Cebalord Very best movie i ever watch

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Crwthod A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Woodyanders Wealthy, but jaded and disillusioned jazz musician Robert Troy (a solid and subdued performance by Zalman King) purchases pure and guileless sleeping beauty Jennifer (sweetly played with charming wide-eyed naiveté by Tisa Farrow) from a carnival sideshow. However, Robert's attempts to shape Jennifer into the ideal girl of his dreams don't work out quite as planned.Writer/director James B. Harris relates the unusual and absorbing story at a deliberate pace, offers a compelling and provocative cinematic meditation on the fine line between fantasy and reality as well as the impossibility of preserving innocence for perpetuity, comes up with several inspired moments of beguiling whimsy (for example, a dance set piece involving two women dressed up in nun's habits), and does an expert job of crafting a strangely haunting dreamlike atmosphere. The fine acting from the able cast keeps this picture on track: Carol White excels as Troy's sly and scheming distaff companion Scarlett, Richard Pryor contributes a touching turn as Troy's drug-addled struggling artist best friend Jeff, Logan Ramsey has a colorful bit as a seedy carnival doctor, and Brandy Herrod burns up the screen as a foxy nude cheerleader. Mario Tosi's sumptuous cinematography and Richard Hazard's gracefully elegiac score further enhance this movie's singular melancholy mood. Recommended viewing for aficionados of original and esoteric way out of the mainstream fare.

noonward An obscure oddity, chastised and forgotten in its time. A different take on the Sleeping Beauty story which is complimented with interestingly composed shots, surreal characters, narrative peculiarities and great music. It's a warm piece of Americana that invokes weird nuns, freak carnivals and a rambling Richard Pryor. Basically all the stuff that makes America great. Despite the strange elements inherent in the movie, it still comes off as artfully dramatic. Love cannot be forced and no one is perfect for one another, the film explores how futile it is to make this happen when a man has the perfect opportunity to mold a sleeping beauty into his ultimate love. It is somewhat a shame that the film hasn't found an audience outside of Rosenbaum's essential 1000 and some Cinemageddon weirdos as it could easily slot itself into the fanbase cult of Harmony Korine and beyond. Watch it at 3am and let it mesmerize and sedate you.

TedMichaelMor This is a magical film with intriguing iconography, engaging narrative, and solid performances. Carol White is splendid. Tisa Farrow also performs well. James Harris directs with great control and vision.Some commentators find the film bizarre; however, I do not find it weird. Instead, the film is mysterious with the haunting Nate King Cole song framing the narrative. I found myself opening to new ways of thinking about what being a human being is.The dialogue is formal, however. It sounds like a bad translation from Swedish and thus sounds pretentious, but it not pretentious, just a tad wooden. And that makes the film, in a way, seem more formal than realistic.

Balthazar-5 The cinema is such a magnificent art that it enables artists to minutely examine the darkest crevices in the human psyche. Here we have one of the strangest examples of this possibility. Zalman King makes a superb central character of Robert Troy who brings a 'sleeping beauty' from a fairground to his West Coast mansion. It emerges that she has been artificially kept asleep - drugged by her fairground owner. The mansion to which she is brought is a cavernous affair populated simply by two women, whose relationship with Troy is never fully articulated. There are clear suggestions of necrophilia here as Troy's obsession with the sleeping girl become more explicit, but the film doesn't pursue these lines, leaving the audience to make connections and draw its own suspect conclusions. One of the most disturbing aspects of the film is in the scene in which Jennifer relates to Troy how she had experienced being asleep and just remembering how the men in the fairground kissed her... and more. However, she had only the alternative of oblivion to compare these half-perceived experiences with so regarded them as precious, but Harris doesn't moralise.Although the British video that I watched (I had seen the film in the cinema before) promotes the fact that Richard Pryor is in the cast, he is, in fact, the weakest part of the film - playing a drug/booze-crazed friend of Troy. Carol White also has a strange part as the possibly Lesbian dominatrix, who regularly dresses as a nun in the weird role-playing games that pass for life in the mansion. Visually the film concentrates on darkness with many strange chiaroscuro effects in the mansion lit by dim chandeliers and candles. When Jennifer (Sleeping Beauty) and Troy take a trip, it is mainly shot at night in anonymous, faceless locations. It seems to me that one of the few real clues to the heart of the film is in the choice of Nat King Cole's 'The Very Thought of You' as the key musical motif. This points, it seems to me, to the notion of the film being a reflection of the way that love enters and distorts the mind of the lover. Finally, in this extraordinary film - made by one of Kubrick's closest associates of the time - we see mystery in almost every aspect. Where, if at all, does the flashback with which the film opens end, for example? There are relatively few movies that make you think that there is a whole new area of human existence, but this is one of them. It may be tacky and lacking in 'taste and decency' on occasion, but this is cinema of the fine line between decadence and depravity - it isn't 'nice', but it's, to use another Nat King Cole title, unforgettable.