It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

The acting in this movie is really good.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

"Let Me Dream Again" is what can be considered another one of the many one-gag shorts from this time period. While many comedies of the time were pretty cheap (a gardener getting sprayed by a hose, for example) this gag is actually a lot different. Well, for the time anyway. A year later, it would be outright copied in Ferdinand Zecca's "Dream and Reality", which uses a dissolve to go from dream to reality as opposed to the de-focus effect here.The gag centers around a man who dreams that he's dating an attractive bucktoothed woman, when reality finally becomes clear to him. It's not hilarious but definitely holds up better than watching two bill-posters fighting over a defaced wall. The wife in the 1901 remake was uglier, I have to say. But I like the de-focus better here. Both early films are about equal.

Let Me Dream Again (1900) *** 1/2 (out of 4)Clocking in at less than two minutes, this is a pretty funny movie that shows a middle aged man drinking, smoking and flirting with a beautiful young woman. The man is having a terrific time until he wakes up and realizes that in bed with him is his rather unattractive wife. LET ME DREAM AGAIN is a pretty simple film but for 1900 it was rather clever and used the dream sequence for a great cause. George Melies was using dream sequences to show off horrors and magic tricks but this here was clever use of it because we get a very big laugh. I thought it was rather hilarious when the man woke up and the facial expression when he sees his wife was extremely good.

An old man flirts with a pretty young woman and gets very amorous, only for the reality of his situation to become horribly apparent to him! This is a very simple film with one gag to deliver and a short time to do it in. The joke is funnier than it sounds mainly because the manner of delivery of the punch line is good. It has enough time at the end to milk the gag so it does tend to work. Contrast this with the French short that repeated it less successfully the following year where the delivery was the problem and the punch line felt like it was delivered in a rush without allowing the actors to react.Of more note is the way that the film moves from dream sequence to reality. The film goes out of focus and when it returns we are in the second scene. It is now a common effect and we all clearly know what it means but this film was the first known example of it being used.

Another familiar trope that will seem poignant to many people. A man is wining and dining a young lady only to wake up beside an old shrew who gives him what for. The master of this dream/reality narrative is Buster Keaton, who developed it with heartbreaking inventiveness.This film is not without interest though. Firstly, the dream sequence is excellently imagined, with the couple dining in the foreground and a blank background creating a suitably unreal effect. The symmetry between couples is effective, suggesting that the wife may once have been like this one, asking us to ponder the processes that led to her 'decline', even the possibility of the husband's malign influence. Of course, this symmetry is actually a representation of rupture, division, disharmony - between dream and reality, the ideal and the mundane, the young and the old, the unattainable and the attainable.The strange thing about the dream is that, firstly, the woman is unattainable in it, she flirts, but she doesn't give herself; secondly, she is dressed in a costume reminiscent of the circus or carnival. Here the dream is something subversive, something that can critique the failures, the repressions, the dissatisfactions of real life. It also points to the use most people make of the cinema, to dream about better lives than our own, lives we can see but cannot have. It is this melancholy vein that helps the film transcend misogyny.