The Official "Dreamcatcher" discussion thread

I haven't seen it yet (may save myself the pain, wait for the DVD), but for some reason Coming Soon gave it an 8/10. That's the first positive thing I've seen on the movie...strange.

Well I love Mission To Mars unabashedly, so I'll have reserve my judgement.

But I also trust The Inspector on myriad issues so this is something of a quandry.

Is the score at least good ?

Dammit! I've been looking forward to this. I'll probably see it anyways I guess.

Strax--

The score is very good! I'll definitely pick it up the first chance I get. (The opening credits theme is sort of a "funky" variation on his theme for Signs.)

The scene I mentioned in my review (the Independence Day-level helicopter attack) is some seriously amazing music. The scene itself just comes out of nowhere, doesn't feel or seem like the same movie and has Morgan Freeman with those stupid eyebrows wearing his flight helmet and spouting angry drill-sergeant dialogue.

It's worse than that really...

I love that review! Another nice one Inspector. Anyway, it sounds so bad, how could I NOT see it today? I just finished the book, and I am in agreeance with most who have read it, I dug the first and last thirds of the book, but the middle was dry to the bone. I purposefully didn't read any spoilers on the movie ending so I have yet another thing to either laugh or shake my head at.

You will have a blast. Another internet review somewhere called it the Showgirls of science fiction. They're aren't far wrong, just no tits.

Wow...sounds like in about an hour, i'm gonna be really disappointed! I'm heading over to check out the 12:10 show, despite the Inspectors warning, but perhaps with his words,i won't e let down as much. It s been a while since i have read the book, but it sounds like the follow things along, i can't remember completely though. Someone who has readthe book recently should stop back in and let those who have shitty memories how far off the beaten trail they went.
On a curious side note-why is it that the only Stephan King adaptations that seem to be really really good are the drama ones?, like Stand ByMe, Green Mile, Shawshank, even Hearts. Why is it the King Of Horror has such shitty horror movies?

Are there any pictures of Mr. Gray or the Shit-Weasels out there? It would certainly sate my curiosity.

Thanks for that 'Spec. At least I'll have Jim Newton Howard to lead me through the cinematic wasteland as he has done many times before...

Wow!! Great review Inspector.. There was a time when reading such a scathing review would have turned me right off. But I am a glutton and I have to say the badness that I have read about has more than piqued my curiosity.. I shall be viewing this on a Tuesday when the price of admission is half price...

I'll be watching the flick tonight after work...but after reading the corner's review I gotta say....

...I love LIFEFORCE. I really really do

On the subject of Morgan Freeman's wacky eyebrows I have a little bit of info on the subject. In playing the character Mr. Freeman was looking for something that would tip people off that the Colonel was a bit tweaked, or just plain honking nuts before the flick would actually come out and show it. He went through a variety of things, smoking pipe , coffe mug, ect. Nothing clicked until he thought of those evil eyebrows. This he came with in an interview with film critic David Moss last week. Who by the way gave tyhe film a pretty decent review. However I'm waiting for it to come out on DVD due to the fact of a hectic scheduale, and my "to see" list seems to be rather full this year.

The movie is horrible.The review nailed it on the head.Sad acting, the plot was just.."god-awful".It was just a joke, the creatures, and the hilarious dialog.The scene were he was talking into the gun..super cheese.I think I like Saddam Hussein better than this movie....yeah, it's that bad.

I gotta say, i liked it! I went in to be entertained, and entertained i was. I dug a lot of things in this movie, and didn't see where everyone could laugh out loud at it. Wince at some parts maybe, but i loved lots of it. The creatures, the helicopter attack, the cheesy-ass acting...The ending was...odd....but, yeah. I liked it.

