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From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: Dream Scenario (2023)
Date: Mon, 27 May 2024 19:28:34 -0000 (UTC)
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Arthur Lipscomb  <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:
>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.

I'm not objecting to performances. The story utterly lacked a plot.

There's a shared dreamscape. His image enters the dreams of other
people. It's not him. He can't interact. Stuff happens to him for no
reason the script bothers to explain.