marc Warren was suitably sinister as the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair. A great start to a series that is going to get weirder and weirder as it goes on, if it continues to follow the book. Marvellous.
Safe House (2015)
Long, drawn-out, boring and utterly stupid
This is what I would regard as a typical ITV series - it starts intriguingly enough but ultimately disappoints. I have no beef with the actors who all played their parts as well as the ridiculous script allowed them to. I'm not going to give any spoilers in this review because there are no spoilers to give away because it's all so predictable. The actions of the characters are nonsensical, to say the least and the whole thing could have been over and done with in two episodes. In fact it looked like the writer had two incomplete stories and in his haste to get something on TV had fused them together in an attempt to make something passable. And don't get me started on the ending. Avoid this at all costs. It is without doubt the most boring, pointless and least suspenseful suspense thriller of the year, where most of the (in)action takes place in the most depressing B&B in Britain. It has no TV or internet, which would be a good thing for any guests staying there because they wouldn't have to watch rubbish like Safe House. If I could have given it no stars I would have.
Mr. Turner (2014)
The Emperor's New Clothes
I've been a fan of Mike Leigh's films for years. They have been funny, emotional and dramatic, sometimes all at the same time. In a recent interview he stated that this is the 20th film he has made without a script - and believe me it shows. It goes absolutely nowhere and tells you nothing about Turner that you don't already know. The critics seem to have been crawling up each other's trousers to praise this film. Yes, it's well acted and it's beautifully filmed = but that's it. There is NO STORY at all. I went with five other people (all art students) and we all found it incredibly boring. This is yet another example of professional critics getting it completely wrong. Don't be fooled by them. They've been wrong before. Avoid this film at all costs. It's beautiful by empty. It's the Emperor's New Clothes.
Happy Valley (2014)
Intense
The most intense, well written, well acted crime series I've ever seen on television. For six weeks I've been hooked on a story that uses a police drama as a framework for the human emotions that are at the core of this fantastic series. Steve Pemberton (The League of Gentlemen, Inside No 9) as the self-interested accountant out of his depth when a kidnapping plot goes horribly wrong was brilliant and James Norton was easily one of the best psychopaths I've ever seen in a television drama. There was real depth to his character and I expect he was hated by viewers as much as Joffre in Game of Thrones nonsense police officer. But it was Sarah Lancashire's show all the way as the tough, no-nonsense, but damaged police officer. At first I thought this was going to go the way of the film Fargo, with it's kidnapping-gone-wrong scenario, but by the start of the second episode it was clear that it was going to take a different path. Be warned though, it's dark and unsettling with moments of sudden shocking violence, especially at the end of the fourth episode, where I was left shaking at the sheer intensity of it all. Better than anything American crime dramas have had to offer us over the past year, it was brilliant. Absolutely bloody brilliant!