I dinna like it. It was not the worst movie i had ever seen but i found actually a little bitmore pre-occupied with trying to get my watch off of military time and back to normal time. I read the book and did not find things that ...cheesy? (for lackof a better phrase). The memory warehouse? didn't seem that bad in the book, actually thinki found that clever in the book. The bleching and fart? It felt too....Beavis and butthead-ish in themovie wheni remember in the book it being rather serious. it seems to have followed along pretty wellwith the book, but ithink due to whole time spent in book form vs. time spent in film form just makes everything seemkinda ridiculous. I agree the child actors were horrible and some of the lines were just bad bad bad 9i know Pete was drunk but that whole "theory" talkingto the lady in road was...ugh!)
A guyat Suncoast (had to stop in afterwards to pick up AOP13) asked me if King had a cameo and when i told hmno, he said 'well then, there you go. If King ain't in it he hates it andit must be really bad". Hmmmm......
The guy was half right....

I dinna like it. It was not the worst movie i had ever seen but i found actually a little bitmore pre-occupied with trying to get my watch off of military time and back to normal time. I read the book and did not find things that ...cheesy? (for lackof a better phrase). The memory warehouse? didn't seem that bad in the book, actually thinki found that clever in the book. The bleching and fart? It felt too....Beavis and butthead-ish in themovie wheni remember in the book it being rather serious. it seems to have followed along pretty wellwith the book, but ithink due to whole time spent in book form vs. time spent in film form just makes everything seemkinda ridiculous. I agree the child actors were horrible and some of the lines were just bad bad bad 9i know Pete was drunk but that whole "theory" talkingto the lady in road was...ugh!)
A guyat Suncoast (had to stop in afterwards to pick up AOP13) asked me if King had a cameo and when i told hmno, he said 'well then, there you go. If King ain't in it he hates it andit must be really bad". Hmmmm......
The guy was half right....

Ab-so-fuckin'-lutely. I'm the guy who will gleefully watch Orca or The Swarm or Exorcist II or Lifeforce purely for the laughs. (I'm a sick individual, but I too love the Big Budget Bad...)

This is the Apocalypse Now of big budget misfires.

Amen, as I said above...I LOVE LIFEFORCE! I really really do. I'm sitting here smiling reading these Dreamcatcher reviews and then its like someone comes up and bops me a bit on the back of the head with Lifeforce gabs I just keep saying "Hey, stop it."

As I said in the main thread:

I felt that if you disregard the book, it works. It's a plesant time at the movies.

I have seen the horror that is Fear Dot Com. This is not that bad.

i pretty much figured i'd be in the minority of who liked it a lot.

I had had read the book and when i started to hear about the changes to the last act, i was getting dissapointed but i didnt want that alone to ruin the movie...so i waited to see if it was at least a movie i could enjoy... and i did.

Sure the changes were stupid ala "british accented Mr. Gray"....but dammit, the movie was still fun. Not as good as the book, a few changes could've helped out....but i loved it!

This may not have been such a bad flick if they would have saved it for a four-six hour tv mini-series. It would have given them the timemake the absurd actually work FOR the movie rather than stepping all over the audiences dick tyring to show off. My vote for the "Laugh out Loud" award goes to henry talking into the ...ahem...gun phone AND Tom Sizmores character buying it!(hmmm...must be one of them new nextels.....technology is sure amazing!)
Andi concur with whoever saidit earlier. From here one out, wheneve i pull a major boner and fuck something up royaly-"I DUDDITS!!"
SSDD indeed!

I don't know. For some reason it clicked for me. I just had a good time seeing it. I hadn't been to the movies in a while, and this provided a pleasant evening by myself.

Liked the performances, save Lee. I thought Sizemore was really underplaying it.

But I can see how most people find it ludicrous.

Then again, I liked The Postman, so there you go...

I posted my opinion on this mess-o'-shite a few days ago in the Chud Sewer, here's the cut and paste of what I thought:

I honestly didn't think it could be that bad. Then I saw the fucking thing...

Wow. I just can't comprehend how anyone involved thought this would be a good idea. I was moderately enjoying the first forty minutes or so. As has been said by others who've seen it, this section of the movie isn't bad, but it's nothing spectacular either.

