This movie is worthless. If I'm going to spend time watching a documentary about insomnia, I expect to get some insight from it, to learn something. I definitely did not get that from this film. Instead I got a filmmaker who finds his "insomnia" much more fascinating than it is, and who constantly makes whiny and banal commentary about it. And I got lots of chatter from a bunch of supposed experts telling me things I already knew--things like, "when you miss sleep, you become irritable" and "there's no drug that will allow you to sleep a few hours a night and function optimally." In other news, the Dutch have taken Holland.
I would have liked to have seen the film go deeper into sleep problems, the effects of sleep, biological clocks, that type of thing. I would like to have seen much less of the filmmaker talking about himself as if he's some bizarre, unique specimen and occasionally spouting the most ludicrous psychobabble. I found it disappointing that, as the movie ground on, I kept thinking things like, "what about light therapy?" and "isn't he just a night owl?" and then seeing those things touched on briefly (very briefly) later. A good documentary would have held my attention and brought up these issues for me.
One glaring thing that the filmmaker doesn't address deeply enough is one of the first things you think of when insomnia comes up: caffeine. There's a scene where he talks about how he doesn't drink coffee(!), that he hasn't had a cup in 20 years or so. Because it makes him "jittery" and he "wouldn't sleep for days" if he had it. (Isn't caffeine only in your system for ~6 hours or so?) But the crew convinces him to have a cup. I considered that a bit odd--if you're uber-sensitive to caffeine, shouldn't you start with, say, a bar of chocolate instead of a cup of coffee? Anyway, so he has his cup of coffee, and, miraculously, he perks up. He gets a sparkle in his eye and is more animated. Now, you'd think he would start talking about how his heart's pounding and he's shaking and sweating like crazy, but no. He's just more awake. Of course, this scene isn't followed up, so we're left to wonder whether the coffee affected his sleep. (And I was left with the view of the filmmaker as a whiny hypochondriac who would rather bore people with his "insights" about insomnia than do something so simple as drink some coffee. Or get a prescription for modafinil, which, strikingly, goes unmentioned in a documentary about sleep!)
I would have liked to have seen the film go deeper into sleep problems, the effects of sleep, biological clocks, that type of thing. I would like to have seen much less of the filmmaker talking about himself as if he's some bizarre, unique specimen and occasionally spouting the most ludicrous psychobabble. I found it disappointing that, as the movie ground on, I kept thinking things like, "what about light therapy?" and "isn't he just a night owl?" and then seeing those things touched on briefly (very briefly) later. A good documentary would have held my attention and brought up these issues for me.
One glaring thing that the filmmaker doesn't address deeply enough is one of the first things you think of when insomnia comes up: caffeine. There's a scene where he talks about how he doesn't drink coffee(!), that he hasn't had a cup in 20 years or so. Because it makes him "jittery" and he "wouldn't sleep for days" if he had it. (Isn't caffeine only in your system for ~6 hours or so?) But the crew convinces him to have a cup. I considered that a bit odd--if you're uber-sensitive to caffeine, shouldn't you start with, say, a bar of chocolate instead of a cup of coffee? Anyway, so he has his cup of coffee, and, miraculously, he perks up. He gets a sparkle in his eye and is more animated. Now, you'd think he would start talking about how his heart's pounding and he's shaking and sweating like crazy, but no. He's just more awake. Of course, this scene isn't followed up, so we're left to wonder whether the coffee affected his sleep. (And I was left with the view of the filmmaker as a whiny hypochondriac who would rather bore people with his "insights" about insomnia than do something so simple as drink some coffee. Or get a prescription for modafinil, which, strikingly, goes unmentioned in a documentary about sleep!)