Sleepwalk with Me

source: Sleepwalk with Me

Matt Pandamiglio (Mike Birbiglia) is a loser struggling comedian who's actually more of a comedy club bartender. His girlfriend Abby (Lauren Ambrose) is too good for him. Abby pressures him to marry her, and he starts walking in his sleep under the stress. Mike Birbiglia's semi-autobiographical one-man show is turned into a movie. It has the air of real life. However I just couldn't shake the question that probably everybody asked while watching this movie. "Why did she stay with this loser?" Mike probably played up his loserness too much at the beginning. His acting at the start had no energy at all. It just made it hard to understand why Abby would ever stay with him. There is an imaginative explanation based on real life. But it still isn't quite satisfying.

A funny little movie about a man who suffers from a sleepwalk disorder. The story tells his struggle to hold love and career life together while one turns to be a disaster and another one successful. Well the story was a bit uncatchy in opening few minutes because the man of the movie, Matt Pandamiglio, tells his earlier life story while recording it into a camera which looks like some documentary. That makes totally unaware of the situation of the tale intended to but later it turned out to be a nice one. The character Matt, sometimes turns to be a nerd and sometimes make us feel fond on him for his innocence. I was little confused for the randomness of his character. Realised that was the motive created by the writer to make the viewers to go gaga over the destination of the tale. In the movie I liked many individual scenes like Matt jumping out of the window, especially all the sleepwalk scenes. It was a simple story, it was not intended to hurt anybody emotionally from the romantic side of the tale but the line the Matt says at the end of the movie makes really sweet-fully hurt. That one line makes the movie worth giving another rating star or point. I never knew before this director-come-actor, Mike Birbiglia. This movie was loosely based on his own life story, he did a good job as his first directional venture as well first major role in a movie. Hope he to become next Mark Duplass. The movie should reach to every movie buff around the world because it was one of a fine independent comedy. You will like it if you ever liked 'Safety not Guaranteed' or 'Ruby Sparks', recommended to watch once.

OK, I get that Mike Birbiglia is telling his own story and in that way the story is based on real events - at least seen from the eyes of Mike Birbiglia. But even real stories need some artistic alteration or a good storyline to make it to the big screen. This has not really happen here! Mike Birbiglia who is a good comedian makes a comedy movie, is has to be good! Just that, this is not a comedy - its a movie about a comedian but it is in no way funny. So what is it then? Some kind of sad, no happy ending romance? Maybe even drama? At best you might call it a road movie, as half the movie Mike Birbiglia is driving around in a Volvo. When I was watching this movie and figured it was not a comedy, I so hoped to find that the whole concept was to interlink the way the movie is made to the theme of sleepwalking - that the whole slow narrator mode and his misery life had anything to do with sleep, sadly it never happened (except you get sleepy watching it). After a good hour of watching I began to believe that the movie was not really about sleepwalking, but maybe a romance/drama thing - maybe he would kill his mother in his sleepwalking stage or his girlfriend would start sleepwalking with him? Until the last second I still hoped something would happen, some kind of "ah ha" - just a link from the story telling to the story, but no - you do get a morale though which sadly just seem to be a reflection on his own past and not really what the movie was about. The end seems to reveal that the whole point of the movie was to tell the world of this disorder, which it does very bad. Sleepwalk with me is at the level of a 6th grader told to write his own biography - so except you are a huge Mike Birbiglia fan and want to be told that he used to be a horrible boyfriend and that he has a sleeping disorder, do not push play!

Not sure what I was expecting here - some kind of quirky indie comedy? I mean, you'd think a film about a stand-up comedian would be funny, right? Sadly, it is not. Not at all. The film is basically the story of a guy who has an amazing, beautiful, supportive girlfriend, but he's not satisfied with that, so he spends the next hour or so of the film treating her like crap, ditching her to go on some pointless comedy tour, cheating on her, then telling her he wants to marry her but not really meaning it so makes her do all the planning while he flakes off on yet another dumb tour, then comes home and dumps her. The end. With a one line aside of how she went on to get married and have kids with someone else anyway so like, that makes it all okay now and we should just forget about the last hour we spent watching him be a complete jerk. Seriously, the protagonist of this film has NO redeeming qualities at all. The film manages to be watchable for the first half or so, but then this guy just becomes more and more awful to the point where you have no sympathy whatsoever for him and don't really care what happens to him. I am really disappointed I wasted 80 minutes on this. (It feels about 3 hours long.)

