Help me identify this movie

It's a sci fi movie, probably less than 5 years old. The premise is sort of a idyllic setting where people are driving classic cars, living in suburbia etc., but then our protaginst seems to be seeing reality as it really is at the library or some place. When people seem to be stumbling on the conspiracy, they disappear and are transferred to Hawaii.

I don't want to give too much away on the plot, since it was a good movie, but I can't remember the name and I was trying to find it for a friend. Ring any bells for anyone? I saw it TV a while back on TNT or one of those type channels.

**I don't want to give too much away on the plot**

more is better......... :)

The protaganist and the girl (librarian? can't remember fully) peel back a layer and see that everyone is horribly mutated from some sort of war. Then they get into a 1984-type Administration center, and then they track down the factory that makes stuff, and break the mind control projector.

The movie was somewhat low budget, with a sort of Gattaca look -- modern stuff mixed in with old cars.

Some of the memorbable scenes:

Trading in their cars and getting a new one for like 500$. They were el primo 50s and 60s cars.

The letters from people getting transferred to Hawaii.

Nice briefcase turns into cardboard with a barcode on it.

The nice suburb house turning into plywood with cardboard furniture.

The factory making everything out of cardboard with barcodes on it.

Virtual Nightmare (2000) -

A man drives around his small hometown in a brand new convertible. The style of everything is 1950’s but people have cell-phones, HDTV and computers—and an announcer on the radio says something about Kurt Cobain’s children’s christmas album coming out soon. Indeed a very different world. This man starts seeing things, though, like numbers and bar codes on everyday items—even seeing his parents as crippled, burned-out looking people. In fact, the more he sees these things the more he suspects that his own reality isn’t real. It’s finally revealed to him by a group of people that it’s really a hundred years later than he thinks it is and that people live in this type of virtual reality because reality is simply too horrible after the wars and devastation. The people in the domed cities control the virtual reality. He believes this for a while—until he figures out that even this new reality is still virtual reality and that the real world is something else entirely. This is one of the better virtual reality type movies that came out after the matrix. Some cool ideas and interesting story here.




http://www.buried.com/cgi-bin/reviews/viewreviews.cgi?category=23&id=1054510456

Are you thinking of "The Truman Show"?

http://www.transparencynow.com/truman.htm

Low budget, but intriguing. See other post for more details.

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Pretty cool movie. Along with a movie called "Cypher", two low-budget but intelligent movies I can recommend. I like "They Live" too (inspired my avatar), but the version of Lathe of Heaven I saw recently didn't quite move me as much as I thought it would.

BTW, I was remarking that Virtual Nightmare sounded like a cross between those two.