Dreaming Hollywood
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Big dreams of Hollywood success can make even the strongest aspiring actor, writer, or filmmaker lose their cool. The city is full of waiters and baristas, waiting for their big break. So it’s no surprise that the inept criminal in Dreaming Hollywood finds his quest for fame and fortune to be harder and more maddening than he expected.

Dreaming Hollywood follows the adventures of Ray Balfi (Turk Matthews), a small-time drug dealer who gives away more product than he sells. But dealing drugs isn’t his dream; his dream is to make a fortune writing screenplays. He has high hopes for his first animated film, The Dog’s Meow, about a dog who goes undercover to spy on cats. As a random assortment of dealers and gangsters and crooked cops battles one another around him, Ray amasses a stack of rejection letters. But then he discovers that the screenplay has been stolen and produced and is about to be released.

Throughout Ray’s journey, this bumbling, clueless character remains blindly optimistic, convinced that fame and fortune are coming his way. He doesn’t care that his boss is pressuring him to sell his supply instead of handing it out as favors—or that their supplier (a man whose name he can’t even pronounce) is in the middle of a nasty battle to control the streets of LA. And while he waits (and waits…and waits…) for his story of stardom to begin, the film wanders off to tell the stories of a whole lot of strange and seedy characters whose connections are questionable and whose complicated storylines aren’t especially interesting (or even coherent, for that matter).

Instead of really telling Ray’s story, then, Dreaming Hollywood mostly passes the time by telling the stories that take place around him. Like poor, delusional Ray, it seems to think that it’s exceptionally clever and witty. It thinks that its sordid storylines and strange characters make it worthy of comparisons to Quentin Tarantino. But it’s really just creepy and perplexing, with a self-important narrator, an idiotic central character, and a mess of dark drama that you won’t really care about. Had it been a half-hour shorter, it may have been slightly more tolerable—but the painfully overstuffed runtime just adds insult to injury.

Just as the would-be screenwriter in Dreaming Hollywood wrote a bizarre mess of a movie and put it out into the world, his own story is one big, bizarre mess—and not in a brilliantly quirky kind of way. Even if you’re into dark stories filled with drug dealer drama, you’ll find the characters here more irritating than intriguing.


Dreaming Hollywood is now available on demand.


Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:

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