Paperhouse (1988)

When I was a little girl, my younger brother and I were convinced if we strapped enough household wires to each other and fell asleep in the same bed, we could meet each other in our dreams. Of course, my mom told us it was impossible, but that didn't stop us from trying. Children with my wild imagination and faith in the impossible would love the concept of "Paperhouse."

   Of course, "Paperhouse" has a very adult angle that makes it, ultimately, best for grown-ups. 11-year-old Anna (Charlotte Burke,) who is at that age where kids mouth off to their elders and will pick a fight over absolutely anything, faints in school on her birthday and is discovered to have a raging fever.

   Bizarrely, when Anna faints, she discovers that when she's unconscious or asleep, she enters a world entirely unlike her own- to be precise, to a remote house she has drawn before her dizzy spells began. In the house she meets a boy, physically handicapped Marc (Elliot Speirs, who died at a tragically young age,) who bears startling similarities to a boy with muscular dystrophy who Anna's doctor (Gemma Jones) is seeing, and who Anna has never met outside to dream world.

Repost of an Old Favorite: Wild Strawberries

Old people are the joke of Hollywood. How often does one see sensitive, well rounded portrayals of elders? There was Simon Rumley's abstract indie The Living and the Dead, with the beleaguered Roger Lloyd-Pack attempting to care for his sick wife and deranged son. There was The Savages and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Or you could go back further, to Ingmar Bergman's 1957 art film Wild Strawberries.

    Doctor Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) has been called many things. Cold. Hard-hearted. Cruel. In the midst of a late-life crisis, he questions all he is and has been, and faces mortality through a series of dreams.