Video

 

REM - 2007

REM SYNPOPSIS:
Brian Joseph Davis: "REM - In a Nightmare, You Cant Change the Channel", 2007

REM (CC) 11:00 pm HARTHOUSE 136 min 2007 PG-14 A true story of assassination, apocalypse and apnea that begins in the barren arroyos of New Mexico, when a hitchhiker is picked up by various people who will influence his fate and draw him into a mystery of murder and intrigue. Thrown to the side of the road the hitcher wakes up in a world where identity and reality fade like smoke curls. But is he really a trained killer who can’t remember who he is? During the assassination attempt he looks through the cross hairs but loses his nerve and pulls away at the last second. Or does he? A detective, small town sheriffs, bloodhounds, and the LAPD’s gang unit investigate the shooting but conflicting accounts give the sniper a head start on his run and he escapes into a dream eerily si milar to his own life, which he watches on TV. Arrested, he pleads as a defense that he was, in fact, asleep. As he’s being coerced into a confession, he dreams of two Mormons driving through the night to confront a woman about her beliefs. Is it the beginning of her true destiny or an elaborate dream? While sleeping she receives a campy vision of a flaming angel and a stone Christ writhing on the cross. Hijinks ensue at work when she begins to think of herself as the savior of humanity. Institutionalized, the woman joins in group therapy, resulting in an outpouring of emotion, and nervous smoking. At night, the woman’s doctor at the institution (special guest star Malcolm McDowell) awakes from a nightmare of dirt. Or does he? The doctor then dreams of a man who dreams of the doctor dreaming of a chase sequence that ends with the classic fight scene between Keanu Reeves and Bruce Lee. Reeves runs from Lee until trapped in room 303. A policewoman investigates, only to find 303 in a shambles. Running from an unknown terror she’s then pursued through a forest. In bed, she drifts out of sleep only to discover it was all dream she had having fallen asleep watching TV. Her boyfriend walks in and turns off the TV and goes to sleep beside her. Later, the boyfriend sleepwalks down the hall to a neighbour’s apartment and attempts to strangle him. At a psychiatrist’s office the boyfriend learns there’s nothing wrong with him, even though he’s on a pharmacy’s worth of anti-depressants. Going to sleep after an overdose he dreams of waking up next to his long time companion (special guest star Boris Karloff in one of his final roles) and, before he dies, a hallucination of a couple high on cocaine fighting. After an extended coke jag the man watches TV, where a woman wakes up and then investigates her darkened home with a flashlight. A flash of light and the sniper awakens again, but this time at his computer where he makes the decision to launch a virus that will cause chaos, destruction and violence. Bombs fall, cities burn, the dead walk, the president (played by Jack Nicholson) soothes the public while a biological agent is unleashed that kills every last human being. A monkey tolls for the dead. The last man alive then drives around an empty city, talking to himself and hearing phantom phone calls in the middle of the great silence. He awakes to the sound of a ringing phone in a strange motel. He leaves, now apparently free, but at the motel desk he’s asked to initial phone charges. This leads to an elaborate series of phone calls within phone calls that enmesh the man into a conspiracy of crime, love, suicide and accusation. The man demands more money, slams the phone down, makes another call and begins to have phone sex in public—a scene that shocked upon the film’s initial release. On the other end of the line a woman stares out in insomniac agony. This wakes a woman who turns on a lamp and then the room lights. This wakes up a man—who was dreaming of puppets of his childhood—who is then told to leave the lights off. The shadowy figure in the room tells the man that there are no answers and “you are a puppet.” This upsets the man so much he wakes up to discover many people waking up, which causes a stressed out film director to wake up screaming about a noise that isn’t there. A challenging film with a stellar cast. –Brian Joseph Davis