The Pitch: Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is a bit of a nobody. An unassuming, middle-aged psychology professor, he seems pleased with his relatively dull life, his marriage to his pleasant wife (Julianne Nicholson), and the ever-elusive prospect of attending a prestigious colleague’s famed dinner parties. He’s an expert at blending into the background, and seems mostly interested in his banal life of academia; his biggest dream is to publish a book about the psychology of ants.
Yet fame is thrust upon him when he mysteriously starts showing up in people’s dreams — not doing anything, really, just shambling about as people hide from bloody pursuers or tremble at a building collapsing around them. Suddenly, he’s gone viral in the most inadvertent ways, and the nebbishy academic finds himself literally on everyone’s minds.
The prospect of fame initially allures Paul, try as he might to shrug off movie deals and marketing bros (Michael Cera) who want him to sell Sprite to people in their dreams. Even the most principled of us would be hard-pressed to turn away from the spotlight if it were suddenly thrust upon us. But as Paul learns all too harshly, the public’s attention can quickly turn sour, especially as Dream!Paul suddenly turns violent; before he knows it, the same people who love him now hate his guts. And he didn’t even do anything.
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We Live In a City of Dreams: Over the course of his decades-long career, Nicolas Cage has bounced from young, exciting actor to hammy action star to washed-up Redbox fodder and everywhere in between. These days, in a post-Mandy world, he’s largely reclaimed the public’s attention, and rightly so: his tendency towards big, theatrical histrionics and tic-heavy intensity lends all his projects, even his worst, a kind of unconventional allure.
In recent years, he’s leaned into the Meme of Cage: his Renfield relies on the audience’s desire to see someone like Nic Cage play Actual, Honest-to-God Dracula, and he even played several over-the-top versions of himself in last year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Here, in Kristoffer Borgli’s follow-up to 2021’s Sick of Myself, Cage gets to entertain the cerebral and the silly in equal measure.
In one respect, Paul shares a lot of DNA with Cage’s downtrodden, defeated truffle hunter in 2021’s brilliant Pig; but Borgli and Cage pepper Paul’s pathos with bursts of antic disposition, not unlike when Cage played the neurotic, fictional twin brother of Charlie Kaufman in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation.
 Nicolas Cage Review</p>
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<p>Dream Scenario (A24)</p>
<p> ” data-medium-file=”https://consequence.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/https___cdn.sanity.io_images_xq1bjtf4_production_b0c62a460d6aeb193e16cbef6091b07a1e92909a-6000×4000-1.jpg?quality=80&w=300″ data-large-file=”https://consequence.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/https___cdn.sanity.io_images_xq1bjtf4_production_b0c62a460d6aeb193e16cbef6091b07a1e92909a-6000×4000-1.jpg?quality=80&w=1024″ src=”https://www.wazupnaija.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/nicolas-cage-chases-fleeting-viral-fame-in-the-droll-dream-scenario-review.jpg” alt=”Dream Scenario (A24) Nicolas Cage Review” class=”size-large wp-image-1336934″ width=”1152″ height=”768″></p>
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Dream Scenario (A24)
