StrangeScaffold
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Field of Dreams (1989 film) = Finished
🕑 Added 2018-10-15 04:56:30 +0000 UTC I like dark stuff--dark comedies, deep thrillers, you name it. I can mainline tragedy regardless of my emotional state (I'm not sure whether that says more about my taste or just me as a person).Field of Dreams has a classic, dark setup. A man in a field, his family just a few dozen yards away, hears a voice. It's telling him to do something...illogical. Absurd, even. Build a baseball field in the middle of nowhere, right on top of his crops. The voice whispers in his ear like a specter: "If you build it, he will come." It's trippy. It defies explanation, and invites questions you perhaps aren't sure you want the answer to.
I was invested.
The next 90 minutes incorporates everything from kidnappings to time travel to what can only be explained as literal necromancy, and doesn't skip a beat. Unless you're watching closely, you can't even tell beats are happening at all. There's just this haze in your eyes that wells into a small mist as the story goes on. It tackles regret, and the nature of time, and the road not traveled (for the better), all without dipping a single toe into the darkness. It skips over pitfalls and genuine melancholy while remaining emotionally resonant and fundamentally true.
Field of Dreams is magic realist Americana - a genre I didn't even think was a thing, but desperately need more of, now.
It couldn't be more my jam if you put it in a quaint glass jar and labeled it "Clearly Nelson's Jam."
Strangely, I've seen a lot of fantasy films at this point in my life, and far more superhero things, but Field of Dreams is one of the very few pieces of media I've found to capture something that feels truly magical. The essence of magic, if you will.
The unexplainable, better off unexplained. Left to haunt you in the best of ways every day after you watch it. How rare is it to find a movie that feels like it comes from a place of pure, unabashed positivity, with no pretense, guile, or twist?
It's like an episode of the Twilight Zone without the unhappy ending.
I didn't know I needed that, but I do.
I think the world needs more like it too.
