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I-See-You.Com
R1 - America - Warner Home Video Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (19th November 2008). |
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The Film
 Sometimes movies are produced, put out into the market and just never get picked up, they live in some sort of limbo that keeps them from seeing a sort of release for years. Sometimes they never see the light of public release outside of film festivals, others they gather enough of a following that they finally see what happens and become the foundation of cult cinema. But of course there are others, ones with large enough names to live in this neutral zone for a short time where they may or may not see a real release and then reemerge later as an out of nowhere dvd. And that’s about all “I-See-You.Com” (2006) really is, but I’m not even sure if it deserved this new life it’s been given on DVD. The film opens with Harvey Bellinger’s (Beau Bridges) parole hearing after spending some years in prison for blowing up his own home, framing most of the story in his plea to the parole committee as to why he was driven to that destructive act. Apparently it started after his marriage to his childhood fantasy Lydia Ann Layton (Rosanna Arquette) whose son computer savvy son Colby (Matthew Botuchis) begins an internet website based on a secret camera he has hidden in his step sisters room. Soon the voyeuristic site is a hit, earning Colby $17,000 a week and giving him and girlfriend Randi (Shiri Appleby) the idea to wire Colby’s entire home with cameras creating an online reality show based on the odd exploits of this family. Many of the problems are rooted in Eric Steven Stahl and Sean McLain’s predictable and monotonous script. Loaded with far too many ‘timely’ jokes based on the film’s 2001 setting, like expecting laughs for Enron jokes, is just the beginning of the film’s problem. The film is put together with a laugh-track in mind as each comedic beat allows you far too long to laugh and when none of the jokes are falling, there’s just dozens of awkward silences and bad pauses. So much time is spent talking about how Botuchis’ character has predicted the internet video boom there’s no real meat to the plot. But of course the acting can’t go much further, and it even brings the movie further down. Botuchis’ character of the hipster-nerd is annoying enough, but combined with his terrible acting it’s painful to watch him for ten minutes, let alone the full hour and a half runtime of the film. The rest of the cast is equally bad, or at least unimpressive. Bridges and Arquette don’t seem really committed to the movie, as they shouldn’t, and the other names that pop up in the cast are lackluster at best. Building this bad acting off of a terrible script gets even worse as the cast tries to deliver all of the knowing/wink-wink jokes that just plain aren’t funny. Overall, “I-See-You.Com” is fairly disinteresting and feels like it was made to try and capitalize off of the teen sex comedy resurgence of the early 2000’s, but just fell too late and too far off the mark. I think they tried to bury a message in the film about the whole 15 minutes of fame sparked by the internet, but it just doesn’t come through and isn’t worth caring about. Bottom line: the acting is bad, the writing is bad and it’s just not fun to watch in the least.
Video
Presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, the transfer contains some very noticeable grain and some blatant pixilation that doesn’t seem to let up with lighting changes or changes in scenery, just changing in intensity. The colors and the look of the film are incredibly flat and look like a made-for-TV film.
Audio
The English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround track is fairly flat and the actual audio isn’t too interesting to begin with so it doesn’t help too much. There are some occasional drop outs in the audio quality that are annoying and feel like a misplaced microphone that they just didn’t bother to fix. These problems are fairly intermittent and don’t completely break the film on their own, but they certainly don’t help. Optional subtitles are available in English and Spanish.
Extras
Thankfully there aren’t too many special features, only a featurette, some additional scenes, a theatrical trailer and a digital copy of the film. The featurette listed on the box as “Making-of Featurette: 15 Minutes of Fame” and labeled on the menu simply as “featurette” runs for 15 minutes and 38 seconds. The clip consists mostly of clips directly from the film and a handful of interviews in fairly low quality audio that has a tendency to pop. The cast and crew talk about how funny the movie is and how it’s clever, I disagree. Additional scenes from the 'Theatrical Version' runs for 5 minutes and 38 seconds, basically a compilation of deleted scenes. The first scene is an expanded version of the opening scene before the parole board, which runs 45 seconds. Lydia talks on the phone and the kids eat breakfast, which lasts 1 minute 12 seconds. Harvey gets fired at his job selling toilets, this runs 43 seconds. Harvey and Lydia wonder what happened to their family, this runs 1 minute. Harvey’s mother berates his generation for 1 minute 58 seconds. The theatrical trailer runs for 1 minute 49 seconds. Apparently there’s also a digital copy on the disc that’s accessible through an included code, though it sounds more like a download than actually being on the disc.
Overall
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