DREAM SCENARIO****

Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli's DREAM SCENARIO is a film that feels as though it could have been made by a collective of Spike Jonze, Charlie Kauffman and Michel Gondry. This is a good thing. 

Nic Cage stars as a schlubby university professor who starts showing up in everyone's dreams. At first this leads to a wonderful surge in popularity - students actually turn up to his lectures and he gets a book deal. But when his dream avatar turns into a nightmare, the world turns on the real life professor. He and his family are shunned, and then subject to violence. The book deal morphs into a crass trashy occult-baiting book.  The poor man's entire life is upended.

The film has lots to say about the absurdity of the mob - whether in hyping someone up or tearing them down. The increasingly surreal dreams are beautifully executed. And through it all we have Cage's measured, disbelieving, horrified Professor. People are right when they say it's the most well-modulated performance Cage has given in years - playing against type - or rather the caricature that Cage sometimes puts forth of himself.

The resulting film is an intelligent and darkly absurd satire that entertains and provokes. Superb!

DREAM SCENARIO is rated R and has a running time of 102 minutes.  It played Toronto 2023 and was released in the USA and UK last November.

SELMA

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SELMA is a handsomely made, beautifully acted and devastatingly searing movie about the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  It's also a movie about the difference between having a right in theory and having a right in practice, and as such, is a profoundly important and timely film.  What it isn't, and thank goodness for that, is a conventional hagio-biography in the Great Man does Great Things genre.  This isn't, and sorry to keep going on about it, as dumb as THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING.

The movie opens with Martin Luther King already a major political force. He has the ear of President Johnson and wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But despite the end of segregation by Federal Law, in Governor George Wallace's Alabama, African Americans are still subject to extreme racism.  In an elegant, swift and brutal opening triptych we are therefore given King's Nobel acceptance speech; the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing; and Annie Lee Cooper being denied her application to register to vote on the most spurious and humiliating of grounds. 

Overlooked DVD of the month - CHICAGO 10

Brett Morgan has a knack for making funny, insightful documentaries about colourful historical figures. Half his genius is picking characters that have a finely tuned sense of theatrics: the other half of his genius is in bringing that to a modern audience with a sense of flair and energy. In his bio-doc of Robert Evans, legendary Hollywood producer and ladies man, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, Morgan used photo-montage and memoir. In CHICAGO 10, Morgan mixes vintage news-footage, animated court-room recreations, contemporary interviews and simulated stand-up. The sound-track mixes contemporary protest music with Eminem and the Beastie Boys. The resulting documentary is very funny, often surreal, and brings home the gravity and high stakes of the American civil rights and anti-war movement of the late 1960s.

The story is simple. In 1968, the American counter-culture movement is fuming about the escalation of the war in Vietnam. They plan to come to Chicago and lobby the Democratic National Convention. The movement coalesces around the Yippie movement led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and the Black Panthers led by Bobby Seale. Mayor/Boss Daley sets the pigs onto the protestors: Communist conspiracies "justify" disproportionate police brutality. The Chicago 8 are brought to trial. The documentary basically dramatises court records and puts them in context. The Chicago 7 come across as witty, intelligent and radical, but not unreasonable. The gagging of Bobby Seale, and the severance of his trial from the group trial seems like an act of pure and brutal racism. It's shocking to modern eyes. Hank Azaria is simply brilliant as Abbie Hoffman and Jeffrey Wright is powerful as Bobby Seale .(The final two members of the 10 are the two lawyers).

Watching the movie today I was shamed by how active and passionate these kids were and how bland and anaemic the anti Iraqi war protests were. But I was also massively entertained. It's just FUN to see Hoffman skewering the judge, or the defense attorney asking if an undercover cop was hurt by a jumper. And so Brett Morgan achieves the rarest of rare things: he makes a movie that is important and entertaining: and a documentary that actually deserves to be seen on the big screen.

CHICAGO 10 played Sundance 2007 and opened in the US and UK in Spring 2008.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD - strong performances trump mannered direction

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is a beautifully scripted and performed tragedy about a failed marriage in 1950s American suburbia. Frank and April Wheeler believe in fictionalised versions of themselves - talented, bohemian, decidedly not second-rate. April says that callow, banal Frank is the most interesting person she's ever met. It's patently obvious to us that this reflects her day-dream rather than reality.  The reality is that, seven years later, Frank works a dull job in an office cubicle and April is a housewife in a banal town. April attempts to shake them out of the rut by persuading Frank to quit his job, sell the house, and take April and the kids to Paris. She'll work, he'll find himself, and they'll fix their marriage. The tragedy is that April really hates her life and wants to see the dream through. Frank discovers he actually rather likes being the high-earning paterfamilias. Or maybe he's just afraid that there's nothing to find?  April feels betrayed.

The movie is based on the superb novel by Richard Yates - a novel I only recently read and thoroughly enjoyed. Justin Haythe's script stays faithful to the content and style of the novel. His one key departure is to give the Wheeler's neighbours' son, John, more time. John, on a home visit from electro-shock treatments in an asylum, sees through all the pretense. He sees through the myth of suburban contentment but also through the Wheeler's attempt to portray himself as "special". His analysis is piercing and Michael Shannon truly steals every scene he's in with his powerful, menacing performance. He deserves his Oscar nom, if only as delayed recognition from his even better performance in Billy Friedkin's BUG.

What of the rest? Yes, Kate Winslet is superb as April Wheeler, with a raw and affecting performance that I think trumps her work in THE READER. I was also impressed by the maturity and nuance in Leonardo di Caprio's performance as Frank. Kathy Bates and Zoe Kazan (as Maureen) are particularly strong in support. And any movie photographed by Roger Deakins looks great. Where the movie falls down is in its direction. There was something rather obvious and lazy in Sam Mendes' concept for the movie: the perfectly pastel costumes and decor; the overly-insistent score; the obvious shot of Frank running near the end of the movie. I far preferred what Stephen Daldry did with the Mrs Brown segment in THE HOURS or what Todd Field did with LITTLE CHILDREN (though that was also a flawed film.)  There was nothing in this film that surprised me or shook me  or impressed me in the direction.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is on release in the US, Germany, Austria, Norway, Belgium, Egypt, France, Australia, Croatia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Japan, Argentina, Chile, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Russia and Slovakia. It opens today in the UK, Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Italy, Mexico, Poland and Sweden. It opens on February 6th in Turkey; February 12th in South Korea and February 19th in Singapore.