I was gone for most of the weekend, but there were two new films out there that I knew I had to see! Both with incredibly high Rotten Tomatoes scores and some serious Oscar buzz.
Dream Scenario – I’ve been hearing all around that this is Nicolas Cage’s best performance in years, so it seems like everyone has forgotten about Pig, including Cage himself! I digress. It’s perfectly possible to have two awesome movies in recent years, and I suppose this is no exception. Cage plays college professor, Paul Matthews, who teaches a bunch of super bored kids about science. Something about ants, too, which was pretty comical. One day, he notices a lot of people giving him weird looks, snickering and whispering as he walks by. Finally fed up with it all he asks what the problem is only to learn that almost everyone is seeing Paul in their dreams. He’s severely disappointed to learn that he’s doing nothing in these dreams, but his sudden appearance makes him just as suddenly famous. He’s riding on the high of this infamy, hoping it will finally be the catalyst to get his unwritten book published. Almost as soon as his fame takes off though, it crash lands when those dreams featuring Paul turn into traumatizing nightmares. People cannot even be in the same room as him. There is certainly a strong parallel to our recent cancel culture, and just like most people impacted by that in the real world, there’s no way back into good graces for Paul either. Great fun!
May December – I must confess that I had to look up what the title of this film meant. Because as far as I was concerned, it’d didn’t even so much as nod to it over the course of two hours. In reality, that phrasing is in reference to relationships with very large age gaps. Well, that is very much the premise of this film! Elizabeth is a TV actress tapped to play Gracie Atherton-Yoo in a film about her affair at the age of 36 with a 13 year-old boy, Joe. Yuck. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this movie was based on the real life case of Mary Lou Letourneau. I am familiar with the story as it was parodied in the Adam Sandler film, That’s My Boy. Still yucky, but at least it was funny. Anyway, Elizabeth is granted time to observe and ask questions to Gracie, Joe, and anyone else that was a significant part of their lives since the scandal. This period of time also coincides with their youngest children’s graduation from college, about to make them empty-nesters. Gracie is honestly terrifying in her naivete, but she’s also smarter than she seems. Poor Joe seems as though he never really grew past his middle school self, and the upcoming events really has him in a tailspin. It was unsettling for sure, but I craved more answers than I was given, though I suppose that was the intention. For a Netflix film, you really can’t get much better than this.