'Send Help' is a Dumb-Fun January Movie If You Don't Think Too Hard
Plus, a journey into the dark heart of 'Melania'.
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the late aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
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‘Melania’ May Go Down As the Least Revealing Documentary Ever Made
Yes, I saw the Melania Trump documentary, directed by Brett Ratner, this past weekend (here he is posing with his buddy Jeff Epstein). It killed me to have to wait the entire weekend to share my review, but I guess that’s just what happens when your town inexplicably cancels all of their Thursday screenings leaving you to try to file a review at 4:45 pm west coast time on a Friday.
Suffice it to say, the screenings must not have been canceled for lack of interest, because my Friday screening was PACKED. With almost no empty seats, I was one of two patrons younger than 70 and seemingly the only person there for reasons other than loving Melania Trump. They oohed, they awed, they applauded, they breathed loudly from serious lung ailments.
As for the film, one of the things that struck me about it (and not many things did, it was mostly an insanely boring two hours of a lady getting on and off of planes) was that, in one of its only supposedly candid scenes, a tremendously obnoxious Brett Ratner (this dude’s central quality is being incredibly annoying) asks Melania, with all the intimacy of an engagement bait tweet, “who is your favorite recording artist?”
She answers “Michael Jackson,” and the two sing along to “Billie Jean” in the back of a limo or SUV.
I mention it because if you know anything about Brett Ratner beyond him being a formerly semi-canceled sex pest, it’s that he loves Michael Jackson. There are multiple Michael Jackson scenes in the Rush Hour movies. There’s also this famous clip of Ratner dancing and singing along with Michael Jackson, to R. Kelly’s “Ignition” (a nesting doll of alleged sex criminals almost too layered to believe):
Is Michael Jackson Melania’s favorite recording artist, or is Brett Ratner simply passing off his own likes as Melania’s because he knew he could get the rights to the song? And what does it say when even the fluffiest human interest parts of a “documentary,” like the subject’s favorite musician, are so transparently faked? The documentary tells us that she used to be a model probably ten times, but I don’t believe I ever heard her maiden name. Honestly a towering achievement in saying absolutely nothing.
Sadly for everyone assuming it would bomb, that does not seem to be the case.
Matt Belloni reported on Friday that “MELANIA projected to gross $8.1M domestic this weekend, well above pre-release estimates. Audience is 72% female and 72% age 55 and older. Top markets include: Dallas, Orlando, Tampa, Phoenix, West Palm Beach. No, that is not normal.”
That audience breakdown absolutely squares with my experience in Fresno, California, but Melania also mentions Matt Belloni by name in the film so deliberately that it feels like product placement, so take that for what you will.
The actual numbers came back slightly lower ($7 million for the weekend, domestically), which was still good enough to qualify Melania for the best documentary opening in 14 years. Concert films excluded, which is maybe a generous qualification, since it feels like nothing so much as a concert film.
Of course, the fact that Melania fell below tracking numbers from just two days prior suggests that once the die-hard cultists performatively seeing it on opening day were gone, there wasn’t much audience left.
It was a face-saving result for the first lady — last week, ticket sales were pacing at about $5 million — but not for Amazon, which spent an exorbitant $75 million to buy distribution rights to “Melania” and market its release in 1,778 domestic theaters. Theater owners keep roughly 50 percent of ticket sales, meaning that Amazon will end the weekend with about $3.5 million to show for its investment.
On Saturday, analysts projected roughly $8 million in domestic ticket sales for the nearly two-hour film. The actual amount, $7 million, suggests that opening day was front loaded with Mrs. Trump’s fans. (Analysts projected the $8 million by collecting Friday sales data from various theater circuits, measuring presales for Saturday and Sunday and extrapolating from there.)
Even so, “Melania” had the best result for a wide-release documentary, excluding concert films, since 2012, when the nature film “Chimpanzee” arrived to $10.7 million, or about $15 million after adjusting for inflation, according to Comscore data. [NY Times]
So it sounds like Amazon will end up losing money on Melania, but that’s only if you think of it as a movie that was intended to make money and not a bribe to the Trump family from Jeff Bezos, who appears at multiple inaugural events in the film (along with Musk, Zuckerberg, Dana White, and Joe Rogan). Tell us again how you can’t afford to run the Washington Post, asshole.
