Dreamworld

Oliver Hayes, an aspiring animator whose confidence is at a low point, meets the captivating and impulsive Lily Blush, who encourages him to drop everything and go with her to Northern California in the hopes of fulfilling his fantasy of working for Pixar Animation Studios. As they travel up the coast, Oliver falls deeply in love but upon making certain startling discoveries he must decide if he wants to face reality or stay in dreamworld.

While watching this film I first thought, “this Director of Photography should never make another film again.” Then the characters drew me in a bit. That only lasted so long before I thought, “the Director AND Editor both should never work in film again. At the end of the movie I laughed comically loud at the fact that all of those roles were the same man. The story is one draft away from a really solid script. There are some overwritten writerly moments that I took me out of the film. This tends to happen in most indie films because of filmmakers trying to be hip. Those moments were minimal enough that I could look past it and watch the film comfortably. The performances, sans one detail, are all very credible and deserve credit. Mary Kate Wiles and Nora Kirkpatrick do an excellent job. Whit Hertford does a good job as well, but the director should have reigned in the twitchy/blinky actor thing. No one looks around that much except nervous shady folks and Hugh Grant. The movie is only watchable because of two factors. The actors and… The score for the film is one of its greatest strengths. The man knows when to queue his music and what tone it should have to support the scene. He makes the painful decisions by Darst just a bit more bearable when combined with the performances. Another audio note, the audio mixer for this is absolutely terrible. The peaks of overly loud music mixed with painfully low dialog really took me out of the film various times throughout. Darst needs to understand that lighting, color grading and lower ISO settings are your friend. It looks like you made enemies with them on this project. The movie gets three stars; one for the script, one for the performances and one for the score. It deserves nothing else.