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Sleepwalk - Movie Club 2018
Topic Started: Feb 19 2018, 03:32 PM (890 Views)
kanafani
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Sleepwalk by Sara Driver - 1986. One of my favorite independent American movies from that era from a filmmaker who has not directed much since then and who has been kind of forgotten. A strange comedy that moves in mysterious sci-fi/fantasy/surrealist ways. She's a frequent Jarmusch collaborator, but for my money this is more engaging than anything jarmusch has ever done. I Hope you enjoy.
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nrh
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headache
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one of my favorites. all of her films are great.
Edited by nrh, Feb 19 2018, 08:03 PM.
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bure420
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deadpan darling
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this looks.... very cool. and i'd never even heard of the film or director before. thanks for picking this! i can't wait to watch it
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mesnalty
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g legs' flame
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Fascinating stuff, and good timing, since the Year of the Dog just started. Rivette is the obvious comparison point, though I can't help also thinking about Jarmusch, Driver's partner - the nocturnal settings and the emphasis on mood over plot is reminiscent of Jarmusch. In fact the mood seems to be something akin to the sort of mystery that Jarmusch was going for in The Limits of Control, although Driver is much more successful, imo.

It's kind of sad that American indie cinema no longer really has any of these minor, surrealistic films that aren't pointedly twee or quirky - stuff like this and Rappaport's films, which are among the highlights of the 80s for me.
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kanafani
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Yes! Very strong Rivette vibe.

Long Rosenbaum Sleepwalk Review

So where does the film belong? Is it a trance film without the allegorical, intellectual, or budgetary trappings usually associated with the genre? Or a narrative film without the thematic and stylistic coherence usually associated with narrative? A poetic fantasy, yet independent of much of what this culture regards as poetry and fantasy, it belongs on its own dreamy wavelength, offering its chiseled beauty, delicate textures, and disquieting wit to any spectator game enough to climb inside.
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rischka
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nazi trumps fuck off!!
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i'll watch this one; thanks kanafani ^_^
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bure420
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deadpan darling
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i enjoyed this film. more so today than i did immediately after watching it last night. i won't lie and say i understood what was going on the whole time. but it wasn't boring, ever. i think sleepwalk is an appropriate name... it felt very much like i was moving through a dream. at first, i thought to myself, the lead actress, her performance really isn't all that. but as the film went on, the sort of trance it seemed like she was in started to feel very appropriate... like she was trapped in her own body, trapped in this world, just trapped
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rischka
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nazi trumps fuck off!!
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that was great! one of the best approximations of dreamlogic i've seen this side of ruiz.

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loved it :blackheart:

Edited by rischka, Feb 21 2018, 01:37 AM.
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kanafani
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Glad you watched it and liked it, Rischka!

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rischka
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nazi trumps fuck off!!
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kanafani
Feb 21 2018, 12:22 PM
Glad you watched it and liked it, Rischka!

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:O :O :O
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Lencho of the Apes
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Let's go do some crimes
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A near-miss for me, I'm afraid; I wanted to like it better than I did, but I felt like it was operating in two different tonal registers that clashed with each other. The downtown-NY-arts vibe distracted me from the surrealist modality, and part of my brain wast always looking for Basquiat or Arto Lindsay cameos instead of letting myself be immersed in the dreamtext qualities of the movie.

Probably that's just me, everyone else likes this better than I did, and I totally understand why.
"The four cardinal points of the compass? In reality, there are only three: North and South."
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kanafani
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Interesting, Lencho. I think what you disliked about it is what makes it special for me: It is very much anchored in an ultra-specific time and place which it filters through a distortive dream machine. Things are familiar, and yet so strange.
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Holymanm
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moats n groats
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This seemed like a low budget Carpenter movie (in particular, In the Mouth of Madness)... and the only thing I like about Carpenter is some of the nice production values his movies sometimes have. I got nothing from this flick. It seems like the sort of thing you can only possibly take seriously if you're into the NYC indie art scene, but apparently everyone likes it, so whaddo I know? It did not do it for me; this movie is just so many things I find completely dull and uninteresting in artsy movies. I GET that it's surrealistic. But it being dream-like doesn't mean that the annoying redhead character being annoying for 30 minutes of the flick isn't still annoying, or that any of the rest of the boring annoyingness isn't boringly annoying, or that hearing about strangers' dreams and dream-logic is interesting... or that the unexceptional acting, characters, writing, photography, and everything else in this flick is suddenly good. But it's all subjective, and good doesn't exist, so I'm not really saying anything for real here

Anyway, all the "surreal" scenes with the children acting, like, weird, were bad enough, but I just couldn't possibly take this movie seriously for one single second after the "surreal" scene around 20 minutes in where a staid businessman turns around and barks at the protagonist on the street. Bark bark. It was OVER after that scene! Finished! There's no coming back from that shit!!
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josiahmorgan11
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g legs' sweetheart
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Because I'm lazy I'm just gonna copy-paste....

