Recently watched the movie “I Melt with You,” an ensemble drama starring Rob Lowe, Jeremy Piven, Thomas Jane and Christian McKay. The actors play college buddies who reunite 25 years after graduation for a weekend of trying to recapture their youth through wild partying at a beach house.
The story keeps you on the edge of your seat, wondering if and how the college buddies will carry out the suicide pact they made 25 years ago. If life wasn’t working out as planned when they were older, they had promised to do away with themselves.
Carla Gugino ("Spy Kids") has a cameo as a police officer who suspects something is awry at the cliff-side beach house where these rowdy men have encamped for the weekend. I won’t spoil the ending by revealing what happens.
I’m not sure if “I Melt with You” qualifies as an “indie movie,” since filmmaker Mark Pellington implies in his commentary that it was financed by a studio – or at least made through the Hollywood system. But the movie certainly qualifies as “low budget” since it was made on a relative shoestring of $1 million. (Of course, this would seem like a blockbuster budget to many indie filmmakers who struggle to make movies on micro-budgets of $50,000 or less.)
Pellington and his crew did a decent job of making “I Melt with You” look like it had a larger budget, even though much of it was shot with a barebones crew, natural light and existing locations. And the actors seemed passionate about the story and the characters, foregoing many of the perks they usually get, as they described in their commentary.
Overall, I enjoyed “I Melt with You” and would recommend it. However, I was disappointed by the lack of racial diversity in the cast. The actors who were cast are great, but I’m sure it would have been easy to find at least one performer who is African-American, Latino, Asian or another ethnicity to play one of the four lead roles.
I guess diversity has a long way to go, even in the anything-goes world of low-budget moviemaking.
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