Melvin Goes to Dinner DVD: Review By brianroche

All the fun nights from your early twenties blur together into one big party. By the time you're stradling 30 your responsibilities and life changes have slowed everything down, and you can see each wild night clearly. "Melvin Goes to Dinner" shows us a night like this, which all of its late 20s/early 30s characters will remember for a long time. Especially Melvin.

Melvin is played by Michael Blieden. He also wrote the screenplay and edited the film. Melvin's life is screwed up in several small ways. After accidentally dialing his married friend Joey (Matt Price), he agrees to meet him for dinner. When Melvin arrives at the restaurant, he finds Joey there with two women: Joey's B-school pal Alex (Stephanie Courtney) and Alex's childhood friend Sarah (Annabelle Gurwitch) who Alex coincidentally ran into on her way to the restaurant. These four talk into the night about the disappointments in their lives, about sex, religion, porn, and ghosts. Their evening does not shatter the world and all we know about it, but they will all have stories to tell the next day, and decisions to make. Melvin finds something in all of their unhappiness that makes him act for the first time in probably a few years.

"Melvin Goes to Dinner" is the sort of movie you'll need to watch twice to appreciate everything. But you'll want to. Melvin, Alex, Joey and Sarah all seem like friends I've known for years. Their backgrounds are revealed bit by bit through scenes away from/before the dinner. When juxtaposed against the (mostly) forward-moving dinner conversation, we understand their complexities intimately, the way you'd think differently of a friend after a deep conversation.

The film's 'guest cast' of name players like Jack Black and Melora Walters could have just been just a gimmick, as it so often is. But here, the guest players, in their scenes outside of the dinner, each expand our undertanding of the main four characters. Black and David Cross in particular are hilarious, and Melora Walters is absolutely on fire as a complicated woman in Melvin's life.

The film is visually impressive as well. Bob Odenkirk's name was the main reason I checked out this film (he's half of HBO's late, great "Mr. Show"). He shows himself to be an apt and imaginative adapter of existing material here, not just some traffic director. The dinner conversation was shot with five digital cameras, and the rhythm of conversation, reactions, and strange found shots works great. I particularly liked the shot of Courtney in which she goes out of focus while the background remains in focus. He also handles the outside-of-dinner scenes confidently and creatively, including two flashbacks done primarily with still photography.

Too many directors from comedic backgrounds play the non-comedic aspects of their movies as gross sentimentality. Odenkirk doesn't fall for that. Instead, he marshals every aspect of the movie, from the performances to the cinematography to Michael Penn's music, to achieve real moments that enhance the comedy rather than contrast from it awkwardly.

"Melvin Goes to Dinner" is an unfortunate title, from the "Funny Name Does Something Mundane" school of movie titles, like "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", "Morgan Stewart's Coming Home", and "Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx". It's not so much that these titles are bad, so much as cynical. The studio is convinced that no one will realize the movie is a comedy unless the lead character has a funny name, and we are told about the funny name in advance. (And yes, "Ferris Bueller" is a great movie. But you know what I mean.) But don't hold that against this sharp, short (79 minutes minus end credits!)movie.

- Commentary by Director Bob Odenkirk, and all four main cast members. "Melvin Goes to Dinner" is based on Blieden's own play, "Phyro-Giants!" in which he also played Melvin. His dinner mates Price, Courtney, and Gurwitch also originated their roles in the play, which ran in L.A. for more than a year. Just as only the Beatles know what it's like to be a Beatle, only these four know what it's like to have been in the play "Phyro-Giants!" and the movie based on it. This is a great group track covering Blieden's initial inspiration, the differences from the stage to the screen, and how they landed the 'guest-cast'. The actors share ideas about their characters, and even point out where they disagree with the ideas of this film and play they've been doing for so long. Odenkirk is also impressive on this track. Here we learn that the entire dinner conversation was shot in one night.

- Commentary with Odenkirk, Blieden, the producers, and cinematographer, and composer Michael Penn. This group track is more technical but just as engaging. In addition to writing and acting, Blieden actually edited the film as well (is that a first?). His talk here shows him to be a selfless and focused editor. We learn that Odenkirk's plans were initially much grander, with three times as many digital cameras.

- "Scenes from Phyro-Giants!" These are videotaped segments from the original play. They show the cast's easy familiarity with one another, and how film and theatre are different. Many of their line readings are very broad for the play, to reach the back row, and I found the same lines in the movie better for being subtler.

- "The Frank Film Festival". This is one of the best DVD supplements I've ever seen. Odenkirk, Blieden, and Price journey to the titular film festival, a weekend with films and filmmakers, all in the house of a guy named Frank. Frank's played by SNL's Fred Armisen, who's much funnier here then he ever is on TV. The brilliance of this piece is that it nails a good approximation of real festival atmosphere while parodying the bejesus out of it.

- Theatrical trailers. Since this is a Sundance Channel release, we get count 'em 8 trailers, for "The Slaughter Rule", "Swimming", "Searching for Paradise", "The Hired Hand", "Mule Skinner Blues", "The Other Side of the Bed", "In This World", and "Dopamine". It's the party line that extra trailers blow, but I haven't heard of half of these movies, so I'm grateful for their trailers' inclusion here.

"Melvin Goes to Dinner" was shot in 1.85:1, with a nice crisp digital video look. There's a lot of talk about digital video looking almost as good as film, and a lot of convenient sidestepping of the fact that the key word there is 'almost'. There's no shame in just having great video, which is what "Melvin" has.

The sound is fine as well. Michael Penn's music is unique, and his final credits music, I expect, will be lifted for movie trailers for years.

Here is a good place to talk about Melvin's blue jacket. It's a real social studies teacher ensemble. L.A. is most often portrayed as a sickeningly hip environment. But Melvin is an outsider to that life, and we know because of that blue traffic reporter jacket. Just one nuance in a movie that has more, the more you look.