You may say he's a dreamer... (click here)

I love October. The weather gets better, the pollution lessens, it's my birthday, the Scottsdale Film Festival starts, (still the best one in the valley) and the movies start getting better. Because what a wasteland the past few months have been for flicks. I have not even bothered to list September favorites, it's almost a waste of time.

But last week Science of Sleep finally started and we went to see it last night. It is so much better than the trailer, better than I imagined. I loved Michael Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but this one is even more insightful, about dreams, about "love, friendship, relationships, all those ships"... and it's set in Paris, and stars Gael Garcia Bernal, has fabulous art direction and animation... it's a perfect film. Really, the only thing that could have improved it is if Mr. Bernal had come to the house personally with a bottle of wine, wearing that outfit he wears in the hallway scene, to present it.

There are a few flicks that try to capture the surreality and evanescence of dreams, Kurosawa's Dreams and Linklater's Waking Life are two of the better ones. But Gondry's pulls you in and makes you feel like you're IN the dream, and that maybe you're not sure when the dream ends, and you're not entirely comfortable either way. Gondry says, "I just wanted to see how I could make a movie about my dreams and still be entertaining. There's a lot of movies about dreams. If you just go in a dream and then you come out, those are some of the best movies; sometimes you're sleeping in the middle because you need to merge back, to come back to reality before you dive again. So I'm not saying I did better, but it was my goal to do a movie with dreams, how they interact and to work with real life."

The best part about it tho, is the art. Stephane, the dreamer, is an artist who is trying to get his original work published as a calendar, with each month highlighting a disaster that has lasted in the international psyche - he calls it Disasterology. And he invents things, like a time machine that only goes backward and forward one second. When he meets up with a fellow artist, who is also stuck in a menial job and almost scared of real people, you think you can predict the ending, but you can't. You can't even really predict what is real and what isn't.

There are several scenes that I know I will just play over and over but before it hits the shelves, I am going to have to see it again in the theater.

And this weekend - finally - the film festival. I just love October.