Episode 146 - Dreamcatcher

[Quarky 9]

I can usually find these things online. I own the DVD, and there is a "deleted scene" where it's clearly an outtake where Donnie Wahlberg breaks character. It's pretty great. Someone has to post it/find it.

 

My favourite part about this movie is that if you start to hate it, just wait 40 minutes and it becomes a different movie.

[TrevorAlonzo 38]

Family Guy did a joke on how this was written.

[JackChristensen 177]

One other little logic glitch... when Pete the car salesman pulls the woman's car keys out of the deep puddle, she uses the keyless entry to open the door. Pretty sure soaking in water for that long would render that broken, and she'd have to unlock it manually... woot!

 

Not to be a pedant, but I once accidentally got into a swimming pool with a key fob in the pocket of my trunks, and it worked just fine afterward. So, it is possible.

[taylor anne photo 11311]

Family Guy did a joke on how this was written.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22qd39Xxbqk

I just realized that I had always confused the story of how he wrote Dreamcatcher with Kingdom Hospital even though he just adapted the latter for TV. So every time I saw this joke I was thinking Kingdom Hospital lol. Whoops.

 

Although it isn't as bad of a stretch as I thought after looking up the plot again cause one of the main characters does get admitted to the hospital after a severe road accident.

[Lando 2019]

Also just briefly addressing the question people keep raising about the "powers" each guy has, and how they don't seem to provide much protection, and two of the guys get killed off, etc.

 

People who've grown up on recent blockbuster/franchise movies are too used to NOBODY ever dying along the way, because it would prevent a sequel, or it's in the actor's contract to not die, or in some cases even to lose a fight (Rock vs Vin Diesel f'rinstance). Also, each character in today's movies has an exact special thing they can do to "win the day." But also, folks are used to Iron Man or Superman being able to do anything they want, at will, to trump any adversary. Boring...

 

Something like Game of Thrones isn't afraid of characters failing and dying along the way as they're outmatched or have bad luck. There's some actual "skin in the game" and stakes to be won or lost. In Dreamcatcher, these guys are thrown into something, some win, some lose, but they're there to do what they can in the situation. That's where drama comes from.

 

Gandalf could probably have just destroyed the ring himself, but where's the fun in that?

 

I disagree. My problem is that they behave like novices with the powers. If I suddenly developed the power to read minds today I would probably say things like "what did you say?" quite a bit to random people or my patients or strange women that lost their keys. However if I had developed that power 25 years ago I would think that I would have at minimum developed the awareness that I was receiving thoughts from people around me and not say "what did you say" or blurt out otherwise commonly withheld information. Hell, there are fake mind readers in the real world that do a better job with their "powers" than these real mind readers in this fake world.

[dickhoff3 81]

A few questions I had, and I'm at work so I haven't able to read all the comments yet, so sorry if they've been addressed. One minor thing. They mention that they've gone to the cabin for the past 20 years, right? And the flashback to when they met Duditz was, if I'm not mistaken, 20 years ago? So they've been presumably renting and spending weekends alone to hunt in this cabin in the woods since they were like how old? 12 or 13? Sounds odd, who's putting up the security deposit for this trip when they're basically children? Where are these kid's parents? I feel like they could have mentioned that in a flashback. Was this a place they discovered or used to come to with Duditz? I feel like the significance of this trip is kind of lost in this movie. Maybe it's different in the book.

 

Also, and again, I was probably falling asleep when I was watching the last act of this movie, but doesn't Tom Jane mention that they hadn't seen Duditz in several years; like basically since their teenage years? I thought they were supposed to be best friends; this guy is the most important person in their lives and they continually talk about him as if he's dead. He's got a terminal illness and seems to be just a few hours drive away, shouldn't they be routinely visiting this poor guy, even helping his elderly mother with some of the care-giving? Hell, why not invite him to the cabin, seems like it would have been a lovely thing for this dying man to spend one last weekend with his best childhood buds? Couldn't they have just packed his meds up, sat him in front of the fire and serenaded him with Blue Bayou? Now that's the heartwarming movie I want to see.

 

I was also really annoyed when the so called fasted kid in the world, not only never showcased his speed but also basically broke his leg 30 minutes into the movie right as his speed might come into play. Couldn't there be a big foot race scene where he's outrunning some alien animals or something to save someone? Would have been a nice way to redeem a pretty bad character. I'm guessing in the book, his speed some how comes into play more when they're flashing back.

