Path: ...!feeds.phibee-telecom.net!news.mixmin.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Arthur Lipscomb Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv Subject: Re: Dream Scenario (2023) Date: Mon, 27 May 2024 07:41:03 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 85 Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Mon, 27 May 2024 16:41:03 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="1a194732d77c7d5d013065420027fab8"; logging-data="98249"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+eV6NjttgReAlpuBSYzQRCL5QffDUgjSo=" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird Cancel-Lock: sha1:5jeXf3WQ3IrxHJC6Ksrkn9Tma+s= Content-Language: en-US In-Reply-To: Bytes: 5059 On 5/26/2024 11:40 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote: > From A24, Toronto-based production with some locations in Montreal. > Produced over five weeks at the end of 2022. > > I found this in the library, knew nothing about it. The cover said it > was a comedy and Nicolas Cage has never been funnier. > > Uh > > It has tiny moments of comedy but this is an attempt at horror, with a > shared dream scenario that Cage's character Paul Matthews enters with > no idea how. The dreamer experiences Paul but Paul does not experience > the dreamer. > > It's really not good. > > Sophie (Lily Bird) has a dream in which her father Paul appears. > Clothing keeps falling from the sky and then a body, but Paul just > stands there, ignoring the crisis, and then ignoring Sophie as she > floats away. Soon, numerous people experience dreams with Paul standing > there oblivious. > > Paul is upset because he's not helpful but he's not all that engaging in > real life. He's a professor. Janet (Julianne Nicholson whose delightful > freckles have faded; I wish she'd get them back) is his unsupportive > wife. I thought they made her too extreme. Significantly, she never > dreams about him. > > Paul has been neglecting research in his field since he was a graduate, > but someone he was a student with took his ideas and developed them. > She's going to publish in a prestigious journal. Paul is jealous. It's > not quite clear how much work, if any, he'd done on them in grad school. > He's been thinking about writing a book for decades. > > Paul's students start dreaming about him, but at first, the dreams may > have violent imagery in them but Paul is not interacting. > > The owner of a marketing firm Trent (Michael Cera) thinks he can use > Paul's abilities for product placement in dreams just by getting people > to think about Paul with the product while awake. One of his employees > Molly (Dylan Gelula, a very attractive brunette in her late 20s playing > early 20s) tells Paul that she's dreamt about him and in the dream, he's > sexually agressive. Soon, more women have dreams like this. > > Later, the dreams people are having about Paul have him instigating > violence, usually killing the dreamer. > > People are now terrified of Paul. He's still experiencing any of it. > > Paul is now shunned. His students won't attend class and he loses his > job, and his wife loses her job. He's banned from his daughter's school > and cannot see her perform on stage. > > Paul tries to make an apology video after finally experiencing one of hs > own dreams, a figure who looks like him tries to murder him. The video > is terrible and backfires. His marriage ends. > > Eventually a guy sees him in a restaurant and beats him up. Everyone > stops dreaming about Paul. No explanation. > > Later, an engineer figures out how to exploit the shared dreamscape for > commercial reasons now that Paul proved it existed. Product placement is > directly in dreams. He's figured out how to get people to direct their > minds into someone else's dream. > > I have no idea how the time shift works because he uses the example of > putting himself into the dream of a Korean boy. How can you possibly > know when someone elsewhere is in a dream state and receptive, let alone > sleeping? > > Paul writes a book Dream Scape for the French market. They try to promote > him as Freddy Kruger and entirely change his book into something else. > Another failure. > > In the end, he teaches himself to enter Janet's dream. She's being > burned and he rescues her, then floats away as Sophie had, and wishes > the dream were real. > > Amber Midthunder is in this. I liked it more than you did, but it definitely could have been a better movie. I wonder if maybe the issue is Cage was miscast and a different actor would have brought a better dynamic to the part. Although what Cage brought to the part may have been exactly what the directed wanted.