梦想情景

以怪点子多而闻名的, 杨紫琼《瞬息全宇宙》同一公司 “A24” 出品的小成本诡异故事。本片也是男主角: 尼古拉斯·凯奇 近年来为数不多获得好评的电影之一。前些年凯奇因为国际金融风暴, 导致他一蹶不正, 财务崩盘，欠下巨额债务。然后他疯狂的接片, 无论质量好坏，只要报酬足够理想。于是乎, 作品、票房、评分不断扑街，烂片王的称号便由此而来。特地细数了一下, 从最后一部口碑上佳的《国家宝藏2》到2021年《猪》，这14年间他一共拍了45部以上。。。今次，他饰演一位秃顶老教授, 某一天开始突然莫名其妙的出现在千万人的梦境里, 一夜爆红。通常他在别人梦中仅是过客，不论发生任何事都只会自顾自。直到有一天, 一位年轻貌美女子发起了春梦, 梦里的他不再自顾自，居然会主动性爱对方, 且该女子还邀请凯奇入室让梦想成为现实…… 再接下来，整体走向从起初的不可思议梦变成后期的噩梦；最后, 不再入梦。可惜结局没有解读原因, 缺少了一点自洽性。导演只想表达他的中心思想, 并没往猎奇性发展。虽然立意挺好 “社交媒体超越人本身成为凌驾所有人之上的集体意识”，但无反转总觉得缺了点意思。

English Title: Sick of Myself

Original Title: Syk pike

Year: 2022

Genre: Drama, Horror

Country: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France

Language: Norwegian, Swedish, English

Director/Screenwriter/Editor: Kristoffer Borgli

Music: Turns

Cinematography: Benjamin Loeb

Cast:

Kristine Kujath Thorp

Eirik Sæther

Fanny Vaager

Steinar Klouman Hallert

Sarah Francesca Brænne

Fredrik Stenberg Ditlev-Simonsen

Henrik Mestad

Andrea Bræin Hovig

Frida Natland

Anders Danielsen Lie

Ingrid Vollan

Seda Witt

Terje Strømdahl

Rating: 6.9/10

Title: Dream Scenario

Year: 2023

Genre: Comedy, Horror

Country: USA

Language: English

Director/Screenwriter/Editor: Kristoffer Borgli

Music: Owen Pallett

Cinematography: Benjamin Loeb

Cast:

Nicolas Cage

Julianne Nicholson

Dylan Gelula

Michael Cera

Tim Meadows

Dylan Baker

Krista Bridges

Kate Berlant

Lily Bird

Jessica Clement

Paula Boudreau

David Klein

Star Slade

Cara Volchoff

Noah Centineo

Nicholas Braun

Amber Midthunder

Lily Gao

Rating: 6.5/10

The latest practitioner in filmic social satire, Kristoffer Borgli, like his contemporaries Joachim Trier and Ruben Östlund, is also from Scandinavia, he is Norwegian. SICK OF MYSELF is his second feature in which he sinks his sharp teeth into an extreme case of narcissistic personal disorder, which he marries strikingly with the body horror grotesqueries. Then he follows it with DREAM SCENARIO, an A24 produced, Nicolas Cage starring Hollywood calling card, hinges on a high-concept crochet that Cage's middle-aged professor, apropos of nothing, appears in many people's dreams, and how he navigates the instant fame and its underside, while leaving the phenomenon's inexplicability in the lurch.

In Oslo, Signe (Thorp) and Thomas (Sæther) is a young couple bound in a toxic relationship. Signe is the often ignored one while Thomas is a rising artist with a kleptomaniac penchant. Working as a barista and desperate needs validation, Signe's antics to get attention, including stealing the limelight from the self-absorbed Thomas, become increasing awkward and radical. From faking an allergy to voluntarily abusing a drug which can cause skin abnormality, Signe finally gets what she wants, attentions not only from Thomas, but also from the society at large. Her dysmorphia - a thunderstruck achievement from the make-up and prosthetics team (headed by Dimitra Drakopoulou and Ida Astero Welle), she shall be roundly cast in the re-re-booted Fantastic Four from Marvel - attains its newsworthy coverage and gets her a modeling opportunity for an unorthodox agency, but all is not well, the drug's pernicious effect begins to take a toll on her health. Borgli's satire takes an ambivalently unregenerate stance in the end after Signe comes clean with her self-destructive jiggery-pokery.

SICK OF MYSELF doesn't conduce to a comfy viewing. Signe and Thomas are two rather repugnant characters that are cut from the same cloth, borderline sociopathic, attention-seeking and blindly self-serving, which may well justify their co-dependency. As actors, Thorp, although resolute and plucky, is weighed down by Signe's hard-edged pretension whereas Sæther cannot register more than an air of faux-airiness that might be what the director wants.

