SAN ANDREAS (2015)

I have a theory that goes something like this: 

There’s this bunch of people locked in a room somewhere in Hollywood blockbuster-land, who are kept in the dark and fed on scraps and are not allowed natural light or real food until they come up with a new idea. These people are not really human, but clones that have been created in a laboratory by splicing the DNA of Michael Bay with that of Roland Emmerich. 

So far this year these clones have been unsuccessful in coming up with anything close to an original idea. I know this because I have just sat through not just the dumbest action movie of this year, but the dumbest action movie in the history of the world so far.

It’s what is generally regarded as a disaster movie – and believe me, San Andreas is truly a disaster of monumental proportions that is predictable, ridiculous and cliché-ridden in equal measure. Not only that, and this is one of its biggest failings, it’s po-faced and humourless. And yes, I do know that the San Andreas Fault cracking open and killing millions of people should not be a source of levity, but come on – it’s a known fact that people in extreme circumstances often use self-deprecating humour to take their minds off the (sometimes) inevitable.

I mean, have the people involved in this garbage not seen Die Hard, Speed or Twister? These three movies use humour to lighten the tension and add a human dimension to the characters. Saying that, I suppose there would be no need to lighten the tension in San Andreas because there is none, and the reason for that is because you don’t believe in or sympathise with any of the characters. And why is that, I hear you ask. Well, I think the main reason is the fact that they all seem to have been created by a committee using well-worn, stock characters that have appeared in countless Hollywood blockbusters throughout the years. Let’s run through them now.

1.  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 (including bringing his daughter back to life after she’s drowned), 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.
2. His estranged wife (the usually reliable Carla Gugino) 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.
3. His wife’s boyfriend (Ioan Gruffudd) is a mega-rich architect who turns into a cowardly arsehole and meets a predictably sticky end.
4. His daughter (Alexandra Daddario) has no personality whatsoever, but knows everything about survival, apart from when she drowns, obviously. These survival skills are something which, I assume, she has gained from her father by means of osmosis.
5. His daughter’s dead sister (Arabella Morton), who died after she drowned in a white water rafting accident and who is merely a plot device so that Dwayne Johnson, when he’s bringing his other drowned daughter back to life, can say, “I’m not going to let another one die in similar circumstances.” Or words to that effect. I’m not sure what he said exactly because by this point in the film I wasn’t really paying much attention.
6. His (living) 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.
7. The love interest’s annoying kid brother (Art Parkinson), a character that is in every film of this kind who you would desperately like to see die in horrific and (preferably) painful circumstances at the earliest opportunity, but unfortunately doesn’t.
8. The geologist (Paul Giamatti – what the hell is he doing in this garbage?), an ‘expert’, who uses stock quotes from the Discovery Channel and who is so clever that he always knows what’s about to happen, but doesn’t tell anyone until just after it’s happened.
9. The female TV reporter (Archie Panjabi – what the hell is she doing in this garbage?) who serves no real purpose, but to hide under desks and look frightened.

Oh, and Kylie Minogue puts in a totally forgettable cameo performance as the mega-rich arsehole’s disagreeably snobby sister. So, these are the main characters, all rich, WASPish and thoroughly dislikeable, and who bear no resemblance to anyone you would want to care about. Or meet. Ever.

Which brings me to the plot, or lack of it. There is no plot to speak of, just a series of unbelievable escapes that takes suspension of disbelief to a whole new level. I could go on for pages about them, but for your sake, dear reader, I won’t. Instead I’ll just concentrate on one of them.

Ray’s estranged wife is having lunch in a restaurant on the top floor of a skyscraper (where else?) with the mega-rich arsehole’s disagreeably snobby sister when an earthquake hits. She phones Ray, who is about a hundred miles away and who tells her to head to the roof and he’ll come and pick her up. After half-heartedly attempting to convince other diners to join her she makes her way to the roof. Everyone else in the building, I assume, dies. Ray flies to her rescue, ignoring all the other people requiring his assistance (remember, he’s a Search and Rescue pilot), 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 would therefore only ever make such a concerted effort if losing her place at the front of the queue for a Gucci sale were at stake. 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.

So, that’s the characters, plot and effects taken care of. 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. Yeah, come on guys, let’s patriotically rebuild the city on this exact same spot so that it can serve as a constant reminder of all our families that died here and also so that it can be destroyed in the exact same way when the next disaster happens to come along. But let’s be honest here, folks – doesn’t any man dumb enough to have his home built on top of a major fault line and then whinge when all he owns disappears into it deserve everything he gets?