[dickhoff3 81]

Also the line from Jason Lee saying "I've had a lot of fuckarees turn into fuckarows" made me feel like he's forced himself on to some not so willing sexual partners. It creeped me out.

[paultab 225]

Someone in the episode mentioned that Olyphant's drunken speech to the dead woman seemed like it was a reshoot, done for the benefit of the audience who were probably lost by this point. This almost had to have been the case if Dudits wasn't supposed to have been an alien until the second version of the movie ending was shot. Paul even mentioned that in neither the book ending nor the original movie ending was Dudits supposed to have been an alien. I would bet that after the movie was assembled, someone said "Look, we have to add SOMEthing to help the audience understand what's supposed to be happening. And Dudits turning into an alien is going to seem a little too left-field unless we try to set it up in some way."

 

 

He does go directly from, "Maybe he's not from this planet," to "I CAN'T BELIEVE HE'S AN ALIEN"

[paultab 225]

However, your mind reading tells you can still achieve the ultimate fuckarow.

 

Not to pick nits, Cameron, but I think it's firmly established that the ultimate fuckarow is, in fact, a fuckaree.

 

I mean, we are people of language, let's get this stuff right.

[Lando 2019]

That's what I always loved about King's books is that he is willing to sacrifice most anyone in his books if it makes sense. Deaf mute with a heart of gold in The Stand - blow his ass up. Kid who ends up in an alternate western/Arthurian universe of the Dark Tower - kill him, bring him back from the dead, and kill his ass again. Asthmatic kid who originally saved the day in It - have the villain learn from his mistake in the first fight and then slaughter the now adult asthmatic when he tries the same shit. The feeling of real stakes is what makes a story really good, which is why I was sort of bummed by the end of the Harry Potter series because JK Rowling was a real wimp when it came to killing actually important characters and the ones she did kill has now led her to come out and say ad nauseam that she wished that she hadn't. Since you the reader knew that they really weren't going to kill any of the big three in that series, the stakes weren't as high as they could have been.

 

This goes beyond just King, but most of the time you can usually tell who is going to die. It's usually an important character with enough at stake to tug on the heart strings (ie they have a young child) but not wreck the whole story line (ie the main character), with some comforting the audience at the end to say something like "don't worry though, this person's child will be well taken care of." It's that safe American style of having some stakes.

 

Also to your point King often throws the mentally handicapped person (or magical African American in many cases) under the bus. It seems to have the effect of saying "this person is innocent so you should be sad, but at the same time their value is less because of their handicap."

[sycasey 110]

Totally in agreement here. I didn't expect that all or any of the characters would make it through the movie alive, however, the fact that these powers that could make them unique, memorable, or mildly useful, don't ever have that effect, doesn't quite make the cut as a good character flaw.

 

Also agreeing with the issue of them apparently not honing their skills or learning how to keep their powers on the low-down. When they first get the powers as kids, they are accidentally reading each others minds. Yet when Beaver is on the toilet, he's looking for a sign that Jonesy is still looking for the tape. I would think that having telepathy would be quite useful there, even if Jonesy is still unable to get back to the cabin in time to assist Beaver. It just would make more sense. The use of and effectiveness of their powers is way too sporadic for their 20 years of possible experience.

 

Even beyond this, the whole idea of "anyone can die at any time!" doesn't square with the theme the author is seemingly trying to deliver, which is that this group of guys were brought together and given powers because there is something they were "meant" to do. There is a strong theme of destiny here, which indicates that the deaths (if they happen) should be purposeful and not random.

 

So when at least half the group winds up having a "destiny" of doing fuck-all to help defeat the alien menace, the audience might feel a little cheated and wonder why we wasted so much time with these characters.

[watchyourblue 20]

I love all the discussions here, really I do. But all we need to talk about for the next couple of years is this scene:

 

Omission:

 

What about the scene where Thomas Jane holds a gun to his head as though it were a telephone? Its insane!

 

Seriously Jonesy CALLS on a godamm telephone from his mind palace to Tom Jane, who picks up with a GUN. How come SIzemore didn't just stop the car right there and be like: "My mistake, you're clearly crazy. Now get out of my car."

[heavyduty 1]

Unless I'm forgetting one, this is the second movie in the HDTGM catalog that features a group of people singing an oldie to another character to calm them down - Blue Bayou here and of course California Dreaming in Congo.

[RyanSz 3140]

 

Also to your point King often throws the mentally handicapped person (or magical African American in many cases) under the bus. It seems to have the effect of saying "this person is innocent so you should be sad, but at the same time their value is less because of their handicap."

