Woody Allen’s in and out of his mind in ‘Sleeper’

SLEEPER, directed by Woody Allen, written by Allen and Marshall Brickman, 87 minutes, rated PG. Shows tonight only, sundown, weather permitting, Pickering Square, downtown Bangor. Lawn chairs advised. Free.

The sleeper in Woody Allen’s 1973 screwball farce “Sleeper” is Allen himself.

Here, as Miles Monroe, Allen plays a former health food store owner who was accidentally cryogenically frozen in 1973 after an operation to remove an ulcer went awry. Now, 200 years later, he is awakened in 2173 to find a brave new world filled with robots, riots, idiots and corruption.

Considering that Miles left this world during the declining years of the Nixon administration, one would think that he would feel right at home in 2173. But no. Unfortunately, not even living through that era could prepare him for this era.

Somehow, the world has gotten worse. The restraints on our freedom have tightened. Nobody seems particularly happy. We live in a dystopian police state led by an unseen totalitarian ruler.

And sex, among the most basic of human needs and pleasures, has become the responsibility of a machine called the orgasmatron, in which you lock yourself inside a metal cylinder for a few rocking minutes while God-knows-what happens inside.

This is the fifth film in the River City Cinema Society’s Smiles on a Summer Night series, with slapstick and anarchy once again fueling its laughs.

As written by Allen and Marshall Brickman, the film is a funny sci-fi send-up that lampoons a number of films – “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “1984,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “A Clockwork Orange” chief among them – while also echoing the physical comedy of the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, and Chaplin, without embracing the latter performer’s cuteness.

The film is early Allen, which is to say that the director is in a far more loose and playful mood than the movies that would come after his Academy Award-winning “Annie Hall.” He’s in his right mind here – working out the one-liners, allowing his wit free rein – but he’s also way out of his mind, just as he should be.

When we first see Miles, he is covered in tinfoil, still loopy from his long slumber, with two desperate doctors-cum-revolutionists trying to wake him before armed men take them away. The gist of it is this: These revolutionaries and others like them want to overthrow the government. Since Miles is unknown in this world, he allegedly has the ability to infiltrate it and give the revolutionaries the information they seek – whatever that may be.

Chaos is a bullet that rips through “Sleeper,” with Miles eventually finding himself in the company of Diane Keaton’s Luna Schlosser, a greeting card poet and enthusiastic supporter of the orgasmatron who is rather happy with this world and can’t understand why anyone would want to do away with it. It’s their romantic bombast – and the bizarre situations that uncurl around them – that make “Sleeper” the silly, freakish hit that it is.

Grade: A-

On video and DVD

XXX: STATE OF THE UNION, directed by Lee Tamahori, written by Simon Kinberg, 101 minutes, rated PG-13.

Early in Lee Tamahori’s aggressively bad but wholly amusing “XXX: State of the Union,” audiences learn the sad news that the original XXX, Xander Cage (Vin Diesel), has bit the big one in Bora Bora.

What did him in? A natural response might be that he got tripped up in that flashy pimp coat of his and broke his neck. Or perhaps he got poisoned by one too many XXX tattoos.

Whatever the reason, the producers are too bored to answer. Eager to pacify audiences while Diesel changed diapers in “The Pacifier,” they have offered up a new XXX in Darius Stone, played here by Ice Cube in a role that’s something of a departure from his recent “Barbershop” movies. Taking a cue from Diesel, Cube plays the part of Stone as if the weight of the world rested on his face – and you can’t blame him. According to Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson), the national security agent who recruits Stone to save the president of the United States (Peter Strauss) from certain death by his evil secretary of defense (Willem Dafoe), this new XXX must be more dangerous than the last XXX.

They’ve found that person in Stone, an imprisoned Navy SEAL who enjoys his own hip-hop soundtrack whenever he’s onscreen and who holds the record for the highest dive in SEAL history – 250 feet. Impressive? Absolutely. But then everything about Stone is impressive.

With panache, he breaks out of prison and into a tough world of fists, chop shops and guns. With bravado, he hijacks tanks, drives cars at 220 mph, and chases speeding trains without breaking a sweat.

During the course of the film, he even gets his former girlfriend, Lola (Nona Gaye), to put the bling back into his bang. She does so, too, in spite of the fact that Lola looks two implants away from being a man.

Still, it’s all good, regardless of the fact that “State of the Union” was slammed by the majority of critics, who apparently wanted the movie to exist on a higher plane. Sorry, but they missed the point. This is video-game moviemaking that doesn’t want to be taken seriously, a parody of the action-espionage genre designed to offer reprehensible dialogue, impossible stunts, an air of absurdity. If done well, there’s fun to be had in that. As such, there’s fun to be had here.

Grade: B

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays in Discovering, Fridays in Happening, Weekends in Television, and are archived at RottenTomatoes.com. He may be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.