In fact, I wish the San Andreas Fault had split open – and swallowed up every extant copy San Andreas. Preferably about a week ago, so I wouldn’t have had the misfortune of watching it.

CARRY ON CAMPING (1969)

It’s official. The world has been going mad for ages.

It all really started in the 1980s when it was determined that Enid Blyton’s Noddy books, those innocent stories from our childhood should be removed from library shelves, because they apparently promoted anarchy, racism, homophobia, sexism and any number of other deviant activities that could be possibly construed as offensive to some minority group somewhere or other. Round about that time I was working as a Trade Instructor in Hereford, and it was there that myself and my colleagues were told that we were no longer allowed to use the word Blackboard when describing the black board that was at the front of each of our classrooms. The word that we were to use in its place was Chalkboard, because (apparently) Blackboard was considered to be a racist word. These ridiculous decisions were not made (or even asked for) by the minority groups they were supposed to be representing. 

No, those decisions were made by interfering white middle-class busy-bodies with too much money and time on their hands

Those were the halcyon days of political correctness, the days when you could, if you looked very hard, almost see where these reformers were coming from but as time moved on political correctness started to become decidedly surreal.

In her book My Invented Country, the Californian based Chilean novelist Isabel Allende described an incident when she asked for a rejected dog from the American version of our Guide Dogs for the Blind. She received an aggressive reply, bluntly informing her that the dogs were no longer to be referred to as rejected – the dogs in question had changed careers.

Brainstorming became unacceptable and instead you had to Mind Map or have a Thought Shower because the original term might upset people who suffer from epilepsy. But hang on, what about people who can’t make up their minds or people with no imagination – surely they would be equally offended by the terms Mind Mapping and Thought Shower!

Political correctness, it seemed, was destroying the world – survival of the fittest became survival of the unfittest, majority rule became minority rule.

The thing is – and this is what all the purveyors of PC never quite grasped – the majority of people didn’t care. The majority of people were not that thin skinned. Political Correctness may have been a good thing to begin with in order to protect people’s rights and dignity, but it went too far – it exceeded its usefulness. It became a joke. At first when a new PC word or phrase entered the lexicon you would have more than likely witnessed disbelief passing across people’s faces, but as it moved inexorably on those same people shook their heads in resignation at the sheer inevitability of it all.

The problem with telling people what words or phrases they can or can’t use creates another more serious problem. New words or phrases get invented or introduced to replace the ones that were denied and these would be more underhand, targeted and offensive, of which a good example is the name servicemen called the Falkland Islanders – Bennies. This was a term of endearment that referred to Paul Abbott’s character in the TV soap Crossroads who went around, like many Falkland Islanders, wearing a woolly hat at all times and was pleasant but not very bright. To the servicemen detached out there it seemed a perfect epithet. But someone higher up decided that the term Bennies was offensive and an order was published prohibiting its use. The very next day the servicemen had a new name for the Falkland Islanders – Stills. This was an altogether more subtle derogation than Bennies. The word Still was used as an adjective, with a silent word attached to it. The silent word was Bennies, so therefore the Falkland Islanders were still Bennies.

And talking of Bennies, whatever happened to Benny Hill. His TV shows have not appeared on our terrestrial TV screens for years. Why? Because it was decided that his brand of saucy seaside humour was deemed to be politically incorrect and that it was sexist and offensive to women. Instead of treasuring his work and looking at it in the context of the time it was made and the way it was intended he was banned. That didn’t stop our colonial cousins from across the pond accepting him with open arms. Benny Hill is loved by Americans, which might tell you something about their sense of humour, but it also tells us something about our own misplaced sensibilities. I, for once, am with the Americans on this one and Benny Hill should be remembered for the comic genius that he so obviously was. He did, after all, play Professor Peach in The Italian Job and give us the immortal lines: “Do you want it pasteurised, ‘cause pasteurised is best? She said, Ernie, I’d be ‘appy if it comes up to me chest,” in the most popular novelty record off all time Ernie, The Fastest Milkman in the West.

Bennie Hill may have been sacrificed at the altar of political correctness, but there is one series of films that, by their sheer popularity, have escaped virtually unscathed. They are, of course, the splendidly saucy Carry On films, my favourite of which is the wonderfully silly Carry On Camping (1969). It is a veritable feast of double-entendres and smutty innuendos that presents itself like a Donald McGill saucy seaside postcard that has come gloriously to life.

