Dream Log: Kissing Milla Jovovich

Last night I had another one of those dreams where there was no pandemic. It was also one of those dreams about a movie, but this time, it was not one of those dreams where I'm in a movie, but at the same time, the events in the plot of the movie are also really happening. This time, there was a movie being filmed and there was no blending of movie and reality. It was just a movie. And we also weren't watching the finished movie while we were filming it -- we were just filming it in the conventional waking-world manner. And in this dream, I wasn't even an actor in the movie. I was a producer.

The movie was being directed by Luc Besson, and starred Milla Jovovich

as Boudica, a real historical figure, a tribal leader in Britain who led an large-scale but ultimately unsuccessful revolt against the Roman occupation in the area of present-day England in the first century AD. In real life, Ms Jovovich is married and has 3 children with her husband Paul W S Anderson, maker of the Resident Evil movies. This fictional dream version of Milla Jovovich was single.

In my role as one of the film's many producers, I went around the set trying to solve problems as best I could. If someone in the cast or crew was having a creative problem and wanted my help, I tried my best to offer constructive advice. If someone was feeling down, I tried to cheer them up. If someone wanted some money from the film's budget, I either gave it to them, or turned them down, or referred them to one of the higher-ranking producers.

The movie was being filmed on location in Minnesota, near the campus of a large, academically-undistinguished university, a "party college." The cast and the crew interacted with the students and faculty of the university. In an unrealistic dreamlike aspect of this dream, I was solving problems on the university campus as well as on the film set.

I saw a young man with a full beard sitting on a bench in the hallway of a university building, not moving, with a glazed expression on his face. For a moment I was very alarmed, but I checked his pulse and breathing: he was alive. His pulse and breathing were slow, steady and strong, but he was in quite a daze. I couldn't smell alcohol on him, and I can usually smell if someone's been drinking. It was not clear whether this guy's state was due to drugs, fatigue, depression, some combination of these, or none of the above. I saw Milla Jovovich nearby and waved her over.

In the movies, often a man is in some sort of state, and a beautiful woman will kiss him and he'll snap right out of it. Like Sleeping Beauty, but with the genders reversed. I gestured at the young man and said to Milla, "You wanna try a Reverse Sleeping Beauty on this guy?"

Milla shrugged and said sure and leaned in over the young man and gave him a long kiss. Nothing. No response.

I thought it was a terrible shame, a kiss from Milla Jovovich going to waste like that. I stared at her, and she was staring right back, and slowly we got closer and closer to each other until we were kissing.

It was a long, wonderful kiss, and while we kissed we hugged each other and rubbed each other's backs and scalps and squeezed each other's shoulders. When it was over I was stunned. Milla smiled kindly at me, shrugged and said, "Mmmm... Yeah, it was okay. But I'm Milla Jovovich. You understand." And she walked away.

I caught up with her and walked beside her. She gave me a raised-eyebrow look. "Let's talk, okay?" I said. "Let's have everything... above-board and clear. I want to keep trying. You can tell me to leave you alone, any time you want."

Milla laughed and said, "I know I can! It's good that you know it too."

"It was a poor choice of words on my part. Just tell me to leave you alone and that's that, over and done like it never happened." I waited as we walked along. She didn't say anything. I waited some more. She still didn't say anything. I said, "Do you want to have dinner tonight, after shooting's done?"

She was silent for still longer. I felt like I was going to die from the waiting. Was she one of those women who actually think it's kinder to just leave someone hanging? Then she leaned in close, gave me a peck on the ear and said, "Yeah." Then she ran away, running as fast as Milla Jovovich. Then I woke up. And after a few minutes, I realized that I wasn't really going to have dinner with Milla Jovovich. And that she's married, very happily married, apparently, to the Resident Evil guy, the father of her three children.

Dream Log: Ben Affleck Dissed By Young Whippersnappers

I dreamed that I both was and was not an Average Joe/Good Guy/Everyday Hero character played by Ben Affleck in an action/adventure movie. I was the Average Joe, but at the same time I was just me, just watching the movie. Affleck had stumbled across a crime in progress, being committed by characters played by actors in their 20and early 30's, who were probably famous, maybe even as famous as Affleck, but to me they were all kind of a blur because of their age. They were holding Me/Affleck prisoner because I/he had seen what they were doing.

And as if that weren't already bad enough, they were making fun of Affleck because he was old to them.

Ben Affleck, who just turned 47 yesterday, with Ben Affleck's abs and guns and buns and Oscars. The father of Jennifer Garner's children. Seriously, who did these whippersnappers think they were?

