Dreamscape

Brainwashing is convincingly represented in Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate with a POV, the same room and people are somewhere else and altogether different, like a waking dream.

Nemerov has a fly buzzing and a dream, “I saw the helmet of the king / Of Nineveh, pale gold and glittering / On the king’s brow, yet sleeping knew that I / But thought the deepening blue thought of the fly.”

Dreamscape turns the tables on this, the dreamer subject to a secret government program of dream-infiltration appears to the fly who also dreams himself the king of Nineveh. This is enough of a shock to break the spell permanently.

True Believer

A most remarkable representation of a lawyer in his working clothes, the actual thinking reality as it were, and this in service to a grinding war in defense of a principle, the principle of defense and the spirit of the laws.

He keeps the prosecution honest against drug dealers, the record stays clean. Then he’s got a hood framed for murder to support a massive crackdown on Colombian drug gangs.

The savvy of the representation is in a stall for time perpetrated on an expert witness in court and appreciated by colleague and clerk, 93% accurate ballistics analysis means seven false verdicts out of every hundred trials, “no further questions.”

“Cinema of a free man,” as someone says, filmed like a thriller in New York.

The Forgotten

It begins to seem as if the art of printing motion-picture film is being lost, like so many other things. Ruben therefore makes a film in what passes for contemporary technique, digitally blue, CGI’d, about a memory test forced upon the National Security Agency by aliens from outer space. It seems, at least to him, the only possible response, the only one available, as bad as it inconceivably gets.