Dream with the Fishes on DVD

If you’re looking for a buddy road movie that eschews good natured fun and offers weirdness instead, this just may be your film.

David Arquette stars as Terry, a strange dude with stranger fantasies that include a “Rear Window-like” obsession with peeping in on his neighbors. As the movie opens he has decided to kill himself and gets tied up, figuratively, with the more aggressive Nick (Brad Hunt), who lives a life of abandon - but only for a few more weeks until he’s dead from some terminal illness we never really learn enough about to care.

They hit the road together on a so-called adventure in which they drop acid, drink, and embark on a quest to fulfill their fantasies. They share a bond that seems to revolve around death - Terry’s quest for it and Brad’s pending succumbing to it.

The third part of their triumvirate is Liz (Kathryn Erbe), Nick’s tattoo artist live-in girlfriend who appears to have her act a lot more together than either of the male protagonists.

Nick and Terry leave Liz in the lurch, heading from their San Francisco neighborhood and eventually landing back in Nick’s home town where they take up residence with his aunt (Cathy Moriarty) as he tries to reconcile with his parents before shuffling off the mortal coil. More weirdness ensues during which Terry appears to have won the big lottery jackpot, in which is probably the only positive part of the film.

And then that cup is dashed from the viewers’ lips.

Okay, maybe we just didn’t get it. The liner blurb, and we all know they never lie, quotes the New York Times as saying the film is “A nicely offbeat, sharply-etched debut feature…a lean and distinctive visual style,” while Details is quoted as saying “This is a revelation.”

Then again, the way the New York Times has slid from being the pinnacle of American journalism into being nothing more than a left wing advocacy rag should have told us to believe the opposite of the quote, which is actually how we perceived the movie after sitting through this very long 96 minutes. And maybe were the Times to regain its credibility as a journal one can trust it would be a revelation, but Dream With the Fishes certainly isn’t.

Too bad. It seemed promising - and the performances are actually very good, especially Hunt (Arquette seems to have patented a furrowed brow he carries through movies with him as “his look” - though his acting is fine).

And the movie doesn’t even make a great DVD, at least for those who appreciate pristine audio and video. That’s because the film is given a deliberately grainy look, except for a couple of places, that means it could receive the best THX-certified remastering in history and it’ll still look grainy and dark. At least Columbia Tristar has unleashed it with a digitally mastered anamorphic widescreen picture that fills the 16x9 TV screen nicely.

The audio’s better, but is only in stereo and so the home theater surround system is wasted.

Extras include the music video for Greg Brown’s Sadness and some theatrical trailers.

Dream with the Fishes, from Columbia Tristar Home Video
96 min. anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1, 16x9 TV compatible), Dolby Digital stereo
Starring David Arquette, Kathryn Erbe, Brad Hunt
Produced by JohnnyWow and Mitchell Stein
Written and directed by Finn Taylor.

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