I Melt with You (2011)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Richard	Thomas Jane	½
Ron	Jeremy Piven
Jonathan	Rob Lowe
Tim	Christian McKey	½
Officer Boyde	Carla Gugino
Captain Bob	Tom Bower

Review

If you weren't already disillusioned about reaching middle-age, this self-absorbed romanticizer of cowardice and excess does its best to get you there. It's an evocative and sporadically poignant, but irremissibly bleak and self-righteous film about four once idealistic guys who in their mid-40s meet up for a summer reunion and find that they haven't been able to live up to their own expectations. What follows is a glorification of drugs, individuality and suicide, which director Mark Pellington presumably wanted to evolve into or be interpreted as a criticism of western culture and the time we live in. Strangely, I find Pellington's filmmaking more representative of just that than critical of it, if you get my drift. And the quasi-philosophical, all-important plot device which fuels the second half of the film arguably requires of the viewer a consumption of drugs on par with that of the film's protagonists in order to come off as remotely relevant enough to justify what unfolds, even if you're in the middle of a serious midlife crisis yourself. Fine acting, especially by Lowe and Piven, is among this film's few redeeming qualities.