"Driver invokes a repetition of any-all narrative events and the way this informs a largely artificial ennui is worth discussing: Sleepwalk is entirely about a culture but is not of any culture. That is; the culture this attempts to dissect and pull apart is completely fictionalized, built within the margins&borders of the fiction. I got a great deal of superficial pleasure out of the bizarro restrained nature of most events in the movie, though there's no consideration of self-image here. Basically, this doesn't go far enough: recommended, but even more highly recommended is Soderbergh's Schizopolis - a triptych film, and Sleepwalk only approaches the heights of the first third."
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Lencho of the Apes
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Let's go do some crimes
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Holymanm
Mar 1 2018, 01:10 AM
Bark bark.
Wow, that's a really subjective way of approaching a thing. I wonder what it is about that one image that was so ruinous for you. Huh...
"The four cardinal points of the compass? In reality, there are only three: North and South."
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Lencho of the Apes
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Let's go do some crimes
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josiahmorgan11
Mar 1 2018, 02:32 AM
Schiz
I understand the love for Schizopolis, but I didn't see anything flashy and innovative and neu in it that wasn't just an adaptation into film practice of mannerisms that these guys developed in their audio dramas.

"The four cardinal points of the compass? In reality, there are only three: North and South."
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kanafani
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I am a fan of schizopolis,, but I can't relate to the comparison with sleepwalk. They're very different movies with different sensibilities, aiming for different things.
Edited by kanafani, Mar 1 2018, 10:07 PM.
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Brotherdeacon
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It conjures willy-nilly
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I see this film and its director Sara Driver as an independent expansion of women directors who would have influenced her and the NY indie crowd of the mid 80's--along with the NY art world in general and off-the-map music during that same time in NY.
Wanda (1970), Barbara Loden
Girlfriends (1978), Claudia Weill
Will (1981), Jessie Maple
Smithereens (1982), Susan Seidelman
Variety (1983) Bette Gordon
Smooth Talk (1985), Joyce Chopra
Chantal Ackerman, Agnes Varda, Shirley Clarke, Ulrike Ottinger films,
Nan Goldin's still photographs.
If there was a male film it may have been Chan is Missing (1982), Wayne Wang
as well as the intractable Aki of Finland.

I liked Sleepwalk and didn't want it to end, or at least until Ann Magnuson's hair grew back.
Edited by Brotherdeacon, Mar 3 2018, 09:39 AM.
“Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us. “
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Mauries
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g legs' sweetheart
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This film was fun! Really liked that there were two female protagonists who had no dependence or even an emotional connection to men at all (another film I can think of that has this is Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle). Also loved all the moods created in this weird universe. Great Pick.

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The Economy stinks, bees are dying, and movies are pretty much all sequels now
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nrh
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headache
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brodeacon - probably add born in flames and rest of lizzie borden to that list

edit -chan is missing is great, can't believe it seems to have been forgotten to the extent that it has. saw the dcp restoration thing with seema last year and it seems even more exciting now than it did when i first saw it as a teenager.
Edited by nrh, Mar 3 2018, 04:13 PM.
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Holymanm
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moats n groats
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Lencho of the Apes
Mar 1 2018, 09:28 PM
Holymanm
Mar 1 2018, 01:10 AM
Bark bark.
Wow, that's a really subjective way of approaching a thing. I wonder what it is about that one image that was so ruinous for you. Huh...
it's absolutely subjective - that scene just signalled, beyond a doubt, that it was going to be the particular kind of artsy movie that i, personally, cannot abide. also the scene just really made me mad...
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Brotherdeacon
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It conjures willy-nilly
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nrh: I'll look for the restoration. Chan is Missing influenced lots of people, good film. Yeah, Born in Flames as well. Some seminal films. Quite a time. Wanda is certainly earlier, but its aesthetic repercussions and historical place in women's films would have been impossible to not have held some influence for a great many women directors. imho.
“Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us. “
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Holymanm
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moats n groats
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chan is missing is great fun!
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