Jason Lee provided a couple of funny moments, but the shift in tone from "horror" to humour and back again is so rapid that it became hard to tell whether Kasdan was trying to made a horror movie, or was just playing the whole thing for laughs.

Every time there's a potentially scary action scene, it descends into broad slapstick territory that wouldn't seem out of place in Evil Dead 2. For example, Tim Olyphant's attack at the campfire. Add to that the dick and fart jokes we get in abundance. Kasdan just doesn't know what movie he wants to make and ruins any and all action scenes accordingly.

Plot lines are thrown out there so fast, that I can't see how anyone but King fans are going to be able to pick up what the hell is happening. Perhaps I either missed something or wasn't paying attention, but some things, like the "SSDD" thing are brought up, then never explained. No doubt people who've read the book will understand what's going on, but since it's brought up quite a bit during the film, it should've been spelled out.

I was tolerating the movie right up until 'Mr. Gray' showed up. I kept thinking that there's no way Kasdan seriously thought he could play this straight-faced. Obviously he did, as things spiral swiftly into a huge pile of shit from this point on, with no sign that the laughs this film will inspire were in any way intentional.

Then the much talked about ending came about. Fucking hell.

I just can't see mass audiences enjoying it, and I'm positive King fans will be completely irate with the treatment of the book. Such a fucking shame, too. I'd been looking forward to it for a while. That cast is incredibly talented, and I was initially glad that someone gave Damian Lewis some high profile work after his fantastic work in Band of Brothers. After seeing this shite, I feel sorry for the guy. Hopefully he'll continue on to better things.

If you plan on seeing the damn thing, don't expect a good film in any way, shape or form.

Oh, and I have to agree with Ryan. I never got around to reading the book, so I was judging it as a stand-alone movie. It still didn't satisfy me in any way. If anything, I think disregarding the book helps less with it.

Kasdan and Goldman stick far too close to the book and fail to explain a hell of a lot of things to non-King readers. Since this is a movie meant to appeal to mainstream audiences, not just King fans, they should've made a lot of stuff more clear instead of simply assuming people knew what was happening.

I like how Kasdan's always talking about how Goldman knows what & what NOT to include in a movie script when adapting a book... heh heh... Weeeeelllllllll.... Memory Warehouse anyone?!?
There are things that do and do not work in cinema that are made for the written prose & I think we just saw what can happen when filmmakers cross that line with adaptations. This is the reason why King likes this adaptaion (& the Shining mini-series over Kubricks...), they leave in tons of shit that a normal person would understand to cut out!
Now I am talking out of my ass here since I didn't read the book - in fact, somebody should do a play by play comparison & tell us lazy-asses what King's book did instead.
Either way, I totally dug Morgan Freeman's over the top performance (those eyebrows got me buggin'!!!)... shit weasels RULE... & when are people gonna fuckin' stop making retards special!?! They're RETARDS! No more scary kids & no more gifted retards! PLEEEEEZE!!!!

I think the Memory Warehouse was a nice idea, Kasdan just handled it badly. In the hands of another director, it could've been a great plot device.

Seeing as how Goldman delivered two FANTASTIC, relatively faithful King adapations, I'm guessing that this was more Kasdan's script than Goldman's.

So, I just got back...needless to say that The Inspector smacked another out of the ballpark in his review. The only difference is I didn't laugh, I got pissed off. Such a great set-up (not to mention a fairly straight forward rendition of the book, corners cut of course)sucked into the shitter in the blink of an eye. I was actually EMBARRASSED when "Mr. Grey" appeared. Music was the one saving grace, but the theater I was at it was drowned out. I won't even get into the ending, christ almighty *shaking head in disbelief* Oh well, one less dvd to worry about in the future.

