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Comments on Sleep Dealer (2008)
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Tin Lunchbox
Jan 15, 2012, 11:37:30 AM1/15/12
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Sleep Dealer is a film that takes place in Mexico of the not-really
distant future. It starts in the impoverished state of Oaxaca where a
river has been damned and the impoverished rural inhabitants now face
the additional dilemma of having to buy it. It then moves on to mainly
take place in Tijuana, where "node workers" fitted with
surgically-implanted cyber ports offer their labor to control far
distant industrial robots in economically successful parts of the
world. As well, some persons with nodes sell their memories on the
future's version of the Internet.
In something of a plausible and perhaps prescient statement on our
times, armed flying drones globally patrol for terrorists and the
like, too action-oriented to do much validation of the evidence in
question, Oaxaca's Memo Cruz is targeted when their minders
misinterpret his ham radio hobby activities.
Mexican actor Luis Fernando Peña is very good and convincing as Memo.
You don't see many portrayals of farmers from those dry and hot and
poor parts of Mexico. I don't know if it was also filmed on location
in Oaxaca (though I think yeah that was Tijuana) but the locations
seemed authentic to me. As well Leonor Varela does a nice job as the
female writer and memory seller Memo meets on the way to Tijuana.
Production values on this were pretty good. Oh, the drone sequences
are not very advanced, it's not like the quality of the latest Star
Trek movie or even the Battlestar Galactic reimagining for a few years
ago. But it's not that kind of movie. The movie is largely in Spanish
(with subtitles if you turn them on), and I wondered if it were a
Mexican film. I don't think it is, but Varela was born in Chile, and
as I said Peña is Mexican, and the director Alex Rivera I read is from
NYC but self-identifies at Latino, and all this I think plus the
film-making itself tend to give it all an authentic aspect.
Sleep Dealer according to the DVD jacket won Sundance in 2008 and also
some sort of human rights award. It seems to me to be deserving of
those. One doesn't see films like this often, at least I don't, and
it's at-once an engaging sci-fi story and societal commentary.
TiN[]BoX
distant future. It starts in the impoverished state of Oaxaca where a
river has been damned and the impoverished rural inhabitants now face
the additional dilemma of having to buy it. It then moves on to mainly
take place in Tijuana, where "node workers" fitted with
surgically-implanted cyber ports offer their labor to control far
distant industrial robots in economically successful parts of the
world. As well, some persons with nodes sell their memories on the
future's version of the Internet.
In something of a plausible and perhaps prescient statement on our
times, armed flying drones globally patrol for terrorists and the
like, too action-oriented to do much validation of the evidence in
question, Oaxaca's Memo Cruz is targeted when their minders
misinterpret his ham radio hobby activities.
Mexican actor Luis Fernando Peña is very good and convincing as Memo.
You don't see many portrayals of farmers from those dry and hot and
poor parts of Mexico. I don't know if it was also filmed on location
in Oaxaca (though I think yeah that was Tijuana) but the locations
seemed authentic to me. As well Leonor Varela does a nice job as the
female writer and memory seller Memo meets on the way to Tijuana.
Production values on this were pretty good. Oh, the drone sequences
are not very advanced, it's not like the quality of the latest Star
Trek movie or even the Battlestar Galactic reimagining for a few years
ago. But it's not that kind of movie. The movie is largely in Spanish
(with subtitles if you turn them on), and I wondered if it were a
Mexican film. I don't think it is, but Varela was born in Chile, and
as I said Peña is Mexican, and the director Alex Rivera I read is from
NYC but self-identifies at Latino, and all this I think plus the
film-making itself tend to give it all an authentic aspect.
Sleep Dealer according to the DVD jacket won Sundance in 2008 and also
some sort of human rights award. It seems to me to be deserving of
those. One doesn't see films like this often, at least I don't, and
it's at-once an engaging sci-fi story and societal commentary.
TiN[]BoX
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