Re: Dream Scenario (2023)

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.