Sleeper (1973)

Although i was only 1yr when this film was made, its still one that i can watch again and again. Woody Allens physical slap stick is brilliant, the scene of him waking up and getting in the wheelchair makes me cry with laughter. I'm not a big Woody Allen fan so i cant compare it to his other movies, but i would strongly recommend this film. Anyone wanting a good laugh should definitely see this movie. It has that innocent feel you get from older movies that still had some standards of censorship. If the film was made today it would probably be crude and crass like American pie. I'm no prude but i feel that this film was made during the best time of movie making, when plot and good acting were more important than special effects and shock tactics.

Fmovies: Slapstick combined with razor sharp dialogue.

The film is pure magic, its my favourite comedy and I think it is in my top three Allen films of all time.

See it if you like the Marx brothers, Woody is all of them rolled into one in this film, it's utter genius. Woody also plays the jazz music which scores the film, and you know you're in for a treat when hearing the first few bars makes you smile. There aren't many comedies out there which could top this in terms of low budget, gags-per-second ratio, music, and sheer quality.

If a film could save your life (as in Hannah and her sisters), it's this one.

I think I am going to have to rank this as Woody Allen's second-best (and second-funniest) movie... after the unbeatable "Annie Hall". Even after having seen the movie 3 or 4 times I still find myself amused by some of Allen's shtick... and his rarely-demonstrated adeptness at physical comedy. So many classic physical bits: riding around in the wheelchair... eating the rubber glove... the future scientists trying to force his slack body into a futuristic vehicle. After this movie Woody started to get a little too cerebral... this was his last attempt at a just-plain-funny movie... and probably his most satisfying of his early comedies... only because there was a sort-of storyline. Woody is cryogenically frozen after a botched operation in the 1970s and is awoken 200 years later to find himself in a repressive Orwellian future. He meets up with a spoiled rich chick (Diane Keaton) and influences her (not really intentionally) into becoming a revolutionary activist.

Sleeper fmovies. Miles Monroe (director Allen), a health food store owner and jazz clarinetist, goes to a hospital for a routine operation, but something goes wrong and he is put to cryogenic sleep for over 200 years. When he is woken up in the 22nd century, the society has changed into a pleasure-addicted dictatorship. Miles is immediately pulled into revolutionary activity and soon has to flee the state police on his way to the mysterious ruler of the society. He also finds himself teaming up with an initially reluctant woman called Luna (Diane Keaton) and together they adventure through the futuristic society.

The comedic style of Sleeper is an entertaining combination of over-the-top farce and Allen's usual verbal jabs at the society of the 20th century. The silly jazz music accompanying the bumbling chase scenes evokes memories from the silent era (some scenes are even sped-up), and the old masters of slapstick have clearly been a major influence to the style. There are also many references to more modern works of science fiction, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Nineteen Eight-Four. Besides the funny farcical scenes, Allen gets to perform his classic neurotic worrying routine that works fine and will amuse fans of his on-screen persona.

A very notable aspect of the film is its visual style: the sets and props all look excellent. The futuristic houses, round vehicles, stiff servant robots, gigantic fruits and even an unruly pudding look hilarious and the many details of the society provide chances to comment on how things are advancing in our times. Be it an orgasm-machine or nonsensical poetry, they seem to suggest we are moving towards times where ignorance revels and empty pleasure-hunting is celebrated as the only correct form of bliss; it can be said that the underlying themes of Sleeper are not unlike those of Aldous Huxley's classic novel Brave New World.

Social commentary aside, Sleeper is also a very funny comedy that appeals not only to friends of Allen's neurotic shtick but also to slapstick fans and admirers of creative production design. Diane Keaton also deserves praise for her performance that features all the necessary comical energy and makes a good pairing for the protagonist Miles. In brief, I laughed out loud several times and would rank the film highly among the handful of Allen films I've seen so far. As far as sci-fi comedies go, Sleeper is a definite winner.

In this early comedy, Woody Allen plays Miles Monroe, a twentieth century healthfood restaurant owner and jazz clarinettist who is cryogenically frozen after surgery and awoken two centuries later. The America of 2173 is a totalitarian state ruled by an oppressive dictator, and Miles has been reanimated by a group of rebels fighting to overthrow the government. For reasons too complex to set out here, Miles is forced to go on the run disguised as a robot and finds himself falling in love with his new owner, an attractive but intellectually vacant young woman named Luna. The film recounts how Miles wins Luna over to the rebel cause and tells the story of their fight against the regime.

Unlike some of Woody's later films, this is a pure comedy. It does not try to explore philosophical issues or to analyse the human condition in the same way as, say, "Hannah and her Sisters" or "Crimes and Misdemeanours". Although I normally think of Woody as a master of verbal wit, much of the humour in "Sleeper" is physical slapstick, based upon (and no doubt deliberate homage to) the comedians of the silent era such as Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. (I particularly liked the scenes where Woody is disguised as a robot and those where the villains are attempting to clone the dictator, killed in a bomb explosion, from his nose). The links with that era are reinforced by the musical score, composed by Woody himself, in a jazz/ragtime style reminiscent of the 1910s and 1920s. The sets, by contrast, are very futuristic, with the clinical glass-and-chromium look of many science-fiction films. The combination of a futuristic theme with a traditional style of comedy is doubtless why the film was advertised under the slogan "Woody Allen takes a nostalgic look at the future".

This is not, however, simply a pastiche of silent humour like the one Mel Brooks was to attempt a few years later in "Silent Movie". This being a Woody Allen film, there is also a good deal of verbal humour, particularly one-liners along the lines of "I haven't seen my analyst in 200 years. He was a strict Freudian. If I'd been going all this time, I'd probably almost be cured by now". (As that line suggests, Miles is the typical, neurotically insecure Woody Allen character). As is often the case with humorous science-fiction (such as Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker" books), the humour is frequently used to make satirical points about twentieth-century society as seen from the viewpoint of an imagined future. Contemporary worries about our diet are neatly satirised by a joke about how the science of two hundred years hence has proved that fatty foods and smoking are actually beneficial to health whereas what we now think of as healthfoods are regarded as unhealthy. This joke has remained topical because anxiety about what we eat is, if anything,even greater today than it was in 1973. There is perhaps also a dig at seventies "radical chic" as the vacuous conformist Luna becomes an equally vacuous revolutionary. (The plot of "Sleeper" seems to owe something to another tongue-in-cheek science-fiction film from a few years earlier, "Barbarella", which also dealt with rebellion against a dictator and even featured similar "orgasmatron" machines; the star of that film, Jane Fonda, had by 1973 become Hollywood's most famous radical chic actress).

The humour of "Sleeper" is often directed against figures from the sixties and sevent

No question that Woody Allen's earliest films were the most unpretentiously humorous, and Sleeper stands out among them. The conception of a frozen Allen waking up centuries in the future allows for plenty of biting satire on America in the 70's, not that we don't have plenty of good old-fashioned slapstick to boot. The bit with the Jewish robot tailors knocks me out no matter how many times I see it ("o-KAY, ve'll take it IN").