I join the CTV NewsChannel to talk about the big movies from the weekend, including Edgar Wright’s “The Running Man,” rhe magical thieves of “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” the Oscar worthy “Sentimental Value” and the animated “In Your Dreams.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In the animated family comedy adventure “In Your Dreams,” now streaming on Netflix, siblings Stevie and Elliot must navigate their dreams—and a snarky stuffed giraffe, zombie pamcakes and the queen of nightmares—in hopes that The Sandman will grant them their ultimate dream, saving their parent’s marriage.
CAST: Craig Robinson, Simu Liu, Cristin Milioti, Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Elias Janssen, Gia Carides, Omid Djalili, and SungWon Cho. Co-directed by Alex Woo, and Erik Benson.
REVIEW: A story of a fractured family wrapped up as a surreal adventure delivers some kid friendly thrills, but at its heart is a grounded story of acceptance and the understanding that not every family has to be perfect.
When perfectionist Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) learns that her mother (Cristin Miloti) is considering taking a job in another city, she assumes it means her parents are getting a divorce. In hopes of keeping them together she drags her rambunctious younger brother Elliot (Elias Janssen) into her dreams in the hopes of being granted a marriage saving wish from The Sandman (Omid Djalili).
In the dream they are thrust into a surreal world where they meet a disco-ball moon with trust issues, a glibly sarcastic stuffed giraffes and zombie pancakes who guard The Sandman’s filing system. If they are to get to the all-important Wish Desk they must learn to work together to solve their problems.
In its heart “In Your Dreams” is a kindhearted movie about reality, not dreamland. The dream sequences, from co-directors Alex Woo, and Erik Benson, are beautiful, populated with imaginative characters kids should enjoy, but Stevie and Elliot‘s journey is a personal one, not strictly an otherworld one.
The messages of accepting imperfection, teamwork and resilience are mixed with eye popping visuals and fun needle drops. It may be a little too intense in its representation of the nightmare scenes and the frankness of its depiction of divorce for the under 7 set, but it contains the kind of heart and soul usually associated with Pixar, which is enough to earn a recommend.
“I do, in my brain, marry visuals and music,” says Dave Stewart.
Formerly one half of Eurythmics, Stewart has had a lifelong fascination with sound and vision.
“It started with a tape recorder when I was a little boy,” he says, “about nine. My grandmother got me an old-fashioned tape recorder, a battery operated reel to reel, so you could go outside with it. When I first recorded something outside and went back in my bedroom and played it back, it was a mind-blowing experience. It was the first time I had replayed reality.”
It wasn’t until he bought an 8mm camera in an Australian pawn shop that he combined his dual loves.
“I walked out of the shop filming,” he says, “and I sent the films away, these 8mm three minute films. When I got them back and got a projector and played them onto the wall of my bedsit, it was a magical thing.”
“I have thousands of hours of stuff from the time I walked out of that shop.”
Among those thousands of hours is a new film, a collaboration with a music legend. Stevie Nicks brought Stewart on to produce her first studio album in a decade, and in the process they also created a song-by-song documentary, Stevie Nicks: In Your Dreams.
“We didn’t start out making a movie,” he says. “It started off with a cell phone or two documenting the songwriting so we could remember what we were doing then it slowly became, ‘Oh we’re making a documentary.’”
Shooting on-and-off over the nine months it took to make the record—Stewart jokingly called it “a never-ending documentary in Stevie’s World”—left them with eighty hours of footage to cut down. The result showcases their partnership and the input of other musicians, including Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood.
“In these kinds of films you never know when something is going to be interesting or not,” he says. “You have lots of footage of the wall because everyone has walked out the room. Then, unexpectedly you might have a whole flurry of activity.”
With In Your Dreams done and ready to open in theatres I asked him about his favorite movie music moment.
“I am fascinated with the use of music in films,” he says. “I thought Midnight Cowboy was fantastic,” says. “When Ratso dies at the end and Jon Voight has his arm around him and the music starts, ‘Everybody’s talking at me…’”
