Rating: 
Summary: Flows Better Than A Dream
Review: This movie was the most visually stimulating work I've seen in a long time. It is also very funny... All of the existential art theories explored are done with such comedic finesse that I really couldn't stop giggling with glee.
Rating:
Summary: The best movie to express serious ideas
Review: This movie is really an idea movie that is similar in structure to Slacker. However, this one actually has a loose philsophical plot. Descartes idea that we can't decipher when we are awake and when we are sleeping is ever present. This leads to many different meetings with peaceful characters, violent ones, angry, vehemently idiological, and vehemently active people. Sometimes the main character can talk with these people and sometimes he's not even there as if he's a spirit listening. Regardless, he can't seem to get out of his dreams. While he meets/observes these characters the animation is sometimes dreamlike, sometimes realistic, sometimes whimsically expressive of the characters making this a movie that accentuates the personalities of the speakers. Yes, this is a visual movie, but it's one with great depth and it's wouldn't be as interesting if it didn't make the audience ponder the numerous ideas that are brought forth. For the thinkers who also respect visual innovation
Rating:
Summary: Simply transcendent
Review: When I saw this film, this chimera, this animated marathon philosophy slam, over a quarter of the audience walked out in the middle of it. Some may have suffered motion sickness from the perpetual fluidity of the images; this isn't a movie best watched from the front row. But as I sat transfixed by the magic on the screen, (just one long parade of talking heads - but what talk! and what heads!) my fleeing comrades put me in mind of the teenagers at the prom in Back to the Future, recoiling in horror from a guitar played in Hendrix style. Those Chuck Berry hounds thought they knew what rock 'n' roll was; and we think we know what movies are. But Linklater is here to teach us different.I could write a dozen reviews, trying to explain what's unique and wonderful about this film, without repeating myself. What follows is a random sample. The title embodies a triple pun, reminiscent of the layered meanings of the title "Finnegans Wake". Like Joyce's skewed opus, "Waking Life" examines life, on a huge canvas, from the perspective of a dreamer, a dreamer caught up in a seemngly endless stream of babble. Like Joyce, Linklater uses an elaborate artistic form which attempts to duplicate the structure of dreams - in particular, the way that every dream is a palimpsest, in which dim and dimmer meanings underlie the ones on the surface. Where Joyce tried to pack the multiple meanings in by using jumbled and confusing "portmanteau words" that sounded like several words at once, Linklater lets a series of monologues, each one straightforward and some even obsessionally single-minded, mirror and bounce off one another until each is undergirded by the three dimensional scaffolding of all the rest. Ostensibly the subject of all this talk is dreaming and waking up. But it's also about waking to higher consciousness, about speech itself, about movies themselves as a form of speech and a form of dream. Taken at a literal level, the movie is a little paradise for anyone who really enjoys *listening* to people. Even though the talk is all of abstractions, in each case it's about ideas with which the speaker is deeply and personally engaged; so that lives are spread before us and souls laid bare. It's like having Studs Terkels' "Working", with its varied gallery of talkers from every station of life, as a documentary rather than as a book, except that now the working title would be "Thinking." Sure, much of the talk is sophomoric. A sophomore is a wise fool, and all Linklater's talkers qualify; whether "wise" or "fool" is the operative moiety of the oxymoron is up to the viewer. But it is revelatory, in each case, of the person we're listening to; and the polyphony melds into a symphony that beggars its parts. All these voices - together with the lovely self-effacing score - make the soundtrack into a coherent poem cycle that would be worth the price of the DVD on its own. Visually, Linklater has succeeded in putting on screen for the very first time a "dream sequence" which is genuinely dreamlike -- not like the romanticized image of what dreams are like in old tin pan alley tunes, and not like Freudian or Jungian symbolfests. Mullholland Drive raises such conventions to a luminous new level, but even in Lynch's hands they remain film conventions without the real feel of dreams. But this film is like the dreams we actually have each night, or would if we were much smarter and more interesting people. For example, dreams seem photographically real while we're in them - but are in fact lacking in almost all the detail of the waking visual field. Linklater duplicates this experience with his rotoscoping: a photographically real substrate is drained of its detail by drawing flat cartoons over it. And that's just one of many authentic dream characteristics cannily built into the celluloid here. It remains to be seen whether this scrumptious tour-de-force, once it's begun to be absorbed, will change the way movies are made in the future, or whether it will stand forever as the only member of its genre. But if any film made in 2001 is still admired, studied and taught in 2051, it will be this one.
