Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		2.0

I Melt with You Blu-ray Movie Review

Men of a certain age...

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater February 22, 2012

1.) Start with a four-buddies-on-a-bender scenario like The Hangover. 2.) Suck out all the comedy. 3.) Turn it into a dark, drug-fueled mid-life crisis drama. 4.) Shoot and edit it like an impossibly pretentious music video. 5.) Make it as depressing as hell. That should get you pretty close to I Melt with You, a slick mess by Arlington Road director Mark Pellington that takes the men-behaving-badly genre to awfully new lows.

Pellington and screenwriter Glenn Porter desperately want to make an edgy, controversial statement about men of a certain age--their mid forties--who've had their vim and vigor replaced by responsibilities and broken dreams, jaded cynicism and erectile dysfunction. They certainly touch on some hard truths--namely, that life doesn't always turn out like we'd hoped--but they're way too obvious about it, relying on stock situations and cliche, unsubtle imagery. No joke, there are even frequent cuts to a blurry close-up of sand slowly streaming through an hourglass. How profound. What's really disappointing is that the film actually gets off to a promising start, with a bacchanal opening atmosphere tainted by dread.

The setting is the gorgeous California coastline of Big Sur, where four fortysomething friends have rented a cliff-top beach house for a week of drugs and booze, punctuated by weepy reminiscences of regrets and days gone by. They're all deeply miserable--each in his own way--and this annual retreat is just that: a temporary escape from the drudgery of their lives. Richard (Hung's Thomas Jane) is a failed novelist-turned-high school English teacher who hit the writer's block wall after publishing his first book, while his buddy Ron (Entourage's Jeremy Piven)--the "commerce" to Richard's "art"--is an equity investor who's currently the subject of an FBI investigation. Tim (Christian McKay), the dark horse of the bunch, is still mourning the death of his boyfriend eleven years prior, and Jonathan (Rob Lowe) is the sort of seedy physician who sells prescriptions on the side.

Between Richard scoring a large supply of blow and Jonathan arriving with his doctor's bag filled with every imaginable kind of pill, they're well-stocked for a week of self-medicated forgetfulness. Cue the non-stop partying, set to a raucous college radio rock soundtrack. The raging all-nighter. The boozy fishing trip. The stone-drunk tumbling down sand dunes. The high-as-a-kite skinny dipping. And you haven't lived, apparently, until you've snorted coke like Scarface whilst driving a Porsche at 100 mph on a seaside dirt road. The festivities take a dark turn, however, when a group of local college kids turn up to par-tay, their youthful, we've-got-our-whole-lives-ahead-of-us optimism souring the four middle-aged friends' mood. You can bet Richard is pissed when he learns that one of the young bucks just had a short story featured in The New Yorker. Meanwhile, in a back room, Tim has awkward, tearful three-way sex with some skeevy dude and a local hottie played by porn actress Sasha Grey, whom you might remember from her mainstream movie debut in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience. (Or from your internet filth-surfing. I judge not.)

Up to this point, and despite being a bit too self-serious, I Melt With You is at least engaging, carried along by a feeling of oh man, something awful is going to happen any second now. But when it finally happens--and it's no spoiler to reveal that one of the friends up and offs himself, though I won't reveal which one--the film completely loses it. Completely. Goes off the rails, jumps the shark--whatever--with a last half devoted a strange, frankly unbelievable oath the friends signed 25 years before in college. It's almost like the movie itself suffers a mid-life crisis here; it makes some risky (narrative) decisions that don't pay off, and after a last-ditch effort to be energetic and relevant, it loses steam and trudges slowly to an unfulfilling end. I don't know what's more depressing, the film's we've-all-wasted-our-lives subject matter or the fact that the film is a waste of two hours of your life.

A long two hours. I Melt With You could easily stand to shed a good 20-25 minutes off its runtime, which is padded with inserted "mood" shots--footprints on the beach, crashing waves, the aforementioned sand through the hourglass- -none of which add anything to the story besides length and an artificially arty music video-ness. You can also expect a lot of semi-nauseating, hip-hop montage-style fast cutting. This somewhat makes sense, as director Mark Pellington got his start doing music videos--he did Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" and U2's "One," amongst others--but you'd think he'd of grown out of that rather-dated style by now.