While Borgli's social commentary is biting and accurate, he is quite inept at constructing character arcs, both Signe and Thomas are constants in terms of their behavior patterns and mental states, there are no learning curves. That could be a current Scandinavian trait, a frigid aloofness that also penetrates the films of Trier, Östlund and Ali Abbasi. As if the manifesto is "we are awful people, that's our raison d'être!", Signe can truly gives Joachim Trier's THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (2021) a run for its money to claim the title.

In DREAM SCENARIO, Cage's Prof. Paul Matthews is an obverse of Signe. He is semi-content in his ivory tower until a sudden fame involuntarily catapults him into a trending celebrity, which he manages to milk for his own advantage. But as a proverbial knowledge, fame cuts both ways. When his virality turns even more bizarrely threatening and negative, is he capable of reconciling with it? Similarly, Borgli's script opts for a noncommittal way to wind up Paul's plight, and Cage's participation also harks back to the star's own notoriety as an internet meme years ago. But it is irksome when the ending arbitrarily cranks up the weird "dream scenario" to commodification without explicating Paul's phenomenon. All of a sudden, one can purchase the experience to enter another person's dream, but the grounds about our "patient zero" is frustratingly unforthcoming, the leap of scientific and technological advancement leaves an oceanic lacuna in Borgli's script.

Cage, resorting to play a neurotic ordinary Joe with baldness and humble get-up, evokes his two-fold performances in Spike Jonze's ADAPTATION. Here, he is even more anal-retentive as if assuming a Woody Allen-esque persona, and saddled with an unsavory encounter with a young woman Molly (Gelula) who coyly proposes him to re-enact the sex act in her dream (a proposition Paul doesn't resist against his best judgement and of which he makes a pig's ear). Paul is more sympathetic than Signe in SICK OF MYSELF, but not by much. Julianne Nicholson is overqualified to inhabiting Paul's garden-variety wife Janet, conveying that she is not going to stick around if he is in a spot. Michael Cera is quite persuasive and funny as the marketing-savvy, product-placement-oriented Trent, one only wishes he would have had more sceneries to chew as a contrast to Paul's clodhopping reactiveness.

Both SICK OF MYSELF and DREAM SCENARIO are incentivized by Borgli's admixture of horror elements (body horror in the former and nightmarish jump-scare in the latter) injected into the stories's absurdity and black humor, which can be deemed a unique aesthetic on Borgli's part. Be that as it may, Borgli is no wunderkind, his keen sensibility to the signs of our times and a certain degree of facility in filmmaking aside, he has yet hit the bull's eye in his story-telling, in which there are bright ideas aplenty, yet to transubstantiate them into a script with coherence and credibility is something he should strive for.

referential entries: Ruben Östlund's THE SQUARE (2017, 7.9/10); Joachim Trier's THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (2021, 8.0/10); Spike Jonze's ADAPTATION. (2002, 8.3/10); Ari Aster's BEAU IS AFRAID (2023, 7.2/10); Ali Abbasi's BORDER (2018, 7.1/10).

电影《梦想情景》（ Dream Scenario）具有浓厚的寓言意味，由尼古拉斯凯奇饰演的大学教授出现在了每个人的梦里。开始的时候，凯奇在梦中出现只是奇怪地观望，并不做什么，这导致了现实中的凯奇一下子成为了社交媒体的名人。可是后来，凯奇在梦里变得残暴、凶狠，开始攻击、强奸人们，让现实中的凯奇又被抵制（ Cancel culture）。 社交媒体时代，群体意识被凝结，形成了一个集体人格。每个人都是这个集体人格的一部分的同时，每个人又都可能从集体人格中剥离。 凯奇饰演的大学教授被社会群体通常认为“无聊”，沉浸于自己的研究，有点nerd。凯奇突然出现在每个人的梦里，虽然什么都没干，虽然没有做任何有趣的事情，但时代早已不是传统的精英话语了。如果是过去，发生的这件事情很可能根本就不会引起热潮，即便引起关注，结果可能也只是一些相关领域的记者去写个特稿。可如今是社交媒体时代，掌握话语权的是集体人格，相比精英，哪里在乎或者根本没有能力去在乎事件的合理性、事件的价值意义、事件是否真的很有趣，集体人格需要的只是乐子与狂欢。 集体人格可以在没有任何特长、价值、贡献的情况下捧红一个人，同样可以在没有任何错误、过失、丑闻的情况下扼杀一个人。 捧红一个人的例子太多了，精英才看不上于文亮、闻神呢；扼杀一个人的例子也太多了，网络暴力最恶心的点在于暴民真的只是想攻击一个人，理由可以只是“因为你，我不舒服”。 批判与讽刺这种集体人格，这是精英的行为，所以我喜欢这部电影。