Rating: 
Summary: 1 of a kind
Review: This is a great movie to watch,i have to give credit to all the people behind this film, especially since every charachter was done by a different artist to give it powerfull flavor. I think the film is getting known by word of mouth so hopefully it will come out on dvd so i can view some special features on it.
Rating: 
Summary: Life is but a dream
Review: "Waking Life" completes (continues?) the walking-and-talking trilogy Richard Linklater started with "Slackers" and took up again with "Before Sunrise". It owes much to the form and content of those previous movies, borrowing "Slackers"s disjointed structure and "Before Sunrise"s unabashed romanticism. Only this time it's not a romance between a man and a woman, but between one man's sleeping and waking life.For me, initially, this was a tough film to engage with. The first third was terribly boring to sit through; at times it was a tough fight to keep my drooping eyes from closing for good. The friend I saw it with wasn't as lucky, for I caught her napping early on (she later admitted that the nap I saw was actually her third, and this was during the film's first half hour!). Frankly, this sleepiness should be expected, for the first "act" consists entirely of Wiley Wiggins encountering various random, verbose individuals, whom all ramble on about their great philosophical theories. Combine the droning nature of the dialogue, the very liquid backgrounds (the animation was beautiful, true, but very hypnotic; like watching the ocean on a breezy day), and a meandering anti-narrative, and you get a sleep inducing movie. This first third was like listening to someone's long, boring dream, an observation that Linklater, appearing near the end as himself, actually cops to. Kudos to him for admitting the inherent flaw in his movie (This flaw is also alluded to when Steven Soderbergh, in a brief cameo, tells an anecdote about how Billy Wilder described Louis Malle's upcoming $2.5 million dream-within-a-dream movie as a "$2.5 million loss"). However, even though the film is preachy, pretentious, long-winded, and droning at times, I give Linklater credit for including such off-beat discussion in his relatively mainstream movie. The movie takes a drastic turn around halfway through, when Wiggins' character experiences dream lucidity in a "Holy Moment". I'll not spoil how, for it was, for me, the most exhilarating moment of the movie. Needless to say, from this point on he is no longer a passive listener, but is allowed to engage the people he meets in thought provoking discussion. It picks up some much needed energy from this moment. The movie changes from being a series of boring lectures (reminded me of school!) to a series of fascinating social discourses (in one of the scenes that doesn't involve Wiggins, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy seemingly revive their "Before Sunrise" roles, going so far as to quote their prior selves regarding a discussion they had in that movie about the division of the soul as the world's population increases -- it's much more fascinating than the way I describe it here, trust me). The animation is impressive and necessary for the kind of movie this is (in an interview, Linklater admitted that if live-action characters spoke his trippy dialogue, the audience would be hard-pressed to believe; the animation allows him to go off on tangents, work through absurd trains of thought, and generally make as much or as little sense as he wanted, just as a real dream would). The visuals do take a while to get used to, though. In the beginning I found myself noticing the technique more than paying attention to the dialogue. If you let yourself, the minutiae that the artists include in the background can be quite engrossing. That being said, with a new toy like this a lot more could have been done, which would have been distracting. Linklater reins in his animators with a fine sense of restraint, not allowing them to go wild and fully exploit the animation to any extreme, but only go far enough to show a glimpse of its magnificent possibilities. I was grateful for this. "Waking Life" is a unique movie-going experience, at least for me. I left the theatre confused, disoriented, and mildly disappointed. It is only after 12 hours of reflection that I realize the particular genius here. I can't stop thinking about what it all means, and am truly glad that I saw the film.
Rating:
Summary: I think I have seen this one before...
Review: and it was a movie called " slacker " where a camera just goes around from person to person and they expound on their philosophy of life or just rant about whatever's in their heart and mind. i have seen two of linklater's movies, " slacker" and " dazed and confused " and i think he is a brilliant filmmaker.this however is just a revision of " slacker " with some new wrinkles thrown in. i would have rated this film lower, but the animation is revolutionary. he shot the movie on film, then had animation done to the film. when i watched it, it was like a peter max cartoon coming to life, plus it was entertaining enough to make me forgive linklater's slight of hand...
