ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

Ogosmith Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Michael_Elliott Let Me Dream Again (1900) *** 1/2 (out of 4)Clocking in at less than two minutes, this is a pretty funny movie that shows a middle aged man drinking, smoking and flirting with a beautiful young woman. The man is having a terrific time until he wakes up and realizes that in bed with him is his rather unattractive wife. LET ME DREAM AGAIN is a pretty simple film but for 1900 it was rather clever and used the dream sequence for a great cause. George Melies was using dream sequences to show off horrors and magic tricks but this here was clever use of it because we get a very big laugh. I thought it was rather hilarious when the man woke up and the facial expression when he sees his wife was extremely good.

bob the moo An old man flirts with a pretty young woman and gets very amorous, only for the reality of his situation to become horribly apparent to him! This is a very simple film with one gag to deliver and a short time to do it in. The joke is funnier than it sounds mainly because the manner of delivery of the punch line is good. It has enough time at the end to milk the gag so it does tend to work. Contrast this with the French short that repeated it less successfully the following year where the delivery was the problem and the punch line felt like it was delivered in a rush without allowing the actors to react.Of more note is the way that the film moves from dream sequence to reality. The film goes out of focus and when it returns we are in the second scene. It is now a common effect and we all clearly know what it means but this film was the first known example of it being used.

Snow Leopard With an idea that was creative for its time, and a theme that still retains some interest, "Let Me Dream Again" is still worth seeing despite its unpolished look. It was one of the very earliest attempts to film a story that compared dream and reality, and while there are later imitations of the story with a more refined technique, this is the one that should probably get the credit for the basic idea.The comparison between the man's dream and the reality of his life certainly makes a comic point, but at the same time, it suggests some more general ideas about what people want their lives to be. The man in the story does not come across as an interesting person in himself, and the story itself is quite rudimentary - yet in watching the main character, you're not quite sure whether to respond with pity, scorn, laughter, or some of all three.While very simple, these very old, very short features often handle these kinds of themes in an economical fashion that contrasts well with the excessive approach that has become all too common in the 21st century.

Alice Liddel Another familiar trope that will seem poignant to many people. A man is wining and dining a young lady only to wake up beside an old shrew who gives him what for. The master of this dream/reality narrative is Buster Keaton, who developed it with heartbreaking inventiveness.This film is not without interest though. Firstly, the dream sequence is excellently imagined, with the couple dining in the foreground and a blank background creating a suitably unreal effect. The symmetry between couples is effective, suggesting that the wife may once have been like this one, asking us to ponder the processes that led to her 'decline', even the possibility of the husband's malign influence. Of course, this symmetry is actually a representation of rupture, division, disharmony - between dream and reality, the ideal and the mundane, the young and the old, the unattainable and the attainable.The strange thing about the dream is that, firstly, the woman is unattainable in it, she flirts, but she doesn't give herself; secondly, she is dressed in a costume reminiscent of the circus or carnival. Here the dream is something subversive, something that can critique the failures, the repressions, the dissatisfactions of real life. It also points to the use most people make of the cinema, to dream about better lives than our own, lives we can see but cannot have. It is this melancholy vein that helps the film transcend misogyny.