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Dream movies
4:00 am Jul 22 - by Nick Martin – buzz Asstant Arts and Entertainment Editor
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Waking Life
(2001):How do you make a film about dense, philosophical conversations and avant-garde animation interesting? Make it about dreams. A nameless protagonist is struck by a car and swept through a series of surreal situations that force him to ask fundamental questions about reality itself. It’s ambiguous as to whether or not our hero is alive or dead, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Dreams inhabit an unusual plane between existence and death — you’re not actually experiencing life, yet you’re not not experiencing it either. As one character puts it, “They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn’t you say the same thing about life?”
Dreamscape
(1984):Joseph Ruben’s 1984 sci-fi action movie wonders what could happen if dreams were inhabitable worlds of their own? Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) is a psychic wasting his talents on horse races until a doctor of fringe dream science (a field I only wish existed) asks him to participate in a strange experiment. Alex must infiltrate other people’s dreams, fight nightmare-ish creatures and eventually try to stop a plot to assassinate the president (who is under attack by dream assassins). While somewhat campy — and not without bad eighties hairdos or a synthesizer soundtrack — Dreamscape shows how creative movies about dreams can be when freed from laws of reality and only subject to ideas of strange imaginations.
The Science of Sleep
(2006):A lot of Michel Gondry’s work (e.g. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) deals with dreams, but perhaps his 2006 French indie deals with them most directly. Stéphane Miroux is a young artist with lots of creativity and ambition, and not a lot of social grace or self-confidence. After getting a dead-end job at a calendar manufacturer and meeting the love of his life, he resorts to consistently making strange mistakes that mess everything up. What Stéphane is good at is dreaming; in his dreams he’s the boss at his job, irresistible to women, host of a surrealist cooking show and able to ride a big clay boat on oceans made of cellophane. The Science of Sleep reminds us that even though real life might be depressing and mundane, dreaming can still be an exciting spectacle. Maybe that’s why people like dreaming so much ...
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