The Good Night (2007)

The Good Night: Directed by Jake Paltrow. With Keith Allen, Steffan Boje, Penélope Cruz, Danny DeVito. A former pop star who now writes commercial jingles for a living, experiences a mid-life crisis.

“Making a movie about dreams or dreaming is tough, and it shows in this one. The difficulty with dreams in any bit of fiction is that they canu0026#39;t be held accountable; that is, by definition, there isnu0026#39;t any kind of direct correspondence between dream occurrences and narrative significance. A dream (singular) here and there can enrich a narrative with symbolism, causality, subconscious, but when the dream becomes plural then almost universally a story starts to break down. Having gritted my teeth through movies like Waking Life and The Cell, to name a few, Iu0026#39;ve come to associate u0026quot;dreamu0026quot; with u0026quot;lazyu0026quot; in cinema.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThat being said, I had to see what Simon Pegg and Martin Freeman would do in a movie together. And the bottom line is, due to these two guys, the movie is worth a watch. Donu0026#39;t may more than $4 to see it.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eWhat you get really is a movie without consequences. You have Martin Freeman obsessed with a dream character. OK, kind of interesting, but thereu0026#39;s not enough dimension to his girlfriend (Paltrow), who just seems like a nag, or his friend/former bandmate (Pegg), who, granted, is extremely funny but ultimately without Pathos, to really make his dream obsession a truly engrossing psychological/sociological study.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAnd again, what happens here is that the dream sequences, and even the obsession with them, because of the, by definition, incommensurable quality of dreams, their inability to be authentically expressed through proxy (language, film, journals, etc.), leave us as audience members bereft of any feeling of causality, arc, or direction.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAlso, as a sidenote, the pseudo-documentary format that the film opens with and halfheartedly maintains is confusing and ultimately misdirecting. It ends up looking like the mistake of a novice director.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eMartin Freeman performs his lines well, Pegg is funny, DeVito is a pleasing eccentric, and Paltrow isnu0026#39;t as annoying as she usually is (however Cruz is somewhat intolerable), so the movie is worth seeing once, if youu0026#39;ve got nothing better to do.”