9. Sleeper
In Sleeper, Miles Monroe (played by Woody Allen), after being hospitalized, suddenly wakes up hundreds of years in the future. He was cryogenically frozen without knowing it. The society he wakes up in is decidedly totalitarian (the film actually bears a strong resemblance to Fahrenheit 451), and since there is no record of his existence in this society, he is a prime candidate for membership in a freedom-fighting party, which quickly take him for their cause. However, things don't go smoothly, as Monroe is discovered by the authorities early on and spends most of the film on the run from them in a world that is vastly different from what he is used to.
Sleeper is filled with your typical, casually delivered, Woody Allen humor. When he's told by the doctors that wake him from his two-hundred-year sleep that all his friends have long been dead, he states bewilderedly, "But they all ate organic rice!" He later provides an interesting maxim: "Sex and death: two things that come once in a lifetime. But at least after death you're not nauseous." What?
If Allen's humor is not for everybody, this film succeeds through strong direction and a vivid, if quirky, imagining of an Orwellian society. This is one of those comedies that is good even without the jokes, so, Allen fan or not, this is one you should check out.
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