We were in a mostly-empty high-rise downtown in some city, like a new building which hadn't yet filled up with tenants. There were lots of rooms painted white, with no people, no furniture, no rugs, no anything. The younf movie stars were committing some sort of large-scale robbery, using both guns and computers. They weren't paying much attention to Affleck, who repeatedly escaped their custody, but only briefly before they caught him again. Sometimes Affleck got as far as a white-pained stairwell, sometimes he actually got outside of the building, into alleys where truck were loading and unloading or onto crowded sidewalks. I/Affleck felt like I/he was getting closer and closer to actually getting away, and coming back with cops and sweet, sweet justice.

One of the whippersnappers was particularly snarky and unpleasant, and apparently more evil than the others too, because he thought they should just kill me/Affleck and be done with me/Affleck before I/Affleck escaped and got them into trouble, but none of the others seemed to want to go that far. They were all like: get the job done, cut me loose and disappear. In the course of repeatedly escaping and then being captured and brought back to the HQ, I/Affleck was talking to these more reasonable members of the gang, trying to turn them against their murderous or would-be murderous cohort. Affleck felt like he was beginning to get through to some of them. They were decent kids, not murderous. They had just gotten caught up in a bad situation. Some of them even started to ease up on the stupid remarks about how Affleck supposedly was old.

Then I woke up.

Dream Log: 17th-21st-Century Action-Adventure Movie

I dreamed I was on the set of an action-adventure movie, with a minor role in the cast but a major role as one of the producers, almost a co-director, having a lot of back-and-forth discussions with the director about how this film was going to look and sound.

Many recent movies have had scripts by Shakespeare in contemporary settings. This movie took its script from some later 17th-century English playwright, from a play with lots of swordfighting. In our movie, as in some of the above-mentioned Shakespeare movies, the swords were replaced by guns. The setting was midtown Manhattan, in and among the skyscrapers.

Most of the characters had the hair and clothes of conventional 21st-century businesspeople, but many of the people carrying 21st-century guns -- not all of them -- had an appearance with strong 17th-century touches: very, very long 17th-century hair, knee-high boots, black jackets with a bit of brocade. I played one of the minor gunmen. Although in the actual 17th century the hair-impaired often wore long wigs, I had real hair which reached almost to my waist. Black and curly hair. It wasn't clear whether my hair was naturally black and curly or had been colored and curled for this role.

We didn't look like 17th-century people who had traveled here in a time machine, but like 21st-century people who had made some bold fashion choices. Besides our guns, there were other 21st-century notes to our appearance: belts, watches, gloves, etc, tended to be contemporary. Trousers which didn't balloon up. There weren't many 17th-century moustaches to go with the long hair, nor many 17th-century hats. Men were mostly either clean-shaven or had 21st-century-style trimmed beards. We didn't wear a lot of ruffles. The overall effect was very butch both for male and for female killers who borrowed fashion touches from the 17th century. When we didn't walk, we drove cars rather than riding horses.

The script, however, was pure Baroque, taking delight in long and elaborate sentences. All of the characters were very sophisticated speakers. Long speeches mixing aggression with wit took place in boardrooms, and punctuated gunfights in parking garages and on sidewalks.

Thought-Experiment About Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine And Hollywood

If Einstein, Planck, Bohr and other prominent physicists had make a concerted effort, around, say, 1920, to warn against the dangers of using radioactive materials in research, and had succeeded in keeping such research very small-scale and protective measures at a very high level, would they have succeeded in effectively banning nuclear power and weapons 20 years before they were developed, simply because things like radium and uranium and plutonium were consistently treated like exactly what they are: extremely dangerous things which should be kept as far from people as possible? At the very least, they might've lengthened Marie Curie's life a little bit, and who knows to how many beneficial scientific breakthroughs that alone might have led? And she's only the most famous of many physicists who killed themselves with radioactivity.

And if this had happened, would there have been fewer of those dopey movies made whose message, in a nutshell, is: Oh noes! Cutting-edge science and technology is leading directly to an apocalypse which will eradicate all of mankind, helphelphelp they're gonna kill us all?