Carry On Camping Poster

It starts with Sid Boggle and Bernie Luggs (the wonderful Sidney James and Bernard Bresslaw) taking their repressed girlfriends, Joan Fussey and Anthea Meeks (Joan Sims and Dilys Lane) to the Playhouse Cinema to see a naturist film called Nudist Paradise, in the hope that they will agree to go with them on holiday to nudist camp. Joan is outraged by the film while Anthea is just plain embarrassed by it all. As the nudists in the film begin to play tennis and unfettered body parts start to jiggle around Anthea covers her eyes. “What’s the matter, An,” asks the rather dim Bernie, “don’t you like tennis?”

Sid, being Sid, tricks the girls into going with them to Paradise Camping Site, which he believes to be the camp in the film. When they get there they are greeted, to Sid’s delight, by a sign that reads ALL ASSES MUST BE SHOWN. “Where’s the manager?” Sid asks a boy standing by the sign. “He’s gone for a pee,” replies the boy. When the manager, Mr Fiddler (played by the marvellous Peter Butterworth) turns up, he puts a letter P in front of the word ASSES and to Joan’s delight they realise they’ve arrived at a normal camp site. It’s a great visual gag, one of many of which this film is bursting at the seams.

There’s a good story about Peter Butterworth. He was one of many actors who auditioned for one of the parts in the British WWII POW Escape film The Wooden Horse (1950), a true story about three RAF POWs who escaped via a tunnel they dug underneath a vaulting horse in Stalag Luft III. He was turned down because he didn’t look suitably heroic or athletic enough, which was ironic given that he was in actuality one of the POWs who, in 1943, vaulted over the Wooden Horse for hours on end to cover up the sound of digging.

Terry Scott and Betty Marsden are Peter and Harriet Potter, hen-pecked husband and wife with annoying laugh. There’s a scene when Charles Hawtry as Mr Muggins observes Harriet and Peter in their tent. Harriet is attempting to remove some buckshot from Peter’s backside. The tent is lit from inside and all Mr Muggins can see is the silhouette of them performing what appears some unusual sex routine. When Harriet offers Mr Muggins a space in their tent she is asked by him if they wouldn’t rather be alone. “Oh, we gave up that sort of thing years ago, didn’t we dear?” she says to Peter. “Yes, dear,” Peter replies, “you did, didn’t you.”

The actor/writer Mike Myers must have seen and remembered this when he was writing his knowingly hilarious Austin Powers films. Mike Myers grew up in Canada and his father was a great lover of British humour, and the Carry On films must have been on the list of things he watched. In fact, he must have liked it so much that he repeated the scene with increasing hilarity in the two sequels.

And then there’s the sex-mad pupils of Chayste Manor Boarding School for Girls, led by Barbara Windsor in all her fluffy, chortling glory. Accompanying them to the camp site are Dr Soaper (a manic Kenneth Williams) and the sexually repressed matron played by Hattie Jaques (who else?). The scene where Barbara’s bra pings off during an exercise session is a sight to behold and it wasn’t until Sharon Stone’s infamous pantie-less leg-crossing scene in Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 Basic Instinct did so many teenagers once again wear out the pause button on their VCRs.

In this day and age Carry On Camping would be regarding by the middle-class busybodies as Politically Incorrect and I, for one, am glad that there is at least some possibility of upsetting their delicate natures.

I mean, where on earth is all this Political Correctness going to stop?

Are we going to start calling Zebra Crossings Black and White Crossings because the term Zebra could be construed as being offensive to Striped Equines. Or maybe it needs to be changed because stupid people may think it’s actually a zebra lying in the middle of the road that’s been flattened by several thousand tons of heavy traffic. The problem is we can’t call them Black and White Crossings because the very term Black and White is offensive to two groups of people and possibly polar bears. And what about Pelican Crossings? Surely Semi-Aquatic birds should have a say in all this as well.

So what can we do about it?

I have a suggestion – it’s the only thing I can think of. Tonight at eight o’ clock I want everyone to hang out of their windows and shout at the top of their lungs the refrain used by Peter Finch’s desperately unhappy newsreader in Sidney Lumet’s brilliant 1976 film Network, “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE!”

Go on – try it. 

“I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE!”

Now, doesn’t that make you feel better?