Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.
Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes
Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.
KissEnglishPasto .......................................................from Pasto,Colombia...Via: L.A. CA., CALI, COLOMBIA and ORLANDO, FL One must apply powers of divination as to director Jeremy Alter's intentions. Location Manager on high-profile films, long before and since, SLEEP seems to be an obviously ill-fated foray into film direction. ("Location Managers Gone Wild"?) In its conceptualization, SLEEP was projected to become a larger-than-life, neoclassic, film noir, somnambulist visionary dreamlike masterpiece....Sorry, Jeremy, only in your "Perfect Sleep" dreams! From beginning to end, the central character delivers an incessantly droning voice-over monotone narration. Was this intended to lull the viewer to sleep? Desired or not, that's the effect it had on me.Looking at the finished product, the execution didn't achieve 10% of what was envisioned. There were a few moments when it seemed SLEEP was, at last, awakening! (Fleeting moments, indeed!) Movie locations were ONE 10* element. Mr. Alter certainly does have a good eye...All other visual aspects 7 or 8*. Just about every other aspect rates 2 or 3*! Overall: 4*....ENJOY/DISFRUTELA! (If You Can Manage) Any comments, questions or observations, in English or Español, are most welcome!
clif_smith Overall, I enjoyed the film. I think it is a fine example of modern Film-Noire. It's true, the plot is a little too vague, the lack of societal context reduces it's sense of authenticity and realism, and the voice-over narration could have been used less or perhaps eliminated completely. Overall though, it's a great mood piece and visually sumptuous and stunning. The beautiful Ms. Sanchez allowed me to feel the pain of her relationship with the hero. This film had a lot of potential to be a true masterpiece, but the flaws bring it down to the level of great genre piece. I would highly recommend it to fans of the genre, but, it's not a film I would recommend to the casual viewer.
djkaspar I've just finished watching this... it's in my VLC player for two days. The main reason why it took me so long to go through it is that I find things that I love about it, and on the other hand I find things that I can't believe are so very poor and almost make vomit... and so this dichotomy makes the movie a hard piece to swallow.I'll try to name a few of the negative aspects first: 1. The plot line seems confused and overly complex, and the poor graphic details of the movie make it pale and uninteresting to look at (which, if it where not the case, could help create interest on the viewer's part to keep pace with the strange and intricate family drama) 2. There are hardly any other actors apart from the characters; this means there are little to no extras, no population, no sense of society... all it looks like is a void and empty sequence of dark scenarios with little to no discerning features whatsoever... Making the whole thing a little too often look like a sequence of amateur theater shoots. In other words, the director and producers did not bother to put any effort into making the environment of the film credible. It isn't at any time delivering any kind of veracity to the possibility of the story ever finding an imaginable realm where it could take place.3. Things don't seem too thought out. The main character is a prince, or some kind of bastard descendant of a ruler... but he does not behave like one. You can hardly piece together how he lived his life, why he is hunted down (right at the beginning), or why is his brother convinced that he is somehow responsible for his father's death. I mean... it doesn't feel like a noble family's intuitive dynamic at all, certainly not like the type on a Dostoievsky novel.4. It looks like it's a student project, because the acting is so over the top, on a few of the parts... Other, elder, actors are brilliant. The difference is astounding. There seems to be no effort to push the younger actors into delivering a real credible performance. It feels very strange.OK, on to the good parts:1. The dialogs. They really present a vocabulary experience that is close to film noir classics, and and times is so poetic and powerful that it actually makes you think of Russian novels. It seems to be very well written throughout, but poorly executed. I almost need to close my eyes to the sad spectacle of the movie, to listen to the character's amazing discourse on some parts. The main character is poorly crafted, I thought... It lacked coherence in it's actions, some real sense of integrity, I feel the way it is both shown and interpreted is very silly, exaggerated and completely nonsensical.2. Some of the acting is amazing, Tony Amendola especially! I rarely see such talent in an actor... he was the only one (maybe alongside Patrick Bachau) that picked up the text and brought it to a credible output... and he stands out brilliantly.3. The fighting. Well, I thought fights here would be ridiculous... in the context of the dramatic feud that takes place through the plot. But in the end, they are quite contrary, almost the best this film has to show. They seem well rehearsed, well executed and choreographed, and look pretty cool. Too bad the scenarios in which they take place are so lame, and incoherent... Where it not for that, the fight scenes would be some of the most consistent I've seen.4. The sense of sympathy. The core idea of this film seems to be so appealing, I can almost imagine this script beating the crap out of a Frank Miller adaptation of Sin City. I can compare this title to "The Spirit"... "The Spirit" has a million dollar budget, looks brilliant, but it's absolutely horrible (week and whack storyline, terrible acting, horrendously tedious and terrible directing), but "The Perfect Sleep" - if it had better and more consistent casting and directing - and the visual investments of "The Spirit" could have been a fabulous work of art. It feels like something that should be re-done by some serious experts, because I believe there would be much better ways of delivering the script.In the end, it's hardly worth watching unless you don't have anything better to do. I hope this helped... My vote of 5 goes to the writers and the initial concept that could have been brilliantly executed, to the idea that could have been... And an incentive to Pardoe, who imagined it, to learn from this experience and do better next time.
