The Science of Sleep (2006)

This was a very pleasantly surprising movie.  The premise is there is a young man whose vivid imagination and dreams interferes with his real life.  The production design brings his imagination to fruition, with lots of moving cutout pieces and arts and crafts supplies making up the scenery.  It is very creative and incredibly executed.  Perhaps the most interesting depiction is of the protagonist's mind.  In a sort of "Inside Out" kind of way, the audience is taken inside his brain.  His brain is padded with packing materials like an impromptu asylum and a cooking show ensues. Mini-Stephane looks through cardboard flaps that are Stephane's eyes.

The writing is charming and funny (sometimes in an awkward way).  Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg have great chemistry, and their banter is smile-inducing.  But there is one major downside to this movie.  I was entirely unsatisfied by the unresolved ending.  In the same way that "Interstellar" was so brilliant until the last 15 minutes when the conclusion kind of disappointed, this film also drops the ball in the final scene.  I would dare say that it does not offer an ending at all.  It is so creative and brilliant until the last minute, when it doesn't even really leave open an interpretive ending but just leaves you saying "what is this--this can't be all?" But despite this setback, the movie was definitely worth watching.

I'm Not There (2007)

I'm Not There is a very innovative biopic that very loosely based on "the many lives" of Bob Dylan.  Dylan is played by six different actors, including a black child actor, and a woman.  Each character goes by a different name (none of them Bob or Dylan) and they represent different stages of Dylan's life, or rather different parts of his persona.  Cate Blanchett was especially convincing playing a 60s-era Dylan.  I wish I knew a little more about Bob Dylan because I feel like I missed out on a lot of the details that were included in the film that allude to his life.

The film is very stylish with two of the six actors being portrayed in black and white, and one of the six being portrayed in a documentary format.  Time is not linear in the slightest, jumping constantly between personas.  The whole thing is very surreal and sometimes you're not quite sure what to make of what you're seeing on screen.  But it is fitting for such an enigmatic man as Bob Dylan.

The film opens with a motorcycle accident (a reference to Dylan's own motorcycle accident) and Jude Quinn's subsequent autopsy.  I could not help but draw a parallel to the opening of Lawrence of Arabia, another biopic about a complex man who wore different personas in different phases of his life.