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Ik nobody watched Dream a Little Dream but please hear me out on Butch Bobby Keller

#dream a little dream #dream a little dream 1989 #bobby keller

Love a man that can pose on a bike right in front of stairs

He's wearing sneakers with no socks he's so me

of all the movies i believed might warrant a moviegroovies revival, i think i speak for all of us when i say that this one was... not at the top of the list. nevertheless: unexpected, unwanted, and unsung: dream a little dream (1989).

mmmmm... i liked it. more than i expected to, anyway. to be honest, this was one i probably wouldn’t have picked up on my own, even for the “two coreys” phenomenon and its tangential connection back to the lost boys (my beloved)--as i’ve indicated before, while i’ll do anything for love (of the lost boys), i won’t do that (watch corey feldman movies)--but my dad got some kind of meredith salenger itch this week, and this was the result. all in all, it was pretty solid? kind of dragged for me, but there were no scenes i’d point to in particular and say “cut this.” plus, they did some interesting things with the bodyswap concept... and, if we’re being honest, i found myself pretty impressed by feldman’s performance.

(said nobody ever. i know, i know.)

what i liked: the body swap is a fairly standard stock plot (although, as i type this, i can’t call to mind NEARLY as many examples as i thought i could. i’ve extolled the virtues of vince vaugn in freaky on this blog before, haven’t i?), but dream a little dream had a fairly unique take on it; most of the movie is corey feldman acting as jason robbards’ character coleman, but we never see robbards as bobby. the justification for the plot is given a lot more screentime than the handwavey explanation which typically accompanies such a story (although i’m not necessarily sure that this is a good thing--sometimes the plot does NOT demand explanation; groundhog day & etc.), too--we devote a substantial amount of the exposition to coleman’s obsession with dreams and the idea that, as we don’t really know what dreams “are,” therein lies the path to eternal life, eternal youth...

sometimes it really is better just to say a wizard did it and have done, i think.

what really stood out to me, though, was whose movie it really was. don’t let the smokescreen of the two coreys fool you--dream a little dream is coleman’s movie, through and through. coleman, not the delinquent teenagers, is the one with a problem to be solved. it’s coleman, and apparently coleman alone, who has to learn a lesson, and while “this was what being young was like--and it wasn’t easy” is a pretty standard one for this genre, it feels... different, as presented. i searched a while for the big why, until it hit me: dream a little dream is a teen comedy about an old man.

bobby, on his own, has plenty of problems, and the introduction, cutting between title cards and a seinfeldian conversation between coreys feldman and haim, serves as something of a red herring in that respect. we gear up for a movie about teenage ne’er-do-wells coming of age, finding themselves, and presumably getting the girl. the thing is, though--that’s not the movie we get. quickly after we’re presented with our presumed protagonists, we’re introduced to another figure: a grumpy old man searching, to the detriment of his relationship with his friends and wife, even, for more. he has a good life, and he’s still deeply in love with gena, but he’s restless and ill-content. it’s already a departure from the role of older figures in such movies (because if our teenage protagonists represent youth and chaos, then older characters, especially much older characters like coleman and gena, are stability, stagnation--they’ve already figured it all out, and are liable to be trapped in their ways)... and then his obsession pays off, with a little help from fate, and he ends up occupying the body of bobby keller, with gena taking up a more backseat role possessing his female counterpart, lainie diamond.

like i said, the reverse is never true. bobby still exists in a spiritual form during coleman’s escapade, making the occasional cameo in coleman’s dreams (and one has to wonder about the influence of a nightmare on elm street on this movie’s final form; at one point, bobby even quips “you were expecting, maybe... freddy krueger?”, the dreams are shot in a similar, fuzzy way to nancy’s, and in the last act not falling asleep becomes an apparently life-or-death matter for gena), but he’s not walking around in coleman’s body, which i do believe the movie is stronger for. bobby might have a takeaway lesson from all of this, but it’s coleman we follow, navigating his way through high school and first love and the mortifying ordeal of trying to pull his wife’s consciousness up through a teenage girl’s mind. and i like that the delineation between lainie and gena and even bobby and coleman isn’t always clear; they’re sharing the bodies. as coleman points out at one point, “we’re them.” there isn’t quite a point where one stops and the other starts--coleman takes on more of bobby’s mannerisms and speech patterns the longer he plays his part, and lainie, when she’s around coleman, acts more and more in accordance to gena’s personal quirks. it’s surprisingly heartfelt, in a way. the end product is sometimes messy, because it’s juggling the body-swapping a-plot with a romantic triangle subplot involving an angry boy with a gun and a minor gang war between rival delinquent groups at the school (although, i will say that the culmination of THAT, the confrontation where coleman urges joel to shoot HIM, was pretty satisfying), but it’s mature in a way you don’t see in a lot of its contemporaries. ultimately, we’re watching an old man face the consequences of his monomania and realize what really matters to him is love. the rest is set dressing.

and as for the rest, hm. corey haim’s role didn’t pan out nearly as much as i expected it to. he sticks around for most of the movie to make faces at coleman when he does out of character shit in bobby’s body, but doesn’t even make it into the final scene when coleman and bobby (in their respective bodies again) come to a final understanding. it was already a pretty long movie, but i can’t help feeling like more could have been done with their friendship, especially with dinger making it onto the cover of the movie (unlike robbards) and into all of the promotional material. toward the end, coleman-as-bobby genuinely thanks dinger for looking out for him during the ordeal, only for dinger to ask if he’s “going fag” for his trouble. (as an aside: was this a thing people said? i’d never really heard it before i watched the warriors last week, but here it popped up again. whatever.) dinger’s character also continuously brought weird, sexualized racial comments to the table (first referring to apache women, then hawai’ian), which served no purpose but white supremacy’s. this, along with the ease with which lainie’s mother makes the decision to have her second husband drug her teenage daughter with a sleeping pill mixed into a glass of wine, can be explained (but not excused) as products of their time, but, y’know, come on. even in 1989, these scenes were written, greenlit, and parroted by people who should have known better.

hey, killer soundtrack, though. all in all, i could watch it again.

#dream a little dream #bobby keller #coleman ettinger #this didn't fit nicely into the above but you know what really killed me about this movie? how gender corey feldman looked #iykyk