{"id":1268,"date":"2024-06-20T05:45:54","date_gmt":"2024-06-20T05:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/20\/dream-scenario\/"},"modified":"2024-06-20T05:45:54","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T05:45:54","slug":"dream-scenario","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/20\/dream-scenario\/","title":{"rendered":"Dream Scenario"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s something refreshing about the plainly weird premise of\u00a0\u201cDream Scenario\u201d. Nicolas Cage plays a nondescript evolutionary biology professor named Paul Matthews, who suddenly appears in the dreams of his students, daughters, and people he does not know. He doesn’t do\u00a0anything in their recurring nighttime hallucinations of anxiety or horror, in which people sometimes float into the air or the world collapses. He more or less\u00a0just strolls through the background in his sweater and glasses, sometimes flashing his\u00a0dopey, pleasant smile. Paul soon becomes a phenomenon, and then a pariah when everyone\u2019s dreams co-starring Paul become violent.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They probably won\u2019t make movies with this budget within a few years, and some studios will never make such movies again, if they ever did. That\u2019s where writer\/director Kristoffer Borgli comes in, with the support of distribution A24 and producers Nicolas Cage and Ari Aster. Borgli is\u00a0a Norwegian satirist who has long been interested in crude commercialism and absurd scenarios. Earlier this year, we saw the stateside release of his film \u201cSick of Myself,\u201d about a woman who does the unthinkable and medically dangerous to her face\u00a0to become famous. \u201cDream Scenario\u201d is the inverse, in how it\u00a0actualizes fame and not being able to control your image as if it were a miracle that suddenly happened and then trapped you. Both films hardly show these scenarios playing out on social media, but they don’t need to. The groupthink is the bubble in which this movie takes place.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nicolas Cage is excellent in a strange course of events\u00a0in which he is not intentionally a freak (his storied cinematic superpower) but is stuck being seen as one.\u00a0<\/span>Such an iconic normie needs a star in the role, and Cage is a great fit\u2014he hasn\u2019t been like this since he played two Kaufman brothers in Spike Jonze\u2019s \u201cAdaptation.\u201d In the last few years, his career choices have welcomed meta layers, but he has made them fit his passions instead of the other way around. In his most spirited roles, he cares most about what makes someone so weird, and in this case, it\u2019s about Paul\u2019s hunching, stuttering, and nasal presence. Cage brings such an essential innocence to this role, which is initially very funny about how bland he is\u2014he\u2019s so good at cracking unfunny jokes\u2014and later, how clueless he is as a patsy for the culture wars. Cage plays the part as if this were simply a biopic about a professor who wants to be known one day for writing a book about ants.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Borgli\u2019s script, which is inspired by memes, the rush of\u00a0going viral, and celebrity, is funny when pitching the\u00a0original problem. There are a lot of laughs when Paul, flattered by the attention, says things like, \u201cHave you been dreaming about me?\u201d. But the specific choice to not explore why this is happening, or its worldwide effect, or why everyone\u2019s dreams suddenly become violent, becomes unfulfilling. It\u2019s telling how this movie has some punchy awkward moments (including a punchline with concurrent bodily functions), but not a singular great scene. Cage\u2019s sincere work can only do so much as Paul flails through a downfall that he has no clue how to reverse. When he makes a crying video begging for empathy, as influencers are known to do, it just makes everything much worse, but the story is not better.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s something refreshing about the plainly weird premise of\u00a0\u201cDream Scenario\u201d. Nicolas Cage plays a nondescript evolutionary biology professor named Paul Matthews, who suddenly appears in the dreams of his students, daughters, and people he does not know. He doesn’t do\u00a0anything in their recurring nighttime hallucinations of anxiety or horror, in which people sometimes float into …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[33,44,48],"class_list":["post-1268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-horror-movies","tag-comedy","tag-fantasy","tag-horror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}