Rating:
Summary: Finally, a truly transformative film
Review: This movie is far beyond anyone's ability to describe it. It is not a film for the literally minded. It is a film for the viewer who feels shackled by commercialism each time they purchase a movie ticket. It is a film for the person who wants to lets his spirits soar, It is for the person, who really thinks there is more to the universe than McDonalds, George Bush, or the Taliban. It is for the viewer who has this unfulfilled dream that films are a way of feeding the soul. It is also an astoundingly beautiful experience flowing with the images that are constantly one step ahead of your expectation. Having seen Waking Life just once was not enough. Enjoy, let your spirits loose. Sincerely, Zev
Rating:
Summary: very funny on a very dry level
Review: The entire film is rotoscoped, with additional computer and traditional animation added, resulting in a veritable feast for the eyes. Something is almost always moving, and the effect can be somewhat disorienting at times, but that's also the point. WAKING LIFE is about a young man who realizes he's dreaming, and finds he's "unable" to wake up for real. He keeps having false wake ups, crossing paths with one idiosyncratic individual after another between each failed attempt. The story moves largely in monolog form from the people around him. He repeatedly has complex conversations (where he's more getting spoken "at" than "to") with random people. It feels a little hard to take at first because the conversations are so thick (ultimately that's also their appeal), but I found myself really getting in to it after the third one, or so.
It's very funny on a very dry level, drudging through topics like existentialism, human evolution, and human interaction in depths seemingly forgotten to the superficiality of everyday television. It's a good, alternative film, worth seeing for its unique visuals and worth hearing for it's erudite jabs into higher thinking. I want the DVD!
Rating: 
Summary: Would've been a great short-film
Review: "Waking Life" is a visually spectacular and innovative film. With the use of rotoscoping (a technique where animation is drawn on top of digital live-action footage), the style of the movie ranges from super-realism to bad-acid-trippy surrealism, and there is never a dull moment for your eyes. It's a little too much to take for a 2-hour period though. There are far too many movements on the screen at any given time for your brain to digest (e.g. eyes, noses and mouths all move separately in a fluid manner) and I eventually got a nasty headache. As far as the story goes -- well, there isn't one. Like Richard Linklater's previous movies, "Waking Life" is just a collection of scenes where various characters indulge themselves in pseudo-philosophical blabberings. These "discussions" are occasionally insightful and funny, but more often than not, they are pretentious, uninteresting and downright boring. It also suffers from what I call a Kevin-Smith-Syndrome, where a movie has just too *much* dialogues that it eventually becomes annoying. Maybe it's just me, but I don't want characters to talk non-stop through the entire span of the movie. Silence, indeed, is underrated. If you are a fan of Linklater and his style, you'll definitely enjoy it. And even if you are more of a conventional movie fan (i.e. you want a *plot*), it's worth checking out just for the visuals. I think this could've been much better as a short-film, rather than a full-length feature, though.
Rating: 
Summary: intersting ideas, disappointing result
Review: An artsy, moody college student moves from scene to scene, encounters a series of talkative characters, engages in conversation after conversation on various philosophical, political, and spiritual topics, and as the circumstance becomes more and more mystifying, our unnamed hero realizes that he's in a dream that he cannot wake up from. This is the basic premise of Richard Linklater's latest animated feature "Waking Life". An interesting idea. The film has a very fascinating visual presentation: shot in real life, and later painted frame by frame by animators with the aid of computers. The result is an exhilarating explosion of visual excitements. An interesting new medium. But, as interesting as the premise and the visual presentation are, this movie rubs me the wrong way. I've always wondered whether or not a book from the "For Dummies" series can be turned into a film, "Waking Life" answers my curiosity. After hearing a string of pseudo-intellects having a string of mind-numbing pseudo-intellectual conversations, I am almost certain that this film is based on "Philosophy For Dummies". Pretentious and sophomoric, the film has the same depth of a first year philosophy major's term paper. I can probably get more philosophy out of an episode of Monty Python than from "Waking Life". One of the very loathsome aspects of this film is that it conscientiously tries to be "independent", and thus corrupts the true spirit of independent films. It rejects the very fundamentals of what make up a film. Sure, independent films are all about breaking the rules and rejecting the norms. But directly reciting passages from a Philosophy 101 textbook is not art; not even outsider art, it's anti-art. Sometimes, we have to admit, the emperor is indeed naked.
