1980: "The Lathe of Heaven"

                                   The Lathe of Heaven is an 1980 science-fiction TV movie based on Ursula K. Le Guin's novel. It tells the story of George Orr (played by Bruce Davison), a young man who has effective dreams that affect reality. George sees a psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, who wants to harness George's dreams to change the world.

                                 I watched this film on a mediocre film transfer that looked grainy and muddy, add to that, obnoxious motion blur. Despite being a popular TV film for a good eight years on PBS, the broadcasting rights expired in 1988 and was shelved by WNET because it's an apparently expensive process to rebroadcast. Now, all we have is this 2000 remaster and they have not cleaned it up or polished it properly. It frankly looks like shit, but whatever.
                                It was a TV movie with a low budget so it suffers from cheap visual effects, unimaginative sets, and stiff direction. It's definitely in need of a remake (they made another TV movie adaptation in 2002) with Denis Villeneuve at the helm.
                                And despite all that, I liked it. Despite its visual limitations, it ends up achieving a sort of minimalist, Theater of the Mind effect and what you're really left with is the story, the characters, and the ideas. And those elements worked pretty well. The premise is interesting and tackles heavy themes (the reliability of consciousness, the usefulness and ethicality of psychology, the futility of a perfect world). It suffers from a slightly muddled third act, what with dreams within dreams and dream machines, but I still thought it worked. It felt like a radio drama from the forties.

                                 Not a perfect film, by any means, but like its source material, it's ambitious and thought-provoking.