Blu Ray/DVD Review: I MELT WITH YOU

I MELT WITH YOU (Dir. Mark Pellington, 2010)

They should’ve called this film “Beach House Suicide Pact.”

It’s like an episode of Men of a Certain Age gone way dark: a group of longtime friends vacation together at a Big Sur beach house, and they party their miserable asses off until they start offing themselves.

Jeremy Piven, Rob Lowe, Thomas Jane (HBO’s Hung), and Christian McCay (ME AND ORSON WELLES) play the 40something-aged friends who didn’t originally plan on such self destruction, it just turns out that way because of a suicide pact written on a piece of notebook paper that they each signed 25 years ago.

Aided by tons of booze, blow, and pharmaceutical drugs (all they’re missing is a hot tub time machine), the guys live it up in the noisy first half of the film.

As the fellows get wasted, blaring the music of their youth (mostly ‘80s punk pop), we slowly learn how downhill each of their lives has gotten. Piven is a corrupt business man about to be busted by the SEC for stealing from his clients, Jane is a high school English teacher who never followed up his first novel, Lowe is an unhappy divorced physician, and McKay is wracked with guilt over causing an automobile accident that killed his sister.

Sounds like a fun bunch of guys, huh? Some local college students seem to think so as they join the guys for a party at the house with plenty of pill popping, snorting, toking, and drinking, oh, and groping. Porn star/wooden actress Sasha Grey shows up for a brief instance for no reason.

The morning after the party, McKay hangs himself with his belt, and the guys start freaking out. I kept expecting Piven to call it a 200-pound problem that needs to be moved from point A to point B, just like his character in VERY BAD THINGS.

They don’t call the police - they bury McKay in the backyard, and things go from bad to worse, in every sense. A policewoman (Carla Gugino) starts snooping around the premises, apparently suspicious of the guys from the start, and the implausibility factor increases.

What we have here is 4 appealing actors playing 4 unappealing angsty a**holes. They pissed my wife off so much that she stopped watching it after the first 10 minutes. I stayed with it, but it was such a tiresome depressing slog that I think she made the right decision.

After the infinite playlist of the party half of the film dies down, the film is just as loud because of an annoying score that pounds every ominous moment into your head with no mercy.

In one of the only affecting moments in the film, Lowe puts in some excellent acting in a scene in which as he’s dying he phones his ex-wife and talks to his toddler son.

Otherwise I MELT WITH YOU is full of depthless close-ups of these actors in despair, and show-off photography of their admittedly awesome surroundings – the cliffs, the landscape, and the beaches of Big Sur shot by cinematographer Eric Schmidt. At over 2 hours it’s way too long as well.

I’m the same age as these guys, but I don’t relate to them at all. Their back stories aren't fleshed out enough for me to put any investment into them. They are all selfish jerks who never got over their college days of getting wasted constantly. 


The tragedy here isn’t their senseless suicides, it’s that this is a fail of a film about 4 failures.

Special Features: 2 commentaries, Director’s Statement, Deleted Scenes, a few featurettes, Behind the Scenes Photo Gallery, Alternate Theatrical Poster Gallery, Theatrical Redband, Greenband, and International trailers. Whew! That’s a lot of extras.

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Film Babble Blog's Oscars 2012 Recap!

Last night, the 84th Academy Awards went a lot smoother than last year's James Franco/Anne Hathaway-helmed debacle. I've seen a bunch of Billy Crystal bashing online for doing the same old tired schtick, but I thought that's what they brought him back to do. His song and dance medley made my head hurt, but he had some funny moments. I loved this line in particular:

“Nothing eases the world's economic woes like watching millionaires give each other gold statues!”

Otherwise, there were few surprises. Christopher Plummer gave the classiest speach, Angelina Jolie made the creepiest pose, Octavia Spencer freaked out the most, and Christopher Guest and co.'s bit on film as a focus group in 1939 discussing THE WIZARD OF OZ was funnier than their last movie which was about the Oscars: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION.

As for my Oscar picks I did a little better than the last 2 years when I guessed 13 out of 24. This year I got 15 out of 24.