One of the big questions surrounding Melania’s box office was, is the audience genuine, or just a false boost from ghost patrons and group sales? There was that viral Craigslist Boston post offering people $50 to see the film, after all. I couldn’t find any other posts like that on Craigslist, but when I checked on Wednesday, the front row (and no other seats) were all sold out at every Thursday show in my town. But then they inexplicably canceled Thursday’s shows (they haven’t responded to me about why), and when I went on Friday, the theater was packed with real people (mostly women over 70). Make of that what you will, honestly I have no idea.
Seems to me (and Deadline concluded similarly) that Melania hit hard with its core demo, which is relatively small, and pretty much no one else save freelancers trying to milk a few bucks out of ritually humiliating ourselves.
Anyway, you can read my full review over at GQ. Real Heart of Darkness shit. I haven’t felt so out of place since we went to the Gathering of the Juggalos.
Elsewhere, the New Yorker’s white hat troll, Isaac Chotiner, interviewed Melania’s “cinematographer,” Dante Spinotti. This dude shot Last of the Mohicans and Heat! It’s a decent, breezy read if you enjoy petards and hoisting and things of that nature.
Here’s a snip:
You told the Times that Brett “made some mistakes.” Has he told you that he made mistakes?
No. No. No. Isaac, no. All I’m saying is that I worked with him twelve hours, fifteen hours, a day, and then everybody went their own way. Our age difference is wide. I could be his father.
I read that Roman Polanski is a father figure to him. So that role might already be filled. There are a lot of people who feel affection for Brett.
Yeah, yeah. Because he’s a good kid. [In 2007’s Paris-based “Rush Hour 3,” Ratner gave a cameo to Polanski, who had fled to France after being accused of anally and vaginally raping a thirteen-year-old. He was later accused of sexually assaulting other teen-agers, which he denies. In the cameo, Polanski has a comic scene where he prepares to do an anal-cavity search of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.]
The Times has you saying that he made some mistakes. That’s what I was curious about.
What I’m saying is, he might’ve made some mistakes. I don’t know. It’s not like I was with him when he was interviewing actresses to do a movie or that kind of activity.
It’s the same with Trump. A lot of accusations have been made against him, but neither you nor I were in the room. So who’s to say, really?
Yeah, exactly.
With all due respect, I’m going to go ahead and say that Brett Ratner was absolutely not doing a knowing reference to Roman Polanski’s history of non-consensual anal contact when he was shooting that scene. It’s just that there are a limited number of jokes one can tell when one is a dull-witted buffoon. A solid pull by Chotiner nonetheless.
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Send Help is a Return to the Vicinity of Form for Sam Raimi
I’ve long thought of myself as basically in the tank for Sam Raimi. Even his lesser remembered movies, like Drag Me To Hell or Oz: The Great and Powerful are well-remembered by me. The Quick and the Dead is on a short list of not-great movies that I’ve inexplicably watched countless times. When my toddler wants to watch a Spider-Man movie, I usually choose one of the Raimis, and neither of us leave disappointed. Even Raimi’s non-comic-book-based movies feel exactly like what I think of as “comic book”: very broad themes delivered cleverly, with sublime visual clarity and a thinly disguised penchant for schlock and gore. Raimi tells stories anyone can understand, executing them with the personal flair of an obvious pervert.
The Sam Raimi-ness of Send Help is so unmistakable that he’s practically carving his name on the screen every 10 or 15 minutes. In many ways Send Help is the beau ideal of a January release: a goofy pulp thriller about a dorky secretary who gets marooned on a tropical island with her douchebro nepo baby boss, flipping their original power dynamic on its head in a sort of War of the Roses meets Triangle of Sadness story, with Troma film aesthetics.
Send Help is a winning concept, and yet I couldn’t help get the sense that everyone involved knew it was winning concept early on, and sort of rushed it out before they’d finished writing it. It’s beautifully performed and gleefully staged, but ultimately kind of underwritten—with great broad strokes and incredible twists, but also a lot of scenes shot with what feels like placeholder dialogue. Send Help continues to surprise even after you’ve stopped believing any of it. I wanted to love it, but could only manage chuckling like Beavis & Butthead at the unnecessary gore. Huh-huh huh-huh she puked in his mouth huh-huh huh-huh.
The divine Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, the socially awkward, greasy-haired numbers genius whose brilliant market research keeps the unnamed financial firm where she works running. She talks to her bird and doesn’t notice the giant chunk of tuna sandwich clinging to her face when she talks to her bosses. What a klutz! It’s basically Sam Raimi canon that even the nerdiest of female characters be conventionally attractive bombshells in the thinnest of Clark Kent disguises. Even the porcelain STEM nephewling Tobey Maguire had at least four separate babes throwing themselves at him by the third Spider-Man.
