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From: Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: Dream Scenario (2023)
Date: Mon, 27 May 2024 07:41:03 -0700
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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.