SPOILERS WITHIN
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Dreamcatcher is a mélange of film genres that's become a victim of its own excess, risking itself from turning into a massive flatulence exploding into the audience's faces who would have either enjoyed or hated this Genre-Bending Glorified B-Movie Extravaganza. The film is a series of contradictions and is littered with plots and subplots that are as confusing as the plots of dreams themselves.

Fuck it. I can't believe I was attempting to write a thesis out of this...

Anyway, SSDD: Our four protagonists dwelled on this acronym a number of times: "Same Shit, Different Day." Actually, it's also called: Sweet Smelling Decomposed Dung. In other words, this is what this film is: a "sweet smelling piece of shit."

The question is, "Is this good shit or bad shit?" I happen to fall under the "good shit" camp. In fact, I will admit to even loving it. Let me first focus on the bad shit:

BAD SHIT
It started out really well. It appeared to be a Serious. Dramatic. Horror. Film. Contender. There was a slow burn to it and a feeling of dread with a touch of light comedy. Suddenly the comedy turned into a gory South Park episode. I'm not sure when it happened but I suddenly saw Mr. Hanky going, "I Duddits!"

<img src="http://members.iinet.net.au/~funnyguy/hankylink.jpg" alt="" />

Then what started out as a character piece (since, you know, the four guys were the main heroes), a top-secret military unit and Morgan Freeman sporting R. Lee Ermey brows entered the picture; and before I knew it, two of the four buddies immediately died -- two guys who appeared to not have any "Grand Purpose" whatsoever in their role to save the world! (Okay, okay, if you carefully analyzed -- hehe, I said analyzed -- the film, there were reasons for their deaths. Oh, fuck it, I don't really care. Though if I stick with the South Park analogy, I would say that Terrence and Philip represented Beaver and Pete.)

Suddenly, the film would shift gears between being the The Thing then Independence Day then Invasion of the Body Snatchers then a good dose of Outbreak. And, for the love of God, when I saw the alien, I thought of Meatballs Part II where there was an alien with the big head and fucking cheated on a boxing match! And [deleted religious blasphemies], when Duddits finally revealed himself by going "SHAZAM!" -- er -- "I Duddits!", I thought of a 1970's children's series called Kikaida. For you younger kids, think Power Rangers.

<img src="http://www.webroon.com/~plamo/musicpict/kikaida.jpg" alt="" />

And out of the blue, the film's transition scenes would do that "swiping thing" (hell, I don't go to film school so I don't know the terms). Anyway, it was so Star Wars that I knew the film wanted to break all the rules of genre conventions.

And sprinkled about are flashbacks to the past. It was very reminiscent of Stand By Me and even IT and though it was good, it needed more character development. But the hell with that. Why the hell did the "Good Red Alien" decide to house a -- no offense -- retarded boy? What sort of grand plan did that "GRA" had in mind? And why did he know Mr. Gray? And who the fuck is Mr. Gray? And why the hell did he speak with a British accent? *brain explodes*

Finally, the ending was pretty weak. It was, as I've mentioned, a crappy '70s monster battle. But at least when those rubber-suited monsters died, they don't evaporate! Which brings me to another question: Why the heck did that "Bad Gray Alien" just "evaporate"? And why didn't Mr. Gray erupted out of Jonesy's body??? Huh? What the hell?

Anyway, on to the good shit...

GOOD SHIT
See above points.

SERIOUSLY, THE GOOD SHIT
It's definitely an aggravating mess, but I found it to be an entertaining mess. It's like 100 movies in one. It's like a collected short-short stories written by an EC comics aficionado kid writer suffering from ADD.

I actually loved the shit weasels and the Power Rangers-inspired main aliens. I also loved the normal Mr. Gray aliens. These aliens also for some reason reminded me of the game X-COM.

I don't really believe in the idea of a "guilty pleasure" but I will have to label this film with that. It's complete and utter shit, but it's just a fun ride. It's not the summer, but it felt like a summer popcorn flick extravaganza.

