Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, ex-wrestler and current second highest-earning actor, does some amazing saving all through San Andreas, a new 3D earthquake disaster movie which crumples the US west coast like a crisp packet. In one scene, he instructs screaming people to crouch by a wall. They do so, and a skyscraper collapses around them. No one is hurt. “You just gotta get up against something sturdy,” he explains to the crowd – among them his estranged wife. Her eyes shine with renewed desire. She’s thinking what we’re all thinking: there is nothing sturdier than The Rock.
At Cannes, a fresh wave of climate change fiction films were announced, all of which aim to engage audiences with exciting stories of direct action activism, rather than dire warnings about impending apocalypse (such films having conspicuously failed). San Andreas does the same for seismic calamity. It hopes to get Californians pre-planning not just by showing what might happen if they don’t, but through the relentless glamorisation of practical competence.
For it’s not just The Rock who’s sturdy here. His 19-year-old daughter is stranded without cellphone service as San Francisco cracks up around her. But she knows where the high ground is and how to get there. She can read an actual map and hack a police walkie-talkie. She also knows how to bandage a wound and, most amazingly, how to locate a landline. “You’re astonishing,” says a bloke with whom she’s teamed up, before moving in for a snog. These two first met, incidentally, when he spilt his coffee and she came to his rescue with a wet wipe. It’s her resourcefulness, not her big eyes and small vest, that seals the deal. Sensible isn’t just life saving. It is, says San Andreas, seriously sexy.
I came home on Tuesday evening having heard tell of the Harringay tsunami: a north London flood caused by a burst water main, which turned 300 yards of road on the way to my house into a river. “When it first happened the water came gushing down the street like a tsunami,” a local shopkeeper was quoted as saying. “We were all a bit scared.” As I walked towards the disaster zone I had plastic bags ready to use as impromptu galoshes. In fact the street looked the same, just cleaner. But it’s good to know cinema can still inform, as well as entertain.
The great chocolate heist
What does £201,000 worth of Toblerone look like? We may never know. Yesterday, six men were convicted of nicking three lorries from a haulage yard near Dover. One contained £23,000 worth of whisky, the other £40,000 of miscellaneous swag and the third a presumably vast amount of the triangular chocolate. But despite the jail terms, the Toblerones have never been recovered – although the lorry itself was found, abandoned in Lancashire. Alan Partridge fans will recall his barefoot drive to Dundee while bingeing on Toblerones, to which, he reveals in his autobiography, he’d become “medically addicted”. Lancaster is, of course, just over halfway to Dundee from Dover. To point fingers is always dangerous. But this does feel fishy.
Fast cars and flip-flops
Flying back from Cannes on Monday, the plane was full of people in huge watches (the men) and white jeans (the women), who’d been on a jolly to the Monaco Grand Prix. Fetishisation of the sports car is big on the Riviera. The main drag at Cannes is nose-to-tail with flash motors – low-slung yellow Ferraris and sober tinted-window trucks. All of them inch along, doing about two miles an hour, unable to get into second gear on account of the buildup. There’s something uniquely pleasing about speeding past a Porsche in your flip-flops.
