I Melt With You (2011/Magnolia Blu-ray)/Stuck
Between Stations (2012/Lionsgate DVD)
Picture: B/C Sound: B/C+ Extras: C Films: C
So many
dramas have forgotten how to be honest or believable that I have lost
track. Now, two recent misses, but they
missed for two different reasons.
I Melt With You (2011) is the latest hideous
attempt at narrative storytelling by the awful Mark Pellington, an early alumni
of MTV, he made some of their earliest promos, then turned off Pearl Jam to
making more music videos when his clip for “Jeremy” was widely
misinterpreted. Pellington is one of the
longest-running hacks who put style over substance (see his work with a solo
Bon Jovi, for instance) and he is back with one of his worst works yet.
Here, we
get the reunion of four old friends from the 1980s (Pellington fancies himself
an expert) after many decades, now all in their middle age. It is supposed to be a happy reunion, but all
goes wrong (surprise?) and what is barely happy gets worse and worse and worse,
much like the film itself. Pellington
manages to waste still-active Thomas Jane, ‘80s icon Rob Lowe, enduring
character actor Jeremy Piven and Christian McKay, plus all 122 minutes
(oooooooohhhhhhhhhhh, but it feels longer… much, much longer) of anyone’s time
who suffers through this mess.
Without
the leads trying, it would be a total bomb, but all the clichés are here. Next to no character development, bad &
dated 1980s music video editing, extreme overuse of 1980s hits, the overall
message that the 1980s and anyone from it are all disposable and a borderline
psychotic desire to be hip and smart that always (especially in Pellington’s
case) unleashes a non-stop stream of smugness that you will want a high
definition version of the TV brick!
Wow, what
a waste! Remarkably, there are also
extras including trailers, a poster gallery, HDNet piece on the release, making
of featurette, statement by the director (yeeeee) and two (yes, you read that
correctly) feature length audio commentary tracks that are the worst pair I can
remember since the advent of Blu-ray.
Hearing these people try and explain all this is… fascinating.
With less
money and more heart to work with, Brady Kierman’s Stuck Between Stations (2012) is yet another “one of those night”
tales in which a goofy guy (Sam Rosen) meets a female his age (Zoë
Lister-Jones) under wacky circumstances and they become interested in each
other and maybe more. Michael Imperioli
has a great turn here as her ex-boyfriend and Josh Hartnett shows up as another
friend in his best work in a while. The
problem, this does not always work, the pop culture references seem desperate
and we get more clichés including… yup, the coup-0le land up at a basketball
court!
The
couple even have a bit of chemistry and using Minneapolis, Minnesota
is a nice change of locale, but the makers could not come up with enough
original ideas and honest situations to make this work better and that is a
shame, because this had potential. You
could do worse, but what had some promises eventually disappoints. Extras include trailers, a behind The Scenes
featurette and an intelligent feature length audio commentary by the director
that I at least took seriously.
The 1080p
2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Melt actually looks good throughout enough despite some degraded
material and dated editing techniques, while the anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X
1 image on Stuck was unfortunately softer throughout than expected. The DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix
on Melt somehow manages to keep a
consistent soundfield despite some corny sound effects and the hit songs sound
good, yet they should have sounded better.
The alternate version of the hit song by Modern English is performed by
that band at the end, but to no avail.
The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix on Stuck
is dialogue-based, but is not badly recorded.
- Nicholas Sheffo