I Melt With You (2011)
There is something about movies which focus on groups of friends with almost brotherly relationships that leaves me feeling cold and empty. ‘The friends you make at college will be the ones you make for life’ they say, well, I went to a crappy regional art college which was filled with wankers of a startling and almost impressive variety and so that saying doesn’t really apply to me. Still, I can appreciate that in America, things are a little more identikit and so amongst the fraternal structures of the American third level ‘education’ system, there are plenty of opportunities for young men to find companions of a similar ilk to form lifetime bonds with. Or maybe it’s all bullshit, who knows?
Either way, the quartet of immensely unlikable characters played by an immensely wide ranging group of actors (from the sometimes brilliant; Tom Jane and Rob Lowe, to the reprehensible; Jeremy Fucking Piven) are thrust into our faces from the opening credits. They may be almost fifty, but they still know how to party. They play loud late 80′s and early 90′s music (and an array of Sex Pistols soundbytes) and jump around the house a lot taking small mountains of drugs. It appears to be the perfect party, but what could possibly go wrong? I was hoping for a film akin to Very Bad Things (shut up, I like that movie), I was given something far different.
It transpires that this is a movie which concerns itself with the loss of youthful spirit. With the inevitable melancholia that perpetrates the mind after one reflects on the mistakes which one has made since the idyllic days of ones youth. Each man holds his own personal demons, his own failures and regrets which begin to emerge with all the subtlety of a chair up the anus. Speaking of which, Sasha Grey makes a pointless cameo in which she tries to act creepy and shows her boobs. Then there’s the endless scenes of drug taking and debauchery. The trouble is, taking drugs isn’t very debauched, for the simple reason that almost everybody does it these days. The downside being that people on drugs are incredibly annoying for people who aren’t. If this was the result they were going for then they achieved at least that part correctly.
There are some funny moments, Rob Lowe in particular stands out as a burnt out doctor who has lost his family, garbling lines such as ‘I miss pussy hair’ bring a smirk or to, but Piven is unwatchable as a babbling cokehead as it’s so easily imaginable that it’s exactly what he’s like in real life. It takes some really adolescent turns halfway through and degenerates into a steaming pile of horseshit which I only sat through out of contempt and stubbornness. I could try and be more eloquent about the subject matter but it can fuck off, it’s not a fraction as clever as it thinks it is and anyone who thinks that this is actually poignant, touching and insightful film making should consider signing up to attend my old art school as it’s full of other arseholes who will probably agree with you.
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