In Dreams (1999)

Very Cool!!!

From my favorite movies..

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

The housewife Claire Cooper (Annette Bening) is married with the pilot Paul Cooper (Aidan Quinn) and their little daughter Rebecca (Katie Sagona) is their pride and joy. When a stranger kidnaps a girl, Claire dreams about the man but Detective Jack Kay (Paul Guilfoyle) ignores her concerns. But when Rebecca disappears during a school play, Claire learns that her visions were actually premonitions and she is connected to the killer through her dreams. She has a nervous breakdown and tries to commit suicide. Her psychologist Dr. Silverman (Stephen Rea) sends her to a mental institution and soon she finds that her husband will be the next victim of the serial-killer. Further, the serial-killer was interned in the same cell in the hospital where she is. Will Claire be able to save Paul?"In Dreams" is a deceptive Neil Jordan's movie. The messy story is boring and Annette Bening is hysterical most of the time. There is no explanation for the connection between Claire Cooper and Vivian Thompson and the conclusion is terrible. My vote is four.Title (Brazil): "A Premonição" ("The Premonition")

Interesting that there are so many different interpretations when only one makes any sense. The whole thing is a view from inside a broken mind. The dreamer is who we have been calling Vivian. Not sure whether the character is a he or a she. For sure the entire thing is a combination of madness, possibly induced or deepened by long-term abuse, possibly not because the childhood could be a fantasy as well. Vivian, seen as Downey is the one who dreams while asleep and awake. Asylums don't look like this. The court scene is wrong and clearly imagined. Folks, there hasn't been a death penalty in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in a long time. I don't think either child is real. All those apples = knowledge. Think about the clues. The security guard who dies, the one who doesn't. The police-like car used and the one sunk. The child drowned and the child saved. The husband dead and the husband alive. The whole thing is a nightmare. Don't you wonder why some psychotics do what they do? It is because they are in this kind of world. I would have rated higher and intended to do so before I saw how confused everyone seemed to be so apparently the message is not clear and I'm not sure if the plan was to make it so ambiguous. By the way, about the concern as to Downey's Vivian being weird but not serial killer-weird? We never do know if Vivian ever "did" anything or imagined it all. American Psycho anyone? Maybe it really does deserve that 9 I was toying with. I'll sleep on it.

This is a movie to be watched more than listened to. Let the visuals have their way with you and you are going to have an exciting, nail-biting two hours capped with a perfect-fit ending.If you look for meaning, logical connections and perfect continuity, don't bother. It's not going to work for you. It's not that kind of movie. This is not "Silence of the Lambs" or "Se7en." It's more like Nicholas Roeg's twisted little masterpiece, "Don't Look Now." In fact, I recommend that movie to anyone (the few, the proud, the brave) who can see what a terrific movie In Dreams is.Annette Bening, who is in 90 percent of In Dreams, turns in a bravura performance (if you're reading this, Annette, give us a kiss, you ravishing hunk of woman. Speaking of dreams ... well, uh, let's not go there. Let's just say I've about worn out my copy of The Grifters). The story is simple. Bening plays a mom being driven mad by dreams put in her head by the sicko who killed her daughter. These dreams are of events in the past, things happening now and things that haven't happened yet. A lot of the movie is Bening having nervous breakdowns, each one worse than the one before. The apple-throwing sequence is brilliantly acted and shot. Incredible tension. Major props, also, to the big car and truck crash scene. Jordan puts you right there.Aidan Quinn, as her husband, doesn't have much to do but act baffled, but he's good at that. Stephen Rea, as the psychiatrist, performs the same role as the psychiatrist at the end of Psycho, tying together events from years past to what's going on now. Robert Downey Jr. plays the nutcase very well.This movie looks gorgeous — small town Massachusetts in the fall. Vivid colors you could eat with a spoon. The scene with the little boy atop the church steeple poking out of the lake is really eerie.Again, the visuals in this movie are extraordinary. In Dreams is not about something that could actually happen to real people. It's a wonderfully made adult horror movie that, compared to other horror movies, is actually restrained. Check it out.BTW, the trailer of this movie, which I watched on the DVD, is just awful. It looks like a completely different movie, and a bad one, at that.

** SOME SPOILERS ** There are a handful of directors out there - Brian De Palma is another - who believe that the way to make a convincing psychological thriller is just to steal wholesale from Psycho. Neil Jordan goes further and steals not only from De Palma's famous Carrie ending too, but also the red-obsession and drowning themes of Don't Look Now and the dripping red wallscrawl of The Shining, plus all the usual lunatic asylum clichés. He also reckons that by attaching a Roy Orbison song onto the end of the movie the effect will be as chilling as a David Lynch film, rather than just plain funny.In Dreams wants to be an intelligent and adult thriller, but like a director with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Jordan just can't help himself loading his film with meaningless clichés and nods to his favourite horror movies.The early domestic scenes are effective, as is the gut-wrenching murder which takes place a short way into the film; but once Bening is committed, the film takes a turn for the usual, and instead of being interesting, incisive or intelligent, just throws a lot of MTV tricks and regurgitated movie moments at the screen hoping that some of them will stick.By far the worst thing about the film is Robert Downey Jr., who undoes anything remaining to keep the viewer interested by his cartoonishly camp turn, and we're treated to yet another mother-obsessive lunatic with a penchant for cross-dressing.This is a good film to watch if you have an apple fetish or enjoy being untroubled by original ideas.