Sleepwalk With Me

[Jeremy Blackman]

I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by this.

This wasn't exactly at the top of my priority list, for several reasons. I've heard most or all of Mike Birbiglia's material at least once. He tends to be redundant in different formats, so I had already been a bit smothered with some serious Birbiglia overlap, and I figured this would simply offer that in the extreme.

But instead of feeling like that, I just felt like I had read a bunch of spoilers. The content was so thoroughly recontextualized, and it was so surprisingly cinematic, that it completely worked. I credit Ira Glass for most of that... the man knows how to craft a story.

I absolutely loved the way the dreams were depicted. You'd think that ways to depict dreams had been exhausted in movies, but this particular method felt fresh somehow. I'm going to credit Ira Glass for that too. Why? They feel to me a lot like his surreal intros for the This American Life TV show:

[RegularKarate]

I'm with you, JB. I like Birbiglia okay, but this movie is beyond that. Just a great story told in a really personal way.
I think this would make top ten for 2012 if I were to re-make mine.