FilmFan2222 Review: The Perfect Sleep by Scott Weinberg Mar 12th 2009 // 12:45PM I don't pretend to be any sort of scholar where film noir is concerned, but like most movies geeks of a certain age, I was bitten by the bug and went a little crazy. All of a sudden my Netflix queue was swollen with films by Jules Dassin, Robert Siodmak, and Anthony Mann. I must have gone through at least 50 titles, but my very favorite remains the first noir I ever saw: Otto Preminger's practically perfect Laura. As most old-school movie freaks can tell you, film noir generally deals with several key components: Crime, paranoia, sharp shadows, hard-boiled dialog, elaborate conspiracies, femme fatales, sudden violence, and a foreboding sense that fate is a cruel mistress indeed. (Like I said, I'm no scholar, but you can get a great noir lesson right here.) But nowadays we don't seem to have much use for film noir, unless (of course) it's used as a stylistic choice in movies like Sin City and Watchmen. (Hey, I guess Frank Miller and Alan Moore dig film noir, so maybe you should too!) And then there are indie films like The Perfect Sleep, which aim to come across as both a traditional film noir and an affectionate homage / satire of the genre at the same time. If the flick is just a bit too clever for its own good on one or two occasions, well, I suppose that's preferable to most movies, because they're generally way too stupid for their own good.Tailor-made for open-minded noir buffs who wouldn't mind seeing the beloved genre blended up with a dose of martial arts mayhem and just a touch of supernatural strangeness, Jeremy Alter's The Perfect Sleep takes a little while to warm up to. We open with whom we assume is our grizzled hero, just as he's about to get beaten up by a gang of wise-ass henchmen. Then we jump straight back into a slightly convoluted flashback structure in which all the essential rules and players are introduced before we end up back at square one.And that's when things get really twisty. Anton Pardoe plays the unnamed protagonist, and while the flick (to its credit) never comes out and states that its reluctant hero is virtually immortal, it soon becomes obvious that the villains are just a little "extra cautious" when he enters the room. Plus, it turns out that the nefarious evildoers (something about an old grudge, a recent kidnapping, and a whole lot of bad blood) have a whole lot of martial arts experts on the payroll -- while our inscrutable, invincible anti-hero has a colorfully evil doctor as his only sidekick. All one need remember is that Ms. Roselyn Sanchez plays the femme fatale / object of multiple affections, and suddenly the various schemes, betrayals, and motivations make a lot more sense. (In other words, she's gorgeous.) I could waste this paragraph explaining the densely-layered plot threads, the amusingly pulpy tough-guy banter, or Alter's unquestionable gift for throwing shadows and light together, but The Perfect Sleep is a fine little indie concoction that's best left for the viewer to sift through. Pardoe does a great job of delivering even the pulpiest of dialog, and the supporting cast is particularly excellent: Michael Pare pops up as a violent cop, and adds a lot to the proceedings when he does, plus we're treated to a wonderfully sick performance by Tony Amendola as a character best described as "Dr. Hit-man." Amendola steals every scene he's in and left me wanting more of this bizarre lunatic.Of course I had a few nitpicks (the narration is maybe a bit too self-aware, some sequences a touch over-stuffed, a small handful of lines perhaps a little too florid), but it's tough to notice a few speed bumps when you're riding along with a filmmaker who clearly loves the same sort of movies I do. The Perfect Sleep is an undeniably odd mixture of 80% noir, 15% action, and 5% random homage, but I suspect that the film fans it was made for will definitely appreciate it.The Perfect Sleep opens on 3/13 in Los Angeles, with other markets to follow in a week or two. It looks like Magnolia plans to release it when DVD time rolls around, so that's good news for everyone. And here's a link to the film's official site.www.theperfectsleep.com http://www.cinematical.com/2009/03/12/review-the-perfect-sleep/