If anything, the Memory Warehouse and gripping first half are what's keeping me very forgiving with the film. Plus, fucking-A, I dug that Apocalypse Now alien massacre! Come on, you know you loved it!

Anyway, I will be seeing it again. It's just so bad that it's good.

I thought it was a nice idea, but badly executed. If they'd spent a little time setting it up, it might've worked a little better for me. Instead it was simply thrown out there.

"You still got that memory warehouse?"

As if it's just an everyday thing. The idea of it intrigued me, but on-screen it just didn't work well. As I said, in the hands of another director, Spike Jonze maybe, this idea could've worked incredibly well.

So that's what it stood for? Just one of the many things in the movie that were left unexplained. That would've fucking taken one sentence to explain.

for the most part I agree with Ryan.Goldman, and Kasdan screwed up and left us all with a turd steamed to perfection.However, Zombie left us with a HUGE Un-Original turd himself.He showed flashes of brilliance, and then erased it with scenes ripped directly from TCM among others.He scored a fat "0" on originality scale, and a whopping "10" on the RIP-OFFED Scale.Still reeling from these good reviews given to House of 100 Texas Chainsaw Massacre Maniacs,oops...did I say that....Hope Zombie does something worth watching next.Everyone's defense is that it's "fun", wow...If that's the best defense of the crap-fest than I think that in itself speaks volumes about the movie.Either way both Dreamcatcher and HO1C are utter shit-piles in my book.

Beaver says what SSDD is in the fourth scene in the movie.

I must've missed that amidst the barrage of bad dialogue and unnecessary plot info. Although, I wasn't the only one. A lot of people who saw it didn't catch that bit.

For those who are confused, SSDD stands for "Same Shit, Different Day."

Upon prior contemplation, it wasn't really explained very well in the movie, but it was a saying that they came up with when they are kids.

OKAY, so supposedly in the new Cinescape, Kasdan talks about how Goldman left out the Memory Warehouse bit because he didn't think it would translate well to the big screen. The story continues with Kasdan talking Goldman back into throwing that bit in again because he knew that he could "make it work". Hmmmm...

Here's the weekly "capsule" of review consensus that the IMDB provides every Friday of the new films coming out that weekend. (I personally can't not read this column every week, like the moth to the flame, but when you think it about it, it's a pretty sad endeavor: it used to be that you might at least read a couple of reviews and then, perhaps, make a judgement on the movie, now all you have to do is read the blurbs of the reviews...could we get any lazier??)

[Special note: as you'll see, someone else pointed out the Brazil angle. I guess it's just the memory warehouse sequences that made me think of it for my review, though, in truth, a movie with this crazy a plot and outrageous concepts might have been served well by a subversive, black comic genius like Gilliam. Something to think about.] They failed to mention Roger Ebert's 1-and-a-half-star review in which he uses the phrase "stunning awfulness." About the only thing he liked was the memory warehouse stuff, summing up that it's a good concept wasted (and underused) in a terrible movie.

I've never read the book, and I've never unintentionally laughed through a movie more than I did with Dreamcatcher

I had such high hopes.

Such high hopes....

A lot of the humour was intentional.

It was hard to tell what was intentional and what wasn't. Save for a few lines of dialogue towards the beginning, the only intentional humour seems to be slaptick comedy during action scenes and broad, crass humour during the lost hiker scenes. Neither of which fit, nor generate any laughs.

Well, first off, I had posted twice "denouncing" people making reference to LIFEFORCE, which I love, before I had seen the movie.
Now I have seen it, it is just like LIFEFORCE--and I thought it was great. Scary? no. A tight, well made solid film? No. But man, I gotta say that maybe besides the end battle, I loved every crazy minute of it.
I didn't even think it was really that silly...wild, yes, silly, no (though yes, the kid scenes were pretty horrible.)
So yeah, personally..I loved it. Very fun. But I stress the "personally." I would not try to convince anyone it's great or put it on a list of "great films" but man, I gotta say again, I had a blast! Just wild.