Rating: 
Summary: visually fascinating
Review: When the special effect is everything, anything other will
be omitted. This film, meanwhile, is worth seeing only for
its visual beauty.
Rating:
Summary: Best Movie of 2001
Review: Waking Life was so interesting because it brought so many ideas and ways of thinking into one movie that kept you entertained with stunning animation and interesting characters. This movie really has a message, it has tons of them. It's a great break from regular movies. I absolutely loved this movie, definitely worth buying.
Rating:
Summary: I'd love to preorder a DVD
Review: Excellent, thoughful existentialist fare in an outrageous format. The hapless main character drifts through existence seeking advice and help in answering the BIG questions. Some of the people he meets seem to be professors of philosophy --I think I recognized Robert Solomon's voice and thoughtfulness. I found the wavy visual effects annoying and found myself closing my eyes sometimes so I could enjoy the profound and amusing sound track without getting nauseous. This is the first movie I have recommended to a blind friend. It will be great to get it on DVD where you can enjoy it in bite sized pieces---and presumably get lots of interesting information not available in the movie.
Rating:
Summary: waking life
Review: "waking life" is the most profound piece of cinema i have seen since "requiem for a dream." although the story may seem incoherent to some, i personally found it to be quite the opposite. by weaving together collections of various monolgues about the nature of reality and dreams, linklater creates an intellectual masterpiece that is both thought-provoking and life(or death) affirming. the closest thing to cinematic enlightenment; very taoist at times(i.e is reality a dream or are dreams reality?) definitely not a film for those who don't like to think too hard or those who feel uncomfortable when confronted with strange and unusual ideas.
Rating: 
Summary: A slap in the face to GOOD Independent Films - AVOID
Review: This movie was an embarrassing attempt to be "artsy" and I use the quotes around the word on
purpose. WAKING LIFE was nothing more then a movie were someone had a great idea for a
interesting concept and that was all. The film would have worked as a 15 minute short film (tops).
It was almost comically pretentious and the script writer seemed to being trying to be ultra-
philosophical on a subject that is not deep enough to talk about as long as they did. The question
the film asks is one asked over and over- one that simply makes you go "hmm?" and nothing
more. It was almost like watching people pretend to be intellectual who were not. This film was
insulting to intelligent audience members and was one of the very worse movies I have ever seen.
The creators cannot fool everyone that they had anything original or interesting to say.
Rating:
Summary: See it now, then see it again
Review: Waking Life is a dense, difficult to digest, series of monologues that address the most profound, timeless questions: is there an afterlife? how do dreams relate to our lives? and of course, what is the meaning of life? Instead of answering these questions directly, a variety of personalities are employed to offer different perspectives, helping the protaganist slowly develop his own philosophy while he begins to question the very nature of his existence. This film seems formally related most closely to 'Slacker,' an earlier Linklater film, but where the latter seems more like an amibitious student exercise, Waking Life is a complete, yet flawed, masterpiece. Both films use the same basic formula of narrating through a sequence of disparate characters, as opposed to a using traditional plots and three-act formats. At the end of Slacker, you are left with the feeling that it could just as well go on as it could end, that none of the details are particulatly necessary; essentially its a day in the life of someone in Texas. At the end of Waking Life, you see the significance of (most of) all that precedes it. The animation style at first made me a bit uneasy, but I adjusted quickly and it became apparent that it was an integral part of the 'dream-like' atmosphere of the film. The monologues are mostly quite heavy and referential, and difficult to fully digest. At the end of the movie, I was completely exhausted, but I wanted to see it again so that I could try to pick up the bits that went over my head.
Rating:
Summary: Waking Life or animated Philosophy 101
Review: When I saw this movie a month ago I was lured by reviews and a love of animation. As I watched the movie it initially reminded me of the intense philosophical discussions that are often induced by "getting high" and the freeform way that conversations seem to progress. While I agree with these favorable reviews, I did not at the end of the movie see these as random thoughts at all. The main character that appeared to be dreaming or waking through the movie by the end I was convinced had followed his life from a young age at the beginning, tracing the memories of his life, only to realize in the end that he was not awakening from sleep. Instead he was revisiting his memories before leaving earth, gradually letting go of his life & body now able to accept his death. It was comforting for me to think that maybe this is the way it could be for all of us sooner or later... or maybe I'm just crazy.
|
