The Perfect Sleep

Film Noire is a genre that requires a certain level of tact, cleverness, intellect, and imagery. This movie has none of that, though they really tried hard with the imagery.

It's the kind of movie that your cousin Marky the dump truck driver, who's always talking about how he's going to make it big in the movies someday, would make.

The dialogue is wooden and lifeless. The visuals, while obviously expensive to make, are the work of a director who has tried to be clever and failed miserably due to a severe lack in cerebral ability. The acting ranged from sub-par to just plain bad. The story might have been salvaged by a real writer and director, but I suspect that such people would not have touched it with a barge pole.

About 1/4 of the way through, I noticed striking similarities with the scene in Sim0ne where Viktor, desperate to be rid of his actress, makes the world's worst movie. I figured I'd check IMDb to see if a similar effect has occurred in this movie, and to my surprise it has. I'd almost be tempted to give a 2 out of 10 just because it's exposed the pretentious groupies, but I won't. It's that bad.

I would say the narration was inane but, that would mean it had to have sense or substance, which it didn't.

The storyline was little more than that contrived by a ten year old boy with constipation while sitting on the pot.

If we still had coal fires we could use the lacklustre script and wooden acting to light the fire.

If vitality is the characteristic which distinguishes living things from nonliving things, we may now bury this and not bother with a wake.

I would like to say that this digital diatribe had no redeeming features at all but, it does have one, a visual one, and that is the beauty of Roselyn Sanchez.

Imagine Diane from Cheers, the self centered over intellectualizing character, now imagine she was trying to make a film moire movie. This would be it. If you just looked at some of the shots without any sound you would think Hmmm.. this could be a good film.

Now if you turn on the sound and listen for anytime at all you quickly realize that the person that made the film knows nothing about films beyond what they read in a book. I was continually thinking is this thing a foreign film, it was that bad.

If you don't remember Cheers, then think of Mr. Beans Holiday... remember the DeFoe character that made the horrible movie... well imagine that horrible movie without Mr. Bean saving it. That is what this movie is. I'm not saying anything about what the movie is other than it is an attempt to make a dark moody film about a hit-man going back home.... at least that's about all I could get out of it.

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.

The Perfect Sleep, while not a brilliant film does represent the ever-shrinking genre of watchable neo-noir. While it's certainly flawed, it lacks much of the intentional overly complex that robs many similar movies of their enjoyability (why watch a movie that's needlessly hard to follow?). Then again, it's not exactly a movie you can switch your brain off for.

Normally someone would put some sort of plot synopsis here, but if you've ever seen any type of noir film you know such an endeavor is pointless. They're usually a bit hard to follow and that can be part of their intrigue. Most noir-ish films rely heavily on the dialog (usually in ways that most people would never use in regular conversation), characters of moral ambiguity, and comparably lavish sets. The Perfect Sleep is no different, with the possible exception of most action sequences involving martial arts. Not sure I'd seen that before.

All in all the film comes out looking a lot like a seriously less flashy and more intelligent version of Sin City or The Spirit (the latter being complete garbage). That's actually a big plus for me as a fan of (some) noir films. While I enjoyed Sin City I always felt like it was just trying to do too much visually that took away from an arguably cool story, so that actually works well for me. Aside from the somewhat vague plot I'd say this would be at least enjoyable for fans of the genre. You don't see too many of these films these days and you see ever fewer done well.