Sleeper

Sleeper (1973)

Runtime: 89 minutes

Directed by: Woody Allen

Starring: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, John Beck, Mary Gregory

From: United Artists

To state a quote that’s on the back of the DVD for this flick, the movie is “a bizarre mixture of New York neuroses, splendidly lunatic sight gags, Alice in Wonderland illogic, and too funny to be painful satire.” That is pretty apt.

Here is a movie I’ve seen once before when I rented it from a videostore that went out of business, but I found it at another rental place recently so I decided to watch it again as I didn’t remember too much about it. The plot is that Woody is a nebbish Jew (but of course) who unwittingly gets locked in a cryogenic capsule and he’s awaken in 2173 and the world is much different; it’s a totalitarian state and he’s awoken by a pair of scientists who are part of the underground movement to overthrow the evil government. Everyone has sex artificially and it’s a sterile world. He ends up running into a socialite (Keaton) and they eventually work together to help the movement.

The movie is a comedy that’s rather odd and strange at times but I enjoyed it and I was able to put up with the absurdist stuff, which I’m not always able to do while watching or listening to other forms of entertainment. The main thing is that the flick is like a silent film in several ways, from all the physical humor to the pratfalls to the groovy Dixieland jazz (where you got to hear Woody himself play clarinet) score and so on and so forth. But, you still get to hear much in the way of puns and witty dialogue. By the way, if you’ve never seen a silent comedy from the likes of Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Harold Lloyd, you really should. The physical comedy there is genius and with the way humor is these days that comedy is oh so fresh and at least with me, I really enjoy it. Note that-and I’m being as vague as I can now-the plot involves cloning, and human cloning at that; I’m sure that Allen didn’t expect that in 2009 human cloning would be such an issue; talk about having a tremendous amount of foresight.

If what I said sounds appealing to you, then it’s worth trying to find either on a channel like TCM, rental, or Netflix, or whatever.

Check back here around this time next week for some new reviews.