Dreamways

Title: How She Move
Director: Ian Iqbal Rashid

How She Move (2008) is a delightful, high-energy movie about pursuing dreams, dreams as hopes, goals & aspirations. It clearly demonstrates that without tremendous determination and waking-world elbow grease, hopes and aspirations are no more than pipe dreams. To make dreams real requires jumping, feet first, into the fray of the waking world, constantly recalibrating the dreams against waking reality, modifying the dreams, but never giving them up.

 read more »

Title: Golden Door
Director: Emanuele Crialese

This 2007 Italian film, written and directed by Emanuele Crialese, is truly, in the words of New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, a “beautiful dream of a film.” In its subject matter, as well as its imagery, this movie compellingly shows us very specific lives shaped and guided by waking nightmares and the dreams, goals, aspirations, and ideals born in response to them.

 read more »

Title: Dexter - The First Season

This sinisterly fascinating TV show is based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay. The novel’s title certainly captures the spirit of the story: it is a dark, if humor filled, nightmare. Dexter (played by the boyishly good looking Michael C. Hall of Six Feet Under fame) works as a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department. While this is an unusual enough job, visiting sites of bloody violence to analyze what may have occurred, it is a perfect fit for him, we quickly learn, since Dexter is himself a serial killer.

 read more »

Title: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

This beautiful and profound movie is director Julian Schnabel’s gorgeous and provocative cinematic interpretation of the book Le Scaphandre et le Papillon by Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby, a French fashion magazine editor, suffered a stroke in 1995, while in his 40’s, that left him in a rare state called “locked-in syndrome.” While retaining vision and hearing, his mind functioning perfectly, his body was virtually completely paralyzed. He could not move or speak. With the help of a deeply compassionate nurse, he learned to communicate by blinking his left eye.  read more »

Title: Talk to Me (Widescreen Edition)

This excellent movie, based on "real life" is the story of two Black men in Washington, D.C. during the tumultuous 1960s. A hallmark of The Sixties was open and boisterous expression. There was a ubiquitous desire for people and groups to tell their own truths as well as to point what was wrong in society at large.  It was a time of Dreams.

 read more »

Title: Pride (Widescreen Edition)

As seems to be the vogue these days, this movie, too, is “based on true events.” It is an inspiring telling of the faith and work necessary to make dreams come true. Daydreams become dreams, goals and aspirations that are made real. All of the individual dreams are set against the background of the dream, the ideal of overcoming the hideous limits of racism. The dreams in this movie play out against the ugly nightmares of poverty, racism, bureaucratic red tape, and indifference.

 read more »

Title: The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Director: Ken Loach

This 2007 movie is a horrifying and sobering demonstration of what can happen when goals and ideals are brought to life and not ongoingly examined. Like a kaleidescope show, this film shows a series of waking dreams fracturing into shards with the twistings of personal and national history. Each pattern of broken dream pieces shatters into ever darker patterns of nightmare. Every turn of events has the terrifying effect of creating suffering. Every action constellates increasingly vivid levels of violence.
 read more »

Title: Angel-A
Director: Luc Besson

Small-time huckster Andre has run up squalid money debts that he cannot repay and his thuggish lenders are menacingly calling the debts in. An endearing sort of nebbish as well as a small-time scam artist, poor Andre comes to his wit’s end and concludes that it’s time for his life’s end. He decides to avoid it all by hurling himself off a bridge into the Seine. So begins Angel-A, a 2005 French black and white movie, directed and written by Luc Besson. This delightful film is a wry and touching presentation of a vision or hallucination.

 read more »

Title: Goya's Ghosts
Director: Milos Forman

This 2006 U.S. movie, directed by Miloš Forman, captures the nightmare that was life in Spain during the life of famous painter Francisco Goya. Featuring Natalie Portman, Javier Bardem and Stellan Skarsgård, Goya’s Ghosts vividly shows the political and religious darkness that settled over Spain during Goya’s life and that he wound up depicting so brutally and honestly in many of his paintings.

 read more »

Title: Grbavica: the Land of My Dreams
Director: Jasmilla Zbanic

This movie, a multi-national production, addresses the unfathomable legacy of nightmares. Grbavica is a story of the ongoing horrors that haunt a few individual lives in Sarajevo, a city battered to pieces in the nightmare of war that convulsed the territory of Yugoslavia as it disintegrated into violence when the Iron Curtain fell apart in the early 1990’s. Sarajevo, the 1980’s Winter Olympics city, had been famous, when part of Yugoslavia, as a place of multi-cultural harmony. The dream city descended into infamy as a site of nightmarish atrocities.

 read more »