Full disclosure: I will never watch Melania. And my sole comment on it is that pondering fellow NYU alum and perennial no-talent Brett Ratner’s reinvention as idjit Leni Riefenstahl gets me all a-titter, with heartier guffaws if I imagine him on-set looking like semi-doppelgänger Jonah Hill in the “Married Your Cousin” scene from The Wolf of Wall Street. May Rush Hour 4 be your history-written-with-lightning moment you scum-sucking bottom feeder.
Uppity jibes aside, let me say that, at heart, I try to view all beings in the light of what the Jesuit priest Father Gregory Boyle terms, in his book Cherished Belonging, their “unshakable goodness.” This prevents him from pivoting into unhelpfully loaded, limiting and inherently condemnatory binaries like “good/bad” or “stupid/smart.” The only polar-opposite terms he elevates are “healthy/unhealthy,” which helps stoke and sustain his foundational empathic response. This is something I believe it’s important to work toward and steadfastly maintain — even with those fellow humans who would end our lives, or, perhaps more challengingly, even with those fellow humans who labor, day-in and day-out, to make our individual and collective existences an interminably living hell. We have to remember these are not healthy people. But they are people still, their behaviors guided by fearful delusions, all of them apparently in full denial that there will come a day when they, like the peers they persecute, lose everything and everyone. I strive to remember (and it’s an effort somedays, let me tell you) that I am of them and they are of me, as we are all of each other.
’Course, I also often think about the story the meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg tells about the aftermath of her encounter with a belligerent drunk, who she allowed to run roughshod over her in the belief that any display of reactive force was a grievous blow to dogma and karma. “Oh, Sharon,” said her guru Munindra after she relayed the tale, “with all the lovingkindness in your heart, you should have taken your umbrella and hit that man over the head with it!”
Keep it compassionate even when thwacking with parasols. And do give Father Boyle’s books — in order of publication, Tattoos on the Heart (2010), Barking to the Choir (2017), The Whole Language (2021) and Cherished Belonging (2024) — prime places on your shelf, as well as the L.A.-based charity he helped found, Homeboy Industries (which ministers, without judgment, to the current and formerly gang-involved and incarcerated), your attention and support. He and his work are lodestars.
I suppose Sam Raimi’s Send Help fits the “return to form” that so many filmgoers crave from beloved auteurs gone to seed. For me, he peaked early with the dually-unhinged Evil Dead II (1987) and Darkman (1990), and at least followed with the worth-engaging trifecta of Army of Darkness (1992), The Quick and the Dead (1995) and A Simple Plan (1998). The rest I’m more than happy to forswear, particularly his jaunts into super-heroic matters Arachnid, Oz and Odd.
Compassion extended to those practical-F/X men doing the Headless-Chicken Trot in modern Hollywood’s trash-digital world. The key scene in Send Help sees Rachel McAdams’s punching-bag corporate cog — who turns the tables on Dylan O’Brien’s nepo boss-from-hell after his private plane crashes on a seemingly deserted tropical island — battling a hilariously unconvincing CGI boar that projectile-vomits buckets of actual stage blood. A very Raimi conceit that falls flat because the disparate aural and visual elements don’t mesh as they should, and done better besides in the exemplary Evil Dead 2 sequence that culminates with the director’s eternal muse, Bruce Campbell (whose “cameo” here is especially inspired), cackling maniacally alongside a demonically-possessed deer head and other dead-alive household objects.
Easy to revisit the hits, hard to re-up their quintessence. Raimi’s Looney Tunes nastiness has always been his best attribute, and Send Help generally tends toward that invigoratingly misanthropic ethos. Though, as evinced by a fakeout moment of gory emasculation that should really have gone full castrato, it too often pulls its punches, testicular and otherwise.