Tits & Disasster

Ok so this is a short piece, mostly my afterthoughts on San Andreas and the conflicting feelings i have on it, so you're going to miss most of my trademark throat-scarring screeching but you still get to hear me incompetently address feminism.

San Andreas is weird. It's not a Roland Emmerich movie for some reason, although there is someone with the last name Emmerich that helped produce it so maybe his kids help make large scale disasterpieces now. It's not the worst piece of shit I've ever seen, nor is it the worst disaster movie i've ever seen, it's just about 20 minutes too long, and filled with several extremely distracting elements that wind up taking you out of the movie.

I think more people died during this than were killed during Judgment Day by Skynet. I am completely serious. This is the grimmest, darkest, most cavalier approach to mass destruction in recent memory. MILLIONS of people have to be dead by the time the end credits roll. Los Angeles falls down completely, everyone in a building taller than 3 stories is killed. San Francisco is overwhelmed by tsunamis that obliterate the city quicker and more efficiently than any kaiju could manage. And Bakersfield in one scene is shown eating itself through widespread looting and chaos, which isn't much of a change from regular Bakersfield.

You see so many goddamn people crushed, exploded, drowned, squished, annihilated, smooshed, and tore the fuck up, I have no idea how this was rated only PG-13.

It's bizarrely violent and there's only so many times you can see skyscrapers fall over like dominoes before you get tired and want to leave already.

Death and destruction aside, I think this exemplifies a problem with any sort of visual media, which deals with me being a chauvinist pig. Dwayne Johnson is a fun leading man in any movie he's in, although his most personal and accurate role was as Hercules since he's kind of a demigod at this point. Paul Giamatti is in about 15 minutes total playing an earthquake scientist in "the most scientifically accurate didaster movie ever made", and serves no purpose. Behind those two actorbs, though, is the most distractingly sexy cast of people I have ever seen.

The people in this movie are too attractive. That's it. There is way too much ideal genetics and bone structure onscreen, you can't focus on any one thing in particular. There's a deep vein of irony in this production, Hollywood needs sexy, vivacious meat onscreen for the popcorn shovelers to sit still for 117 minutes, but this proves it's possible to overdo it.

FOR EXAMPLE:
Paul Giamatti has these two research assistants, one is this athletic girl who always has a zip-up sweater zipped to just below her breasts, highlighting her assets, and a beefcake Russian transfer student who has weird and distracting arm tattoos.

Those nameless assistants do not hold a candle to three of the main characters though. The Rock's wife, his daughter, and her love interest.
1: Carla Gugino is Dwayne Johnson's estranged, soon to be divorced wife. At the start she's dating Mr. Fantastic from the shitty 2000's fantastic four movies, but he quickly reveals himself to be a coward and after murdering several people trying to escape San Francisco dies like the brother in Cloverfield by being smashed on a bridge. Onscreen. Carla Gugino is a mediocre actress, frankly has never been in a good movie and after Sucker Punch can be written off entirely, mostly starring in things her Italian filmmaker husband makes. She's really pretty, to the point where it feels like she'd just be mean to you since you exist on such a lower level than her, it's just a fact of nature.

2: the true offenders: Alexandra Daddario, and the english hunk that plays her eventual boyfriend.
The british guy that Daddario saves from being killed at pretty much every turn is handsome, tall, and muscular, so he's just eye candy that is there just to help 50% of the market sit through the movie.
But Alexandra Daddario. Man. Just.... man.
First off she's 30 years old, playing The Rock's soon to be going to college daughter, introduced in her first scene on the phone in a bikini at a house that must have cost 80 million dollars.
Secondly, to paraphrase Cosmo Kramer, she has got some real hooters, which are front and center on display. She's already done full-frontal nudity as Woody Harrelson's mistress in the first season of True Detective, which makes it extremely hard to take her seriously as a college freshman, but man her mammaries are insane. She also has those blue eyes that are ringed with almost black-blue, and looks like a robot who will murder you when you don't know the location of John Connor or his lieutenants.
Running, jumping, ripping off fabric from her shirt to tie a tourniquet around beefcake's leg before pulling out a 6 inch piece of glass from his leg...

Look I'm not a prude, and I also hope I'm not the worst person on the planet, but when you frontload a movie with a cast that is so superficially beautiful and a step away from the porno parody of the movie itself it winds up undermining the foundation of the picture to the point where it falls over like one of the thousands of skyscrapers destroyed by God finally giving those goddamn liberal homos what for.

(P.S. the Transamerica building, that triangle pyramid in SF falls down, but MOSTLY OFFSCREEN. FUCK YOU THAT'S THE WHOLE REASON WE WATCH SAN FRANCISCO DISASTER MOVIES TO SEE THAT THING CRUMBLE)