Rating:
Summary: A natural progression from "Slacker."
Review: With "Waking Life," Richard Linklater returns to the loose, freewheeling structure he employed in his first film, "Slacker." The two main departures in "Waking Life" are 1) he animates the movie by filming live actors and superimposing computer images, and b) he anchors "Waking Life" by employing an unnamed protagonist played by "Dazed and Confused" actor Wiley Wiggins. The animated version of Wiggins wanders through his waking and dreaming life--the line between the two growing ever thinner--as various friends and acquaintances tell him their philosophies of life. (Among them are Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy sitting up in bed, discussing reincarnation and the afterlife; "Before Sunrise" fans will be delighted to know that Celine and Jesse reunited after all!) At first I thought this was a film I wouldn't particularly want to see again, but I find certain images and lines from it haunting me. Some speakers in "Waking Life" are more interesting than others, but the animation by more than 30 artists gives the film a kaleidoscopic, Chagall- meets-Peter Max quality that holds the interest, and Wiggins is an engaging screen presence even as a cartoon! "Waking Life" is a film that gives us substantial food for thought and gracefully insinuates itself into our minds.
Rating:
Summary: Ideal late-night college hallway conversation
Review: Richard Linklater calls this a "movie about ideas," and it is indeed unlike most movies. It has only the slightest semblance of a plot. The unnamed narrator, played by Wiley Wiggins, seems to be trapped in a neverending dream in which he encounters a whole series of characters who expound on ideas about existence, dreaming, identity, time, religion, society. It reminded me of conversations with peers in college, sitting in the hallway of a dormitory, in the middle of the night, our minds bursting with ideas, grappling with problems and not finding any solutions but enamored with the quest. Like that, except amplified. The ideas in Waking Life are not like, whoa, you know, the ramblings of a pot-smoking college flunkie, but actual thoughts from intriguing street philosophers like Speed Levitch, fictional characters like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's characters from Linklater's Before Sunrise, artists like Steven Soderbergh, or academics like philosophy professor Robert Solomon. It's a movie that would not have worked nearly as well as live action. The realism would detract from the intellectual dreaminess of the ideas. Linklater's animation technique, which uses computers to paint on top of live digital video footage, is just right for this film. It is as close as I've ever seen to having visuals actually embody the ideas being expressed verbally by the characters. A new, exciting alternative to the documentary as a visual medium for ideas, and just as credible an approach as that of, say, David Lynch, for reproducing the sensation of dream. The animation awakens the reality just as the ideas in the film rouse your mind. Finally, it's a movie that will inspire a polarized reaction. The person I saw the film with stood up halfway into the film and left, unable to stand it. The greatest films seem to inspire such reaction. I left the theater and stood on the sidewalk outside, thinking.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant movie
Review: I went into this movie not knowing what to expect. I didn't know the storyline or anything, all I had heard was something about it being redone so it looked like impressionistic paintings. Boy, I was in for a surprise. The movie absolutely shocked me, and not in a bad way. It was extremely intense and well thought out. It was also very trippy and thrilling. It kept me watching the whole time. The movie had seemed long when I heard it ran for 96 minutes, but when those minutes were over with I said "Wow, that went really fast". It had it's very interesting elements, and was very thought-provoking. I went with my film club and we all agreed that we wanted to see it again and watch it part by part because so much information was being shot at you the whole time. The style of the film, visually that is, was unique (and of course, that was it's claim to popularity). The scenes are constantly moving, a fluid motion. The backgrounds are never stationery and at first I thought I would get seasick/motion sickness, but it ended up just calming me, and made me focus more on what the characters were saying. Overall the thoughts that were being thrown out there were all valid in their own ways. I could easily agree with many of them with more knowledge and time with these people. The dialogue, on whole, even though not very emotional, was very well done and highly imaginative. I don't know what more to say about this film but that it is certainly worth seeing, some make think it's boring, but if one wants something different and usual and very intensely aimed towards thinking, then go for it. You won't be disappointed.
|