To be fair he's about 50/50 on sacrificing handicap characters. While Nick Andros was blown up, King had Tom Cullen stay alive so that he could always tell people how to spell words using M-O-O-N.

[tomspanks 9039]

Do you think Pete ever used his finger trick to locate fuckarees vs fuckarows?

Anyway, how did Pete know the realtor bought a candy bar? Wasn't he focusing on trying to find the keys? I don't understand why the finger didn't show him the puddle right away.

[Lando 2019]

My interpretation of it was that it was kind of a "time rewind." Actually, that sounds like it would come in really handy for finding lost car keys.

[RikkiHo 84]

I was also really annoyed when the so called fasted kid in the world, not only never showcased his speed but also basically broke his leg 30 minutes into the movie right as his speed might come into play. Couldn't there be a big foot race scene where he's outrunning some alien animals or something to save someone? Would have been a nice way to redeem a pretty bad character. I'm guessing in the book, his speed some how comes into play more when they're flashing back.

 

I would have appreciated a flashback scene where Pete pisses all of his friends' names in perfect cursive. Or, even better, "No Bounce, No Play".

[firsttimecallerlongtimelistenr 3590]

only got to see this last night and listen to the ep today because i've been catching up on season 6 of the walking dead (amazing btw) so this film was the second time in two days that i saw some poor dude nearly get his d##k bit off ... the pain the actors expressed in both instances illustrates to me that they too have switched over to button flies because of incredibly painful experiences when they were younger. or maybe they went method and used zippers on set?..

 

jason asked pretty much every question i asked myself when watching this nutter of a film ... and i love the fact that no-one was able to answer any of those questions ...

[firsttimecallerlongtimelistenr 3590]

in the scene where tom sizemore is shooting at morgan freeman in the helicopter he first shoots up with the massive automatic machine gun thing (i have no clue about guns) and misses with every blast of bullets but then he pulls out his handgun and shoots and i think he hits the fuel tank twice?, inches apart? ... i think that was the point i said to myself "that's ridiculous ... this movie is totally unbelievable" .. but up to that point i was all in

[RyanSz 3140]

in the scene where tom sizemore is shooting at morgan freeman in the helicopter he first shoots up with the massive automatic machine gun thing (i have no clue about guns) and misses with every blast of bullets but then he pulls out his handgun and shoots and i think he hits the fuel tank twice?, inches apart? ... i think that was the point i said to myself "that's ridiculous ... this movie is totally unbelievable" .. but up to that point i was all in

I think that made the most sense out of this whole movie as he was using what looked like an MP5 (my knowledge of guns is video games so apologies if the name is wrong), which in a situation requiring quick reflexes against a fast moving target along with the recoil of a machine gun, it would make sense that he would miss every hit. Yet when he pulls out the pistol you see him steady up and take aim and fire measured shots. Also at that time Freeman has stopped strafing and was lining up his shot as well so it was basically a perfect situation for it to work.

[tomspanks 9039]

only got to see this last night and listen to the ep today because i've been catching up on season 6 of the walking dead (amazing btw) so this film was the second time in two days that i saw some poor dude nearly get his d##k bit off ... the pain the actors expressed in both instances illustrates to me that they too have switched over to button flies because of incredibly painful experiences when they were younger. or maybe they went method and used zippers on set?..

 

Someone has to ask. Which other movie had the same, uh, grave penile injury scene?

[Ofcoursemyhorse 1043]

I know off hand it happens in War of the Roses as well.

[MoFuzz 17]

 

Someone has to ask. Which other movie had the same, uh, grave penile injury scene?

 

[MoFuzz 17]

Just reviewed King's wikipedia page... I wasn't sure of his timeline, but I'd heard about his accident... I presumed that accident is what inspired 1987's "Misery", but it's a case of life imitating art that he was hit by the minivan over 10 years after "Misery" was published. As has been discussed, the 1999 accident led to him writing "Dreamcatcher" longhand as he recovered from his injuries.

[dickhoff3 81]

Jessica McKenna mentions in this episode how she was so bizarrely unattracted to Tim Olyphant, I too thought he looked really different. I guess the dark dye job and overall sleazy personality probably had a lot to do with it. But also, did anyone think he looked bizarrely like Marco Rubio? In fact, when he first shows up my first thought was, "wow, who's that actor who looks like Marco Rubio?" I couldn't even recognize Olyphant and I'm really familiar with his work.