You say you hadn't noticed such anti-STEM fearmongering in Hollywood? Well, sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Take a stroll with me through time: remember 1995? People were starting to get excited about the Internet. Remember the 1995 movie The Net, with Sandra Bullock and Dennis Miller? Sweet Sandra's life is threatened by one swarm of evil people after another -- all because she works on the (duh-duh-DUHHHHH!) Internet. Remember 2001's Swordfish, with convicted hacker Hugh Jackman forced by extremely-dangerous John Travolta and completely-topless Halle Berry, tempted by evil, evil cutting-edge equipment to participate in extreme violence via the (duh-duh-DUHHHHH!) Internet? Like many other movies, Swordfish is notable for unintentionally-hilarious depictions of how non-experts imagine that cutting-edge technology works. Movies about computers tend to age very badly.

Remember what genetic modification led to in The Fly and the Jurassic Park movies? Not to mention almost every single Frankenstein movie? Young Frankenstein ends pretty nicely. It's the only exception which occurs to me at the moment. Can you name one other Hollywood movie in which genetic engineering leads to anything other than pure horror? ("How could you have been so blind as not to see that playing God would end up killing us all?! Oh, damn you, damn you, you fool!")

Or artificial intelligence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator movies, the Matrix movies, or, to take a more recent example which may or may not prove to be as memorable, Transcendence, released in 2014, starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman, which has both the hilariously non-realistic computer stuff and the horrifying apocalypse as the inevitable result of AI? ("Oh, how could you have been so blind?! How could you not have seen that the attempt to make a computer brain could only lead to huge massacres?!" That's not a direct quote from the script of Transcendence but it's pretty damn close.) You beginning to see the trend I'm talking about?

You beginning to understand how vaccination could be so unpopular in Hollywood because so many people there don't understand STEM (that's Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) [PS, 1 July 2017: Actually, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Whoops!] and have an uninformed fear and loathing of it?

I agree, unreservedly, that nuclear energy and nuclear bombs are very, very bad things, and that it's only natural that they would lead to an association of STEM and disaster in many minds. But things could have been very different. Scientists themselves could have prevented that nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs ever came to be, and if they had acted early enough, that prevention could have been relatively easy. There's nothing intrinsic about physics which had to lead straight to nukes.

And the fact that those bombs and plants did come to be has had a tremendous effect on the way that people in STEM research work. But that's one of the things you don't know if you don't know very much about STEM besides what you see in movies.

Movie Cliches I Hate

1. In chase scenes, all vehicles go equally fast, and only a difference in driver skill can be decisive. If the bad guy is driving a brand-new Lamborghini, and the cops are chasing him in a ratty-sounding 30-year-old van with bald tires, the cops will be right on the bad guy's ass for miles. In real life, of course, the Lamborghini would disappear from the cops' view in about 5 seconds.

1a. As if this wasn't already bad enough (and it WAS), since around the release of Point Break in 1991, cops on foot have been able to keep up with fleeing motor vehicles.

2. Roger Ebert's movie cliche column pointed out the cliche of the tough guy setting a big explosion and then walking away and not even flinching when the big explosion goes off right behind him. Ebert's column pointed out that even the unusually cliche-free Syriana featured George Clooney committing this cliche.

Since then it has occurred to me that this is not only a cliche, but it could be really dumb tough-guy behavior as well, if the tough guy wants to evade detection. Oftentimes in this cliche, the big explosion occurs in a crowded place, and big crowds of people are running around terrified in all directions after the explosion, while the tough guys never flinches. Well, if there's a street camera covering this, the tough guy screwed himself by not acting like everyone else: on the camera's footage, he'll be the one guy walking along like he didn't feel or hear anything, standing out among a crowd of panicking people. ("There he is, right there: the tough guy, walking along unconcerned." And they put out an APB with the tough guy's full description.)

3. Someone's just been shot, and his friends, and/or the responding cops, firemen, doctors and/or EMT's, act like it's completely up to him whether or not he loses consciousness, and also that if he passes out he'll die. "Nononono, stay with me, buddy! Stay with me! NOOOOOOO!!!" I don't know: If I'd just been shot and some bozo was shaking me and yelling in my face to stay with him, I might want to pass out just to get away from the shaking and yelling. But I still couldn't decide whether or not to pass out. And I still know that losing consciousness and dying are two different things.

4. I've never in my life heard someone in a real bar order "a beer." In TV and movies, maybe once or twice I've heard someone refer to a brand of beer (or at least a type of beer. For example: "You got a good IPA?"), the way people do in real life, instead of saying "Gimme a beer."

5. Very nearly everybody in movies likes their coffee black with no sugar. I suspect this annoys Quentin Tarrantino too, and that that's why his characters take theirs with a lot of cream and a lot of sugar. (They also order brands of beer like real people.)