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One could lump Woody Allen’s films into three prime categories – slapstick comedies, relationship comedies or Ingmar Bergman-esque dramas. SLEEPER is part of his early slapstick comedies, which I have found Marx Bros. like in their loyalty to the gag over the story. SLEEPER succeeds when its satirical sights are set on the sci-fi genre.

Miles Monroe (Allen) is a jazz musician and health food store owner who goes into the hospital for a routine surgery and wakes up 200 years later. The future is run by a police state where everyone at birth has a biometric ID made. The resistance wants to recruit Miles, because he is free of the ID, but he’s not that interested in saving the future. That’s until the police come for him and he is forced on the run. He ends up at the house of a socialite named Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton, ANNIE HALL), who is even less interested in fighting against the system that has left her well off.
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Check Out this Clip

Errol Morris’s follow-up to his GATES OF HEAVEN is even more enigmatic than that classic documentary. The origin of this film defers depending on what you read. He went to Vernon to develop a film about retirement communities and/or people who cut off limbs for insurance money. Whether the eccentrics he found were more interesting than the retirees or his life was threatened by the “Nub City” scammers, he ended up with this film that means something different to everyone or even every time you see it.

At under an hour, the film is brisk. It’s simply a collection of eccentrics from the town of Vernon. Some have developed unique philosophies on life based on lifelong observations and others have based ideas on misinterpreted facts. One man believes that when you have all four “balls” of the brain working at the same time you can do four separate actions at the same time. A very earnest couple take an interesting idea away from their trip to the desert where they were told that one dune (pronounced done) grows 14 feet per year.
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