Meet Market Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		3.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.0

Meet Market Blu-ray Movie Review

Sketch Bazaar

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 5, 2011

Shot in 2003, Meet Market sat on the shelf for five years until a direct-to-video release in 2008. In the meantime, one of its stars and executive producers, Julian McMahon, had considerably raised his profile as a lead on Nip/Tuck and as Dr. Doom in the Fantastic Four films. McMahon's turn as a narcissistic soap star in Meet Market is mildly amusing, but it's not enough to save the film, which is a series of loosely interlocked skits based on the hackneyed notion that Los Angeles is full of self-serving jerks, and anyone looking for love is asking for a pie in the face.

The film's main setting is nominally the local supermarket, where singles go to meet each other, but thankfully the script doesn't stick to that locale, which had long since become a pick-up cliche. (Armistead Maupin was already exploring it in 1978's Tales of the City.) Writer-director Charlie Loventhal relies heavily on the device of characters directly addressing the camera to explain their situations and their inner feelings. There's nothing inherently wrong with this technique (witness Woody Allen's masterly use in Annie Hall), but in Meet Market it's primarily a disguise for a lack of narrative cohesion as the film jumps among vignettes.

Let's start with Linda. She's played by Showgirls' Elizabeth Berkley, and so little does Allegro home video think of this film that it can't be bothered to correctly spell one of the most recognizable cast names on the Blu-ray's cover. (She becomes "Elizabeth Barkley".) Linda is that stock character of L.A. stories, the pretty aspiring actress from a small town seduced by a guy who used the promise of a movie career as the quickest way into her pants. Now on her own, Linda takes classes and is trying to break into the business, but every apparent opportunity is quickly revealed as another come-on. Over the course of the film, Linda's disappointment and disgust will grow so strong that a switch flips deep inside her, and she becomes an avenging angel bent on teaching all the sleazy jerks a lesson. Pick-up artists, beware!

Jane is a shy, dowdy type with a compulsion for order who gets picked up at the market by Hutch (McMahon), the vacuous star of a major soap. Since Jane is played by Aisha Tyler, adjectives like "shy" and "dowdy" hardly apply, but there's always the old standby of a pair of glasses to signify the transformation. After three dates with no sex, Jane introduces her new man to a friend, Lucinda (Krista Allen), a publicist, both for evaluation and in the hope of sparking a professional alliance. She ends up sparking a lot more. Lucinda is everything that Jane isn't: aggressive, outgoing, sexually confident. Her interest in Hutch threatens her long-time friendship with Jane, but the real problem with this triangle is that the third leg is detached. Hutch isn't especially interested in either woman. The only relationship that engages him is with himself.

Tess (Susan Egan) is a hard-working attorney who's a new partner at her firm. She doesn't have time for dating, especially since most men are intimidated by a successful professional woman. So she's settled for another lawyer at the firm, who bores her silly. Then one day at the market she meets Lima Lips (Suzanne Krull), a member of an English punk group, and a new world opens. Everything goes fine until Tess's mother (Desperate Housewives' Christine Estabrook) appears on her doorstep, demanding to know why she hasn't heard from her daughter in weeks.

Danny (Alan Tudyk, just after Firefly was canceled, when he was probably glad for the work) is a screenwriter, who can't seem to keep an attractive woman even when he finds one. His romance with an exercise freak named Courtney (Jennifer Sky) lasts all of two days. Danny's personal trainer, Billy (The X-Files's Laurie Holden, uncredited), keeps urging him to man up, stop being "sensitive", and take charge. Billy usually offers this advice while she's pushing Danny past his physical limits in the weight room or beating the crap out of him in the boxing ring. Eventually, she fixes him up with Ericka (Missy Pyle), a major freak whose appetites far outstrip Danny's interests or capabilities. By the time Billy reveals her true agenda, Danny is such a bundle of raw nerves that all he can do is shriek in horror.

Meet Market doesn't have a real story, and it doesn't reach anything that qualifies as a resolution. It just cross-cuts among its comedic bits until each one runs out of steam (and in some cases, that happens well before the end). Then it throws in something that resembles a twist and rolls the credits. The characters aren't people so much as caricatures such as you'd find in a Saturday Night Live sketch. Only Elizabeth Berkley and Alan Tudyk succeed in endowing their parts with sufficient depth to convey any sense of life or vitality, which is why their segments are the most interesting. Generally, though, writer-director Loventhal settles for cheap shots at easy targets, and given the fact that the cast is peopled by good-looking actors with decent careers, the whole enterprise feels cynical. Now, if someone had the courage to shoot the same script with character actors who look like ordinary people (except for Hutch and Linda, who are supposed to stand out), that might be an intriguing film.

Meet Market Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Meet Market was shot on hi-def video with the Panasonic VariCam by Steven Fierberg, who went on to shoot several seasons of Entourage and whose most recent studio credit is Love and Other Drugs. The hi-def digital image is well-suited to the sun-lit, candy-colored, hyperreal landscape in which the film takes place. Detail is excellent, colors are vivid, and everything is just a little too bright without crushing the blacks. The 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, which appears to have been sourced directly from digital files, does full justice to Fierberg's digital cinematography.

Meet Market Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The PCM 2.0 soundtrack is serviceable but unremarkable. Dialogue is centered and clear, sound effects have a decent degree of surround presence when played back through ProLogic Iix decoding, and the arch, ironic score by David Robbins (who has scored most of his brother Tim's films, as well as numerous documentaries) plays cleanly with a smooth tonality.

Meet Market Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

A word about the disc's authoring. On my Panasonic BDP-50, the special features menu would not always completely erase itself when returning to the main menu and playing the feature, in which case I had to stop the disc and reload it. On my desktop computer, one of the two software players I use simply refused to load the disc. So, if you have trouble playing this disc, it's probably not your player's fault.

• Bloopers (SD; 1.78:1, non-enhanced; 5:57): The usual assortment of crack-ups, mishaps and blown lines.



• Trailer (SD; 1.78:1, non-enhanced; 1:50): I suspect this trailer never ran anywhere, but it's a reasonably accurate preview of the film.



• Behind the Scenes (SD; 1.33:1; 5:35): A mixture of on-set and interview footage, the collection includes a brief contribution from writer-director Loventhal and a much longer conversation with actresses Susan Egan and Suzanne Krull, more or less in character.

Meet Market Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Blu-ray looks and sounds fine, and the film has a few entertaining moments. Still, with so much superior fare on which to spend your time and money, I can't recommend Meet Market. It isn't good enough to be an effective satire, and it isn't bad enough to be a guilty pleasure.