Saturday, April 1, 2017

I've never been a big fan of Sleeper

I see that Woody Allen's Sleeper is on tonight at 8:00 PM on TCM. I saw it once, well over a dozen years ago, and to be honest I've never had a desire to see it a second time.

Sleeper is well enough known that you probably all know the basic story already. Woody Allen plays Miles, a man who dies in the early 1970s and gets cryogenically frozen, in the hopes that scientists in the future will be able to solve his medical problems and bring him back to life. Two hundred years later, medicine has advanced to the point that this is possible, so Miles is brought back to life.

Of course, there's all sorts of culture shock, and that provides much of the humor for the first half to two-thirds of the movie. The historians get a warped view of 1970s America from Miles, while he's shocked to find that things like nutritional science have changed in the intervening 200 years. And then there are future things like the "Orgasmatron".

But the other half of the plot is where I found problems with the movie. The future world is a dictatorship, and Miles has to flee because the future would people want him for nefarious purposes of their own. Those fighting the dictatorship want him, as well, as he's the one person who really can take down the dictator, something having to do with the dictator's nose. When the plot moves to getting the dictator's nose, I found that th emovie really lost whatever steam it had built up. It's not as irritating as Annie Hall and the rest of the nebbish Woody Allen stereotype, but you can see the seeds of it.

But, of course, there are a lot of people who like Woody Allen movies and who will like Sleeper.

No comments: