Waking Life

Rating:
Summary: Linklater becomes an artist
Review: This is a brave movie, and for me, it struck VERY close to home (as you'll see below). What might at first seem like playful pretentions - the animation, the intense monologues connected by lethargic ramblings - actually turn out to be not just artifice but ART. And I capitalize the word ART intentionally. And what I mean by ART is this: its gimmicks, its obtuseness, its force, its visual and verbal games all turn out to be valuable and significant symbols. It is animated for a reason. It is alternately ambling and in your face for a reason. It is mercurial and personal and universal for a reason. And as with all good art, they are good reasons. "Waking Life" poignantly explores useful and ingenious perspectives of how we perceive the world both personally and impersonally, feeling at once fully aware and half asleep, sometimes engaged and sometimes apathetic, trying to make sense of what others think makes sense to them. This theme is central to the film, I think, and it is profound: how do we make sense of what others think makes sense to them?

Let me pose that question again: how do we make sense of what others think makes sense to them? What makes sense objectively? And what keeps us feeling sporadically nonsensical and thus alone in our thoughts, whether or not we're asleep or awake? How are we together? And how are we alone?

Like Linklater, I spent lots of years in central Austin. I saw "Slacker" when it came out and realized I was surrounded, at the corner of 15th and Nueces, by places where that radically quirky movie had been filmed. Also like Linklater, I immersed myself in the intellectual riches of UT, the University of Texas, that bastion of not-so-ivory towers that grows at the northern end of Linklater's cinematic neighborhood. (Indeed, I could swear that he used my bare-board duplex with the white French doors and that white swinging door for the interiors of the protagonist's home in Waking Life. What a STRANGE sense of deja vu /'am I dreaming' THAT sent through me!) The point is, I feel Linklater has successfully captured that central Austin milieu successfully, in its tawdry and brainy extremes, outwardly and in my mind... How am I connected to you? How am I alone?

And onto that milieu, Linklater has added a rich tapestry of the profound themes I mentioned above. (A cross between "Waiting for Godot" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"?) That all those words can wear you out means it's worth a few go 'rounds at least.

I happened to see the VHS version of this film. But it is the kind of film that immediately makes a curious or enthusiastic (or mystified) viewer want to hear what the director and production staff have to say. It is, like "What Dreams May Come?", "Pleasantville", and "Moulin Rouge", a film where behind-the-scenes explorations of screenplay development, technique and production decisions prove fascinating. So I'm getting the DVD to have access to all of that additional material. It will be worth it, as I plan to encourage my friends and movie/idea loving acquaintances to see and think about the artistry that is "Waking Life."

Rating:
Summary: sophomoric pseudo-philosophical torture
Review: Along with some of the other dissatisfied reviewers, I've enjoyed the style and originality of Linkletter's previous films. Visually, the film is stunning and perhaps even a landmark of sorts. Content wise, it doesn't even merit a B-minus from a college level film making class. This is a tortuous and meandering death march of stoner philosophy and pretentious intellectual hogwash. Even the phenomenal visuals can't remotely resurrect this irritating montage of tired cliches.

Rating:
Summary: Not a Movie For the Masses
Review: The main purpose of me writing this review is I hope to maybe say something that I didn't really know I knew. That may just be possible because that's almost one of the underlying messages of the movie. Have you ever had a dream, then awoke, and realized that some of the things people said to you were really profound, but then realized that it all must have come out of your own head, because it was your dream? This is defiantly a movie for two types of people; Animation buffs who will simply go ga-ga over the interesting techniques and symbols which are spattered throughout the canvas of this film, and two modern day philosophers who are obsessed with the continuum of the dream realm. In my opinion no indi-film is flawless. There were instances where I would start to wonder, and think about other things. But that seems to be what the movie is trying to get the audience to do. My favorite part of the movie is the broad spectrum of people who are submitting their thoughts on the subject at hand. I am sure everybody will have a favorite character, and everybody will have a least favorite character, but i am also sure that very few people will have the same ides on which those characters are. I feel this is a great movie to watch alone with a notepad, and should be used as a jumpstart for the creative mind.

Rating:
Summary: Long on style, short on substance
Review: The Waking Life team has undercut George Lucas's business model. Mr. Lucas spends several hundred million dollars creating a world so compelling that people flock to it despite an an incoherent plot, superficial characters, and sophomoric dialog.

J. C. Shakespeare et al. create their world on a much more modest budget. The method is tape some random writers/professors/sages/street poets -- some stoned crazy, some just naturally bizarre, all spouting some nonsense -- with a hand held camcorder, digitize the footage into a Macintosh, and have animators paint over each frame in colorful and artistic ways. If the sage gesticulates at lot, the hands are exaggerated, if he flashes his eyes, the eyes and so on.

Like Lucas, the result is merely eye candy. Although the target audiences are very different, the acid test for both is to ask, "What would be left if the visual pyrotechnics were removed?" In both cases, very little. If you want to see a great movie about dreams, try Kurosawa's "Dreams". An episodic movie that that honestly captures the dream state cinematographically....

Rating:
Summary: Pseudo-intellectual drivel
Review: While the movie's visuals are entertaining, the dialogue is annoying pseudo-intellectual drivel. The kind of nonsense one would suffer through in what passes for philosophy courses in most universities these days. Any rational, objective person can distinguish between the waking and dream state, and anybody who believes there is any merit to the dialogue needs to learn something about reason and logic.

Rating:
Summary: Worth watching, but not worth listening to.
Review: The animation in Waking Life is unique and compelling, and thankfully distracts from the bland "philosophical" meanderings of the dialogue. The ideas presented here are neither new nor particularly interesting, unless one is in high school, smoking up, or both. This film takes the concept of lucid dreams and turns it into a mess of pseudo-intellectual drivel, which is a shame considering the apparent talent and potential of the filmmakers.

Rating:
Summary: Still inspiring conversation
Review: I watched Waking Life a few months ago with my then-boyfriend, and we both could not stop talking about it with everyone we knew after that. The movie is really dense, in that there is so much dialog that you can barely keep track of it all. And every conversation between the characters is interesting and makes you think. On top of that, there's the whole "plot" of the movie, if you could call it that, but it has you thinking and wondering about the very existence of the main character and what it is and what that means. Anyway, long-winded but you get the picture. So I think the two of us probably got about 25 other people to go see it, and they kept coming back to us and talking about it. And just when I thought the Waking Life topic had died down, I get the DVD for my birthday. So now I've watched it about 3 more times, and lent it to some friends and IT'S BACK. This movie is so unique and excellent that I don't think I'm ever going to get away from it. In fact, I'm starting to feel like I'm the one in the crazy dream-state since every conversation I have nowadays is linked to Waking Life somehow. Anyway, if you like to think, watch this movie. And then watch a few more times. And then talk to other people who have watched it and see what happens. If you don't like to think, then go watch a Steven Seagal movie. You'll love it.

Rating:
Summary: I have a question!
Review: This is one of the best movies I've ever had the joy of seeing. I have a question for anyone out there in the know....Is it possible to find a copy of the screenplay by any chance? Anyone know where? It's an excellent script and I'd love to read it...

Rating:
Summary: If you've gotten this far
Review: If you've gotten this far you'll probably like it. If you're reading the review of some obscure movie that you could only have read about from some interesting movie critic or heard about from a friend, then you're probably into this unique kind of cinema. This movie is unique. It has it's weaknesses. The movie is only good in moments. The problem with such a fragmentary movie, without any significant plot and only one main character, is that it doesn't build upon itself. The best moments move you and make you think and then they float away, and it's up to the next movment to move you again. There's no sustained tension, no anticipation, no expectation. You're just following a series of converstions.

And the conversations are interesting. Not all of them are really interesting, which is the biggest weakness of the film. Some of the ideas are fairly unprofound and you have to listen to some moderately intriguing rambling, but there are a few moments in the movie that'll really stick in your head. If you go with a friend - the talkative contemplative type, the interesting intellectual - then you will not be without a thing to talk about after this movie. Even when it the conversations in this movie are fairly unprofound, they still are thought-provoking.

Then, of course, one of the most unique things about this film is the animation. All the scenes are filmed, but then that footage is animated over (or digitally filtered or something) using various artists who show their slightly different styles and really play around with the look of the scenes. Everything is constantly moving, swaying, undulating. It's quite interesting actually.

In general I think this movie is really good. Another My Dinner with Andre type of movie, but much more fragmentary and visionary. I would recommend to any intellectual and/or philosophical type.

Rating:
Summary: DVD Features Save the Day
Review: This truly bizarre film recounts a dreamer's dream, and so many repeated "false awakenings" that, eventually, the dreamer panics and begins to believe that he may never awaken (i.e. he may be trapped in his dream state or might be experiencing the after-life). The ending of the film provides a convincing clue as to what is really happening but it takes a LONG time (about 3/4 of the way through) for the film to build any kind of dramatic tension whatsoever. At one point our hero (a zero-personality slacker-type) laments that he is trapped in a dream that "seems to go on and on endlessly" and, by that point, the viewer will feel exactly same way about the film. I could only take this film in increments of 10 to 15 minutes.

Sure, the ideas that pelt the viewer are pretty cool. Sermons about the nature of existence, time, memory, predestination, the after-life, 'lucid' dreaming, libertarianism, and constant name-dropping references to gnostic philosophers from Kierkegard to Sci-Fi icon Phillip K. Dick(!) literally bury the viewer's mind. It's one thing to show a "dream movie" that, by its plot and characters, demonstrates and hints at such ideas and quite another to present a film that ham-fistedly explains such ideas over and over and over again. Maybe a little mixing of plot, along with maybe half of the monologues, would have made this film a tad more watchable. Instead, what we get is a constant, almost haranguing, certainly tiring, barrage of explanations about philosophies and various musings from the cultural fringe. They might as well have hired the philosophers and "culturalists" themselves to blather on and on about their ideas. Gee, I guess that's exactly what they did for almost the entire film. My favorite pseudo-intellectual-guy is the monkey who drones on and on about how language is a poor medium to explain cultural phenomena(!?). What about bad film? I suppose these guys were on a limited budget (like every other Linklater film) so there's no point complaining too much.

Despite the above misgivings, though, the film is saved by the DVD format. The DVD special features, especially the sub-titled commentary to the main film, truly help the viewer understand some context to the endless monologues and provide some cover for the script-writers. Also, the visual effects are pretty unique and the techniques used here are bound to show up repeatedly in commercials and other film offerings in the future. Unfortunately, the crux of this movie's problem is that it throws too much weird animation and too many different ideas about the meaning of life at the viewer and not enough of what makes a film great: interesting characters and a diverting plot. Neither are present here. Somewhere buried in the animations and ruminations of 'Waking Life' there might be a great movie. The film-maker, however, was just too lazy or on too limited a budget to bring it out.