Nothing in life is easy, but it seems like stand-up comedy has its own higher level of difficulty. The constant failure. The enormous amount of pressure to be great. The need to persevere and make it work. The ecstasy and joy felt when you get it right. In a lot of ways, stand-up comedy is a lot like love. At least, that's what I got out of Mike Birbiglia's first feature film, Sleepwalk With Me. Based on his one man show of the same name, Sleepwalk with Me is about his real life relationship with his girlfriend and the beginnings of his stand-up career. Birbiglia plays Matt Pandamiglio, a man who would like to do stand-up for a living, but instead works as a bartender at a comedy club. He's only just moved in with his girlfriend of eight years, Abby, and there's pressure mounting from all sides for him to commit to her in a bigger way. But when his stand-up career begins to blossom with gigs all across the East, Matt has to reexamine what he wants in life, and what that means to the things he already has. Because it is based on his stand-up show, if you've heard his material before, you'll know what's going to happen in the film for the most part. Does it take away from the impact of the film? Maybe just a little. But not enough to keep the raw emotion and brutal honesty from affecting you. While his stand-up has its more delicate moments, his routine is primarily light-hearted, relatable, and goofy. The film differs in this way, because while it's truly funny and identifiable, the serious moments share equal time on screen. In fact, the sleepwalking sequences, which are nothing but hilarious in his stand-up, have a tinge of sadness in the film since you know how desperate he's feeling about the way his life is going. That's what the film does so well; it provides context to all the stories Birbiglia's told before, allowing them to have a gravity not previously understood. Another thing Birbiglia does extremely well is show us the inside world of not only stand up comedy, but of the stand up comedian. Very similar to FX's universally acclaimed Louis, this film shows us the not so laugh-out-loud moments of a comedian's life, and how real life problems influence better comedy. It also shows us how beginning stand-up comedians (and even some well established ones) live while they're on the road, drinking beer, eating pizza, watching Mitch Hedburg specials, and sharing stories of their travels. Because it's all based on Birbiglia's experiences, it feels very similar to the documentary The Comedians of Comedy. This shows just how true to life the world Birbiglia has crafted. All of this attention to realism allows Birbiglia's growth as a stand-up to really be appreciated. As his stand-up becomes more personal, it gets funnier, and you feel yourself rooting for him to become the comedian he strives to be. To read the rest of the review (IMDb form too short) visit: http://custodianfilmcritic.com/sleepwalk-with-me/

As much as I could relate to the anguish of our lead character and everyone around him who just seem to irritate him and cramp his style, the film was on the whole sad. Maybe it's too much to expect that a comedic film might have a few lines that actually make you laugh. My favorite scene was after his gig at the college in Utica. He walks into his room at the cheap motel and starts jumping on his bed. He's thrilled that he actually just got paid to do a show. He's on his way to attaining his dreams however humble they may be. I considered that the films only rejoiceful moment. The actress playing his agent was a highlight. Any scene with her put a smile on my face. In any case This American Life is incredible and I am looking forward to any films that they may produce in the future. Sleepwalk is a good start.

I guess I should start with a disclaimer: a couple hours after seeing this movie in the theater, I popped a copy of Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard into my DVD player, because I had borrowed it from work a couple of weeks back, and the pressures of managing fantasy baseball teams in two leagues hadn't afforded me the time to commit to a 3 1/2 hour epic set in Tokugawa era Japan. Consequently, my recollections of this film will perforce be even more evanescent than they probably would normally have been. So, the set-up is this: our hero, Matt, is living (and it would appear, being supported by) his brilliant, gorgeous longtime girlfriend, Abby. In the course of working open mikes and providing intros for established comedians, he has managed to work up "almost eleven" minutes of material. A flaky agent sends him on the road to a series of extremely bush league engagements where, through dint of desperation, determination, and by mining his fear of commitment to his relationship with Abby, he manages to find his comedic feet, and carve out a career for himself. His lightning strike on the road to Damascus is the line he throws out backstage, talking to a more established comedian: "I'm not going to get married until I'm sure nothing else good can happen in my life". And there is the crux of the film. Matt is tired of everybody correctly perceiving that his relationship with Abby is the best thing that can be said for him, and so, at whatever cost his subconscious takes out on his sleeping hours, he starts to pull out of the relationship. At the end, he concludes that Abby was going to spend the rest of their lives with him just because she doesn't want to hurt him. The problem I had, and it's not a serious one, is believing that choice. Maybe it's just my appreciation for Lauren Ambrose, but really, there have been perfectly happy marriages built on worse foundations. The relationship of his parents contributes to Matt's misgivings: his batty mother, wonderfully played by Carol Kane (and why the hell isn't she in more movies?), and his stern father (James Rebhorn), might seem like a misalliance at first glance, but nothing in the film suggests that they aren't perfectly happy together, if a little uncomfortable to be around. And really, is a life of parking lot assignations with stand-up groupies (I suppose there are such groupies, but what a sad thought) the something else good that can come along? In short, I liked the movie well enough: it was a treat seeing Ambrose, Kane, and Rebhorn, the backstage camaraderie amongst the comics rang true, and Birbiglia's actual stand-up pleasantly reminded me of Garry Shandling's delivery. My complaint would be, no matter how true the story is, it still basically feels implausible.

