Send Help

Rachel McAdams

Sam Raimi's Send Help is genuinely exciting cinema, his best film since Spider-Man 2. As usual, the pulpiness of Raimi's style has led him to be underrated; as Hitchcock was in his day. Yet, history will show that Raimi is just as expert a craftsman as Hitch with an equally mordant sense of humor. Raimi, however, is devoid of Catholic guilt. The screenplay, by the team of Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, swiftly engineers a battle of the sexes on an uncharted desert isle. The combatants are office mouse Linda Little (Rachel McAdams) and her odious nepo baby boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien). Linda is a hardworking grinder, who talks to her pet bird and eats tuna fish salad sandwiches at her desk. Raimi has frumped up Ms. McAdams as much as one can and dressed her in tones of beige to make her as dorky and unappealing as possible. Bradley doesn't prefer the image she projects and passes Linda over for a long overdue promotion. She objects and her moxie gets her a ride on the corporate jet to Thailand where Bradley plans to jettison her.

Of course, the tables are turned after Raimi provides us with one of the most hair raising plane crashes in cinematic history. The duo are stranded on a small island in the Gulf of Thailand. Bradley has an injured leg and is as helpless as a baby, a whiny and entitled one at that. The casting, McAdams is a decade older than O'Brien, plays up his lack of maturity. Linda, a Survivor fan, is in her element. She thrives in this environment where survival is a true battle of the fittest and Daddy's riches can't bail one out. Bradley becomes a mouth to feed in a film in which the central motif is what is going into and out of people's mouths. The level of gore and effluvia is high. Raimi really emptied his amniotic sac on this one. That the film champions women as the stronger and more resilient sex should be no surprise to fans of the director who has broached feminist themes since Xena. 

I admired Dylan O'Brien's performance as Dan Ackroyd in Saturday Night and he does equally good work here in tamping down his natural charisma to play a spoiled and aging adolescent. Bradley is never able to countenance that Linda could be an equal partner and that helps bring about his downfall. Thus, McAdams has the plum role and she delivers a gutsy and memorable performance. Raimi has said that he felt he under utilized McAdams talents in Dr. Strange in The Multiverse of Madness, but this role makes up for that neglect. I have been a big fan of the actress since I first spied her on the wonderful first season of Slings and Arrows and am glad she gets to strut her stuff in a good genre film as she did in Wes Craven's Red Eye. You don't get an Oscar for appearing in pulp horror that open in February, but McAdams has already racked up enough great performances for a lifetime achievement award in, let's hope, forty years.

Art College 1994

          
Liu Jian's Art College 1994, from 2024, is an animated drama that looks at the intersecting lives of college students. The main characters are feckless art student Zhang Xiaojun and his best bud "Rabbit". Most of the film is taken up with ruminative BS sessions between the two in their dorm room and on the quad. The two indulge in navel gazing while they drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Zhang flirts with a shy piano student, but their furtive relationship eventually evaporates. Liu juggles over thirty speaking parts, some impersonated by noted figures in Chinese music and cinema like the director Bi Gan, to create a broad picture of academia that is both warm and mildly satiric. 

The only classroom lecture shown in the film, which the students largely ignore, lays out the twin poles of artistic influence that the students must individually confront. The shifting perspectives of Eastern art is contrasted with the single fixed point of view which the lecturer says categorizes Western art. The mise en scene of Art College 1994 reflects this bifurcation. Nearly all of the conversational scenes in the film resemble the rotoscoped animation used by Richard Linklater in A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life. Art College 1994's hand drawn animation is cruder than those films, but captures their first person immediacy. Between these scenes of digressive dialogue are snippets that focus on nature: a butterfly floating above the quad, bugs and lizards negotiating rocks. These are the moments that reflect Asian art's influence upon Liu Jian, reminiscent of Eastern landscape painting and the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Zhang Xiaojun ultimately rejects traditional Chinese painting and embraces Western experimentalism, bringing an end to his academic career.

The funny and frank dialogue redeems the more aimless sections of the film. It is hard to capture the puffed up bubble of academic life without indulging in the rabbit holes of digression. Art College 1994 often feels jejune, but it is true to the limited scope of its youthful characters. 

Broken Rage

Takeshi Kitano

Takeshi "Beat" Kitano's Broken Rage has languished all 2025 on Amazon Prime with little notice. It is an odd film, divided in two discrete parts, the former a crime drama, the latter a comedic parody of a crime drama, à la Jerry Lewis. Kitano plays Mouse, a hit man who lives anonymously and follows an almost ritualistic existence. We follow him as he executes two jobs, but he is then apprehended by the cops who put the screws to him. Mouse agrees to infiltrate a yakuza mob who control the heroin market. Mouse helps brings down that gang and struts off, presumably to enter the witness protection program. The tone is tossed off and minimal, like the protagonist. The comic second half of this very short film, 67 minutes, has the same narrative, actors, and situations as the first half; with the addition of pratfalls and very broad humor. 

Broken Rage is certainly a self indulgent film, but it is an accurate reflection of the bifurcation of Kitano's career. He is best known in the US for directing and starring in hard boiled action films like Sonatine and Fireworks. Kitano had a brief vogue here in the 1990s, but has fallen off the map critically in America during this century. In Japan, he is best known as a comic performer and that has been his bread and butter in his homeland. Thus, Broken Rage displays the poles of his talent: half Jean Gabin, half Leslie Nielsen. Broken Rage barely qualifies as a feature, but it has structural integrity and strong performances. It further establishes Kitano as a minor director, but a major performer.