I seem prone to cinematic dreams, or at least so I'd class them as. And of not actually feeling refreshed when I wake, but that could be something else....
Last night was (or now is) fragmented, but eventually seemed to be based around a Stepford-type community where everyone knows each other's business, but we're the good-guys. It transpires (though not from the off) that the bad-guys are a group of cab-drivers. Actual left-pondian, inter-war, yellow-cab drivers; wearing utilitarian greatcoats and during at least occasion (in which 'I' was not there) they wielded flaming torches as they either had some sort of Clan Meeting or else threatened somebody. I'm not sure how that went. But very cinematic. I'm fairly convinced that it was it was in black'n'white (or at least very colour-suppressed), even though I'm sure I dream in colour usually. To top it all off, 'my' character, a bit of a Cary Grant, but with a healthy dollop of slapstick to him.
It didn't start that way, though. It might have been something Minecrafty (I had a wolf, and a bow and arrow, and after a now-hazy bit involving something very un-Cary Grantish, I ended up capturing a spider and holding it as a weapon, held just so I could encourage it to squirt its web to capture/incapacitate other spiders), but then we were in this Stepfords-vs-Cabbies situation.
My office, a tall-ceilinged affair with a typical '20s/'30s appearance, has an an assistant who doesn't actually 'get' the Stepfordness, but she's good at her job and honest so we let her use an alcove for her work, rather than the middle of the office where everyone can see... a slightly unusual arrangement that not everyone understands, but she's 'good people', so it passes.
[Things now happen, like the flaming-torches cab drivers around an upturned taxi, but this is something I don't actually 'know' about, and furthers the audience's information about the plot. And probably the 'plot', too. I'm not sure I understood it all, myself.]
I'm now in a hotel. Possibly investigating. There's a laundry-basket that I'm told must get to the elevator before a certain time to get to where it and its contents (my luggage?) is supposed to be going. For some reason I don't want to be seen leaving the hotel, or... rather... I want to be thought of as going elsewhere. I arrange that the laundry basket be moved slightly too late, to allay the suspicions of someone I assume is watching me, somehow distract the lift-boy/attendant/whoever and then rush into the elevator (still holding a plate... not sure why, maybe to convince someone that I was still eating in my room, or else going for a meal instead, and for some reason I can't drop the plate yet) and - unseen - flop into the basket.
Except that I'd apparently practised the manoeuvre without the plate, and whilst holding the plate it's not as easy. Cue slapstick, as I flop into the basket in various ways until I and my plate (regular dinner-plate, and one of those huge-hamper-type laundry baskets that nearly fills the elevator!) 'somehow' fit in. On top of the small amount of laundry. I'm not sure where my luggage-in-the-laundry-basket is, at this point, but never mind.
I exit the elevator in the basement level, a largely open-plan (but laundry-stuffed) area. From an establishing shot, I know that I've descended there just as someone who I probably don't want to be seen by has passed the bottom of the elevator, in that typical cinematic coincidence where guards or antagonists move past doors just before the protagonists step out, unobserved. All this (and all that I remember that follows, save for a few fragments that might just be a camera-pretending-to-be-first-person) is seen in third-person. Insert some flummery as I exit the basket, and it seems I find some overalls, to blend in. Which I do, as a shift changes and a whole lot of others in similar overalls stream in and out of the place. They may be the 'innocents' in the plot, workers unaware, as people akin to the cab-drivers are also there, likely the enforcers or the 'inner circle' of the plot.
I head for a stairwell, back up the building. (Same building? Well, if this dream elevator works the way of normal elevators, one would think so, but it's a dream-elevator, so I think I'm actually intended to be in the basement of some warehouse or other building Downtown, rather than the basement of the hotel.) To the top floor and the posh (hotel-like! ...so maybe they're dream-stairs, too!) top floor, with something of a penthouse-suite look to it.
I find the main antagonist's rooms and find... him dead. He's set up this... organisation of sorts... for some nefarious purposes, but then (it appears) topped himself in remorse, and now he's a figurehead only of this autonomous cult. Some plot-holes are sewn up for my Cary Grant character as he discovers this information (in documents on the desk?), but the-hell-if-I-can-remember how that actually happened. But there's still the cab-drivers, and there's a confrontation with one as I exit the rooms, now with my assistant in tow and A.N.Other who I don't recall. (But it's very much an inter-war thriller, both are ladies of my acquaintance who have taken on the 'sidekick' role. The kind of fish-out-of-water semi-comedic types because they're ladies who aren't used to action-thriller situations and have to follow the hero around in high-heels but then occasionally do something spontaneously and fortuitous like knock a gun out of an assailant's hands purely because of their own clumsiness and because the Plot demanded that it happen so we could all get out of a sticky situation.)
The confrontation resolves in a camera-friendly manner, and it seems we've sorted the conspiracy out. We read some rules on the wall, some sort of proclamation, regarding our Stepfordian community, which has the point that nobody is to have their own private space (but previously annotated, apparently by me (when?), that my Secretary is allowed an alcove, especially, because she's a good egg and it's Ok for her to have that little quirk) and we head for the elevator (a different one, remember we took the stairs up to here and it's probably a different building... as if that matters!) but my character appears to be genre-savvy. Instead of getting in, closing the door and pressing the down button, he half-closes the door from the outside and presses down and the lift starts to move a bit and then sticks. (No, not falls. And no, that's not because the door is half-open. But the implication is that had we got in, closed the doors and then pressed down we would... have gone down a few inches then stuck. NOOOOOO!!!!!!) It seems to be a last-laugh by either the pre-repentant antagonist who later suicided or the just-defeated cabbie-villain-cultmember-person.
But we didn't get caught by that non-lethal (at least not immedately lethal) trap, so Happy Ending!
THE END. (I then woke up. Probably to the sound of a closing overture, although I never did see any scrolling-past credits.)
Yeah, I'm not so sure that's a blockbuster, yet. Needs a good re-write to fill in the gaps. And to adjust the inherent sexism of the movie to at least modern-standards of sexism. And remove the bit about the spiders. (Just to point out about the spiders, though, it wasn't that I was squeezing their abdomen to make them squirt silk from their rear spinicules, it was more like holding them by the legs and bending them up like a weird form of bulldog-clip. Very unanatomical. But that might have been more like a video-game than a genuine wildlife movie.) But, other than that, and the current unavailability of Cary Grant, I think we have a hit on our hands! In my dreams!
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Topic: The Dream Thread (Read 567305 times)