Word: sleepers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When you've finished with these (or, if you will, and I hope you won't, the Bullwinkle cartoons, Dr. Zhivago or Take the Money and Run--when Sleeper in Boston is so much finer), you can take in Gimme Shelter, midnight at the Orson Welles: the greatest rock movie ever made, by far. It's worth trying to understand Altamont--an incredibly powerful nightmare vision in this film--and the Stones perform throughout as only they...
SMOTHERED in aluminum foil like a baked potato or a TV dinner, it's a changed Woody Allen that the doctors unwrap and usher into the yea 2173 at the beginning of Sleeper. Allen has really written this picture--it's painstakingly mapped out--and most of the jokes, for better or worse, are inherent in the science fiction scenario of a post-holocaust future two hundred years from now. The same is true of the hero's new persona, which flows out of the scripted material like soup from a can, Allen sealed--maybe too tightly--in the perfect...
...copilot routine in Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex..., where the human body is a compartmentalized bureaucratic machine gone away, and Allen plays a sperm cell. Allen likes the tension between the human and the mechanical--there's a natural humor of incompetence in it. But in Sleeper the technocratic setting takes over, framing--maybe dominating--his talent, underlining the classic Allenesque plight of the weak human with simple (if overwhelming) personal problems against a strong, impersonal society...
...imagine what happens when Allen slips on one of those banana peels. It is almost impossible, however, to convey the intricacy of his comic inventiveness, the shrewdness with which he sustains his comic lines. The simplest measure of Sleeper's success is perhaps the fact that one recalls it not by quoting Allen's one-liners but by trying to describe-inadequately-his beautifully built visual gags...
...attacking it links him with the grand tradition of silent comedy. Like such masters of that tradition as Chaplin and Keaton, he deplores the notion that things can be improved through scientific and political "progress." Like them, he obviously believes it his unsolemn duty to subvert such nonsense. Sleeper is his definitive assault on it. And his funniest...