Here's the ones I got wrong:

BEST ACTOR: I picked George Clooney for THE DESCENDANTS, but I should've figured that Jean Dujardin would get caught in the sweep for THE ARTIST. It's fine by me, I loved Dujardin's performance and thought it was cool that he thanked Douglas Fairbanks in his acceptance speech.

BEST ACTRESS: I think most folks were surprised that Meryl Streep won her 3rd Oscar for her excellent work as Margaret Thatcher (who she didn't thank) in THE IRON LADY over the others (Viola Davis, Michelle Williams, Glenn Close, and Rooney Mara). I had chosen Michelle Williams for her ace acting as Marilyn Monroe, but that was a personal choice - I expected either Viola Davis or Glenn Close to win. Streep, who seemed surprised too, said “I really understand I'll never be up here again,” but I bet she will be - the Academy likes her, they really like her!

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: I really thought Emmanuel Lubezki would win for THE TREE OF LIFE. I really did. Sigh.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: This was another I thought I was going to get wrong, but I still went with PARADISE 3: PURGATORY because, well, that was the only documentary of the nominees that I’ve seen. I’ll have to track down UNDEFEATED now.

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT: I was just shooting in the dark on this one. I've seen none of the nominees and I just liked the title THE TSUNAMI AND THE CHERRY BLOSSOM. Oh well, congrats to SAVING FACE.

BEST FILM EDITING: I should’ve known Martin Scorsese’s long time editor Thelma Schoonmaker wouldn’t get this – she’s won 3 times before. Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter did do a good job on THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO so bully for them.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: I really didn’t expect HUGO to sweep the technical awards, but it sure did – it won best cinematography, art direction, sound and this one. I had picked RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. That's right.

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT: This was a surprise because I saw these shorts at the Galaxy Theater in Cary last week, and I thought RAJU would be up the Academy's alley. Instead they went for the sentimental Irish short THE SHORE. My personal choice would've been TIME FREAK, but I knew they would think that was too silly. At least I was right about that.

BEST SOUND EDITING: Another one from the HUGO sweep I didn't anticipate. I had picked WAR HORSE, but that didn't win anything.

Okay! So that's that. Here's hoping that next year I'll do better.

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The Navy: It's Not Just A Job, It's A Bad Action Movie

ACT OF VALOR (Dir. Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, 2012)

Publicity for this film boasts that it stars “eight active duty SEALS” and was “compiled from actual US Navy SEAL missions.” So, of course, it comes across as a big recruitment ad (which it was originally intended to be) - the kind they used to show between trailers for films that make bold statements like “Navy: It’s Not Just a Job, It’s an Adventure.”

But the adventure here is a standard one – a Navy SEAL squad takes on terrorists who have captured a CIA agent – with plotting right out of a video game, and instead of giving audiences an inside look into the exciting operations of our fighting men in action, it mainly serves as proof that Navy SEALS may be trained to perform under pressure in intense violent missions, but they sure aren’t trained how to act.

There are several no name actors in the cast (Alex Veadov, Emilio Rivera, and Roselyn Sánchez, who plays the kidnapped agent), but the SEALs, whose show this is, aren’t named in the credits, so it’s difficult to single out individual characters. However, since there are no distinctive characters, that’s not really an issue.

What is an issue is how generic and un-arresting the action sequences are - despite the quite capable cinematography of Shane Hurlbut. There’s an impenetrable muddiness to the combat shoot-outs (possibly attributed to the 18 mm cameras on the soldier’s helmets – you know, to get the authenticity down), and the conclusion involving the terrorist villains’ luxury yacht (complete with close-ups of bikini-clad women’s asses) echoes a bad episode of Miami Vice.

To cover all the bases of military movie clichés, screenwriter Kurt Johnstad (the guy who wrote 300 - go figure) mixes in some icky unaffecting melodrama about a pregnant wife back home, and an over serious narration which makes this point about the squad: “A single twig will break, but a bundle of twigs will remain strong” (Google “bundle of twigs” for what I couldn’t help thinking when that was said).

To its credit, directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh’s debut wasn’t just to be a glorified recruitment film, but also to raise money for the Naval SEAL Foundation, which benefits families of fallen SEALS. It’s just that such a worthy cause deserves a worthwhile movie, and ACT OF VALOR, with all its stiff acting and generic gaming, is far from it.

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