Entertainment
‘San Andreas’ – A must watch movie (Movie Review)
Film: “San Andreas”; Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Paul Giamatti, Ioan Gruffudd, Archie Panjabi, Hugo Johnstone-Burt, Art Parkinson and Kylie Minogue; Director: Brad Peyton; Rating: ***1/2
Layered with a family drama, “San Andreas” is a fictional, formulaic disaster film which showcases the largest earthquake recorded in history. The catastrophe occurs on the San Andreas Fault line. This fault line runs through California, and is the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American plate, which moves horizontally.
The film literally begins with a cliffhanger, where a young teenager, busy with her phone, drives off the road and lands on the side of the cliff, hanging for dear life. A rescue helicopter from the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), with a journalist on board interviewing its team leader Ray Gaines (Dwayne Johnson) lands up for the rescue operation, giving us an insight into the leader’s tough exterior.
But all is not hunky dory in Ray’s personal life. He has been served a divorce notice by his wife Emma (Carla Gugino) and work keeps him away from his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario).
While he is in mid-air, away on one of his rescue missions, he calls Emma to apologise for his rude behaviour of the previous day. And while he is in conversation with her, the earthquake occurs. He diverts his plane and goes to rescue her in Los Angeles. Soon the duo learn that their daughter too is stranded in San Francisco. Together, they journey to rescue her.
Amidst the tremors that are destroying the landscape from Los Angeles to San Francisco, we witness romance brewing between Blake and Ben, a British engineer who she has just met.
There is an innocence in their bonding and you feel for Ollie, Ben’s younger brother, who charms you with his British accent and innocuous insinuations.
Dwayne, as the emotionally soft person with a hard disposition is charming. And Alexandra Daddario as his know-all, intelligent daughter, steals your heart. Kylie Minogue who appears in just one scene is wasted.
What keeps you glued to the screen, apart from the performance, is Steve Yedlin’s brilliant camera work. Each frame is picture perfect and the shot that captures the Hoover Dam in Nevada, is one of the many good ones. Also, his work seamlessly meshes with the VFX team’s detailed, computer-generated images and effects which include the swarm effect of the earthquakes, a tsunami, boats and helicopters crashing, buildings collapsing and power lines snapping. The narration is full of dramatic effects that seem so real. The overall visual impact is spectacular.
What does not work for the film is the slightly off-balance script written by Carlton Cuse. While the family drama is interesting and gripping, it pales before the magnitude of the disaster. Also, the mayhem and rioting scenes during a natural disaster just do not appeal to a logical mind. You cannot connect the characters with the destruction unfolding around them.
And at the end, when Ray is asked, “So what now?”, he replies, “Now we rebuild,” and the American flag unfurls. This smacks of American patriotism and the moment is a killjoy.
Nevertheless, “San Andreas” is an ideal blockbuster, which reminds you about the strong temblors that destroyed Nepal and shook northern India in the recent past.
International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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