Do you know the story of video director/filmmaker Mark Pellington? It’s rather tragic and heartbreaking.
Pellington’s wife died suddenly in 2004, leaving the father to tend to his 2 1/2 -year-old daughter by himself.
While he did some work in the iterim, episodes of “Cold Case” and the concert film, “U23D,” the director finally followed up 2002’s “The Mothman Prophecies” with the feature-length film, “Henry Poole Is Here.”
Clearly inspired by this tragedy, the picture is essentially about a man who has given up all hope, and decides to drink himself to death. But the discovery of a “miracle” by a nosy neighbor — a water stain on his house that looks like the Virgin Mary — ruptures his solitude and restores his faith in life. You read the press notes and your heart just bleeds for the man. You were sitting there just rooting for the film.
It was godawful (and perhaps marked the beginning of the end for poor Luke Wilson; we named it one of the worst films of 2008). The New York Times roasted the film and said it “traffics in the kind of inspirational kitsch that only a true believer could swallow. In the mawkish tradition of movies like ‘Simon Birch,’ ‘Wide Awake,’ ‘August Rush,’ and ‘Hearts in Atlantis,’ ‘Henry Poole Is Here’ is insufferable hokum that takes itself very, very seriously.”
Well, Pellington is back and starring in his new picture, “I Melt With You,” as is “Entourage” star Jeremy Piven and Thomas Jane, according to Deadline. We’re not sure why we care and/or are writing this report, but since ‘Poole’ was unspeakably bad, we’re sort of curious where this will go. Given that ‘Poole’s second half was one long excruciating music video — long pensive scenes to Bob Dylan and Blur, etc. — the title, “I Melt With You,” named after a Modern English song, is worrisome, but maybe there will be salvation from more treacly sentimentality. The picture is evidently a thriller that shoots next August. Pellington co-wrote the script with Glenn Porter.
We almost forgot that Pellington is also attached to direct the English-Language remake of “The Orphanage” (named one the best films of 2007 in our best-of-decade coverage) with Guillermo Del Toro, who was the creative supervisor on the original, as one of the producers. Larry Fessenden was originally attached to write and direct, but sadly he left in the fall of 2009.