In most respects, the film is a searing disappointment, squandering a decent set-up a last half that goes into territory that's so morose that it starts to provoke unintentional laughter. You just can't take any of it seriously--specifically because the film tries much too hard to be profound without any real substance whatsoever. I Melt With You does have two thing going for it, though. First, the cast. All four of these guys are undervalued actors, and they practically pour themselves onto the screen here. One of the movie's few pleasures is seeing how each of their characters handles the crippling disappointments of middle-age. Rob Lowe goes about as far from his recent, happy-go-lucky Parks & Rec persona as he can get, finding solace in pill bottles. Tom Jane masks the hurt behind bad-boy braggadocio, Jeremy Piven pretends everything is fine, and Christian McKay broods, the only one who confronts his feelings head-on. It's a shame the un-subtle script takes them to such a ridiculous place. As for the film's second not-quite-redeeming factor, I've got to hand it to the filmmakers for putting together a kick-ass soundtrack that just doesn't quit, with tracks from The Sex Pistols, Pixies, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and many more punk and post-punk college radio staples. Ironically, the film can be summed up rather tidily with the title of a featured Sex Pistols song: "Pretty Vacant."

I Melt with You Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I Melt with You has a visual style that initially caught me off guard. I noticed immediately that it was shot digitally, but it also looked like there was honest to goodness film grain--grain, not just digital noise--in the picture. I got my answer after some internet sleuthing. As it turns out, the film was shot with consumer-grade HDSLRs--the Canon 7D and 5DmkII, specifically--but in post a layer of composited-in film grain was applied to the footage in order to soften it and make the highlights less harsh. On Blu-ray, this translates into a rather unusual image. Don't expect a pristine high definition image here. Clarity is decidedly mixed; there are some genuinely sharp closeups, but much of the film has a soft-bordering-on-blurry quality, especially in longer shots. As for color, the footage has been toned to give it a vivid, high-contrast look, and while this works for some scenes--the outdoor ones--the interior sequences can look overly saturated, with jacked up skin tones and color balance that's skewed too far into the yellows. Black levels can be harsh too, wiping out shadow detail. There are also some visual quirks particular to shooting on HDSLRs. Rolling shutter "judder" is noticeable during the more frantic scenes-- most of the film was shot handheld--and there's frequent aliasing whenever fine parallel lines are present. I spotted a few instances of noticeable color banding too. All that said, from what I've read, the Blu-ray seems to accurately reflect the source material, picture quality peculiarities and all.

I Melt with You Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's low-budget origins come through occasionally in the audio as well--there are spots where the on-location dialogue sounds a bit far away or muffled--but for the most part, the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix we get here is punchy and intense and as clear as it needs to be. The mix is driven by the film's almost non-stop punk/post-punk soundtrack, which blares from all channels almost equally, with gripping low-end action and clarity through the range. The music really does sound fantastic. As for sound design, there's some impressionistic subwoofer output used to underscore some of the emotional scenes, and you'll also hear a decent amount of ambience in the rears--wind and waves, party noise, barroom clamor, etc. The vocals do get slightly lost in the mix from time to time, but never to the extent that you can't make out the gist of what's being said. If you need some help, the disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles.

I Melt with You Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentaries: The disc includes two commentary tracks. The first, with director Mark Pellington and actors Rob Lowe and Jeremy Piven, is the more listenable of the two--despite how badly the film sucks, this is still a decent, entertaining group of guys--while the second, with Pellington, screenwriter Glenn Porter, and cinematographer Eric Schmidt, is a bit more technically minded, with low-budget filmmaking details galore.
• Deleted Scenes (1080p, 18:42): Seven deleted scenes, none of much consequence.
• Behind the Scenes (SD, 25:36): Pellington, Porter, and Schmidt--they could be a law firm--discuss the origins and development of the screenplay.
• HDNet - A Look at I Melt with You (1080i, 4:57): A typical HDNet promo, with a synopsis of the film and a few short interviews.
• Interview with Mark Pellington (1080p, 37:54): An extensive interview with the director, who covers a lot of the same material in the commentaries and behind-the-scenes featurettes.
• Interview with Jeremy Piven (1080p, 9:51): Piven talks about his character and the resonance of the film with men of a certain age.
• Jeremy Piven Mood Piece (1080p, 3:53): a kind of short conceptual piece made from clips from the film, narrated by Piven, who walks us through how men chance from their twenties to their forties.
• Thomas Jane Teaser (1080p, 4:47): Jane delivers an overwrought monologue, accompanied by pretentious imagery.
• Director's Statement (Text only): Pellington spells out some of his inspirations--Burroughs and Cassavetes and Mike Leigh--and remarks that I Melt With You is "the type of film that is going to generate controversy and garner deeply felt polarized reactions."
• Director's Behind the Scenes Photo Gallery (1080p)
• Alternate Theatrical Poster Gallery (1080p)
• Theatrical Greenband Trailer (1080p, 2:10)
• Theatrical Redband Trailer (1080p, 2:13)
• International Trailer (1080p, 2:19)
• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment (1080p, 9:06)

I Melt with You Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

And the award for most pretentious dreck of 2011 goes to I Melt With You, a dopey, insufferable, almost laughably depressing mid-life crisis movie that seems intent on driving its audience to suicide. Besides a kickass soundtrack, the film has little to offer. I've said enough--skip it.