Comedian Mike Birbiglia stars as Matt Pandamiglio in Sleepwalk With Me, which appears to be the autobiographical tale of his life up until this current point. The title of the film stems from Birbiglia's REM Sleep Behavior Disorder, which caused him to fall into deep, deep sleeps, often resulting in him sleepwalking and crossing into danger's way. During one of his shows in Walla Walla, Washington, Birbiglia, disoriented and asleep, jumped from the second-story window of his motel room and narrowly avoided accidental suicide by having thirty-three stitches put in his legs. Sleepwalk With Me chronicles not only that chapter in Birbiglia's life, but the chapters and events leading up to his career as a comedian and a motivational speaker. He has achieved off-Broadway success for years now, doing two one man shows and a comedy special. In this film, he stars as Matt Pandamiglio, who also narrates the film, making us come full circle like in his one man shows. He is a directionless twentysomething, stuck in an eight year relationship with the charming but bland Abby (Lauren Ambrose) with no plans to marry, and struggling to find stable work as is. What Matt really aspires to do is be a comedian, but his material on stage is slim and his delivery is jittery and brim-full of anxiety. He winds up performing at nearby bars, attracting nothing but hecklers and a mountain of criticism. Upon acquiring an agent from one of his close friends, out of pure desperation, he winds up driving miles away to introduce lip-syncing acts at a college campus. The gig pays about as much as he will for gas up there. When he does get laughs, they come at the expense of his relationship, and the audience seems to be awake and responsive when Matt goes into the details and tribulations that come with a long-term relationship. He states how his girlfriend told him the thing she's most afraid of is losing him to something she can't control. When asking Matt what he is most afraid of he collectively replies, "bears." Mike Birbiglia is a character of true charisma, who could definitely have a long-running career in not only one man performances, but realistic slice-of-life style comedy. The issues he proposes in his own life to his audiences are easily relatable, and his insights are witty and provide us with much of the same warmness we feel when crowded around a group of friends, sharing opinions and ideas. When Matt talks about meeting Abby and falling in what he calls "love," he describes the world "love" as an unlimited amount of the most wonderful things in the world, for him, subjectively, pizza and ice cream. "Love is a mountain of pizza flavored ice cream...and delusion" he then tells us. Sleepwalk With Me is a wonderful, wholesome comedy mainly because it shows the slow, methodical progression of a struggling comedian battling with his girlfriend, his fear of commitment, the lack of support from his parents, and most of all, his lack of confidence combating with his extreme drive. His only wish in the world it seems is to be able to be good at his passion, and it becomes increasingly hard when his moral support proportions are dwindling and his own life isn't too picture perfect either. But one can turn that around to a positive and say it provides the man with more viable material. Sure as hell beats tired puns on stage at a hometown bar, wouldn't you say? Starring: Mike Birbiglia, Lauren Ambrose, Carol Kane, James Rebhorn, and Cristin Milioti. Directed by: Mike Birbiglia.

A burgeoning stand-up comedian (Mike Birbiglia) struggles with the stress of a stalled career, a stale relationship, and the wild spurts of severe sleepwalking he is desperate to ignore. The story of a rising comic is a story that has been told a few times, and it generally is not all that different from the others. Getting the big break, driving long miles for little pay... it is a hard job, one which rarely pays off. This story, in many ways, is no different. But what works out here is we not only have a relationship crumbling while a career grows (the typical story), but we also have the journey of a man with a very rare, very dangerous sleep disorder. He could kill himself or his neighbors at any time... which makes for a much more interesting story.