Wide Awake

Lucky Alan Berliner -- he gets to indulge his own obsessions, and turn them into completely personal films. Unlucky Alan Berliner -- though he makes films that are funny and intriguing, almost no one notices. Compared to him, Ross McElwee is a superstar celebrity (both figured in a film series I showed at the Clark a while back, “Self-Portrait in Cinema”). His new film has no Metacritic listing, and only one review on the Movie Query Research Engine; the user comments on IMDB and Netflix are preponderantly impatient and dismissive. Well, I’m here to tell you -- Alan Berliner is a filmmaker you ought to be watching. He has mined his own family history and visual archive to make incisive and entertaining films like Intimate Stranger and Nobody’s Business, and gathered a dinner party of a dozen people with the same name as his in The Sweetest Sound. He’s a compulsive archivist of family pictures (even of families he doesn’t know) and old footage (from home movies to educational films to antique Hollywood clips), as well as random sound effects, and he edits them fast, furious, and funny. The personal obsession in his latest film is his odd sleeping pattern, how he got it and how to keep his infant son from developing the same. His family is tolerant and good-natured but sometimes annoyed with his intrusive insistence on talking day and night about his insomnia. The audience should be the same -- he’s demonstrably nuts, but he makes you laugh and he makes you think. With a rapidfire cascade of imagery alternating with narcissistic image-taking and direct to the camera monologue, Berliner takes you on a giddy ride, while circling a small subject that widens out as it unspools. (2006, HBO/T, n.) *7+*