Rating: 
Summary: Short review
Review: This is the stupidest movie ever. If you have not seen it you are not even worth talking to. You do not exist!
Rating:
Summary: People HATE what they don't understand.
Review: The main objections that people have to this movie are two-fold:
1) the dialogue is pretentious.
2) the dialogue is boring.I will attempt to explain why they think that: First off, the dialogue snippets are INDEED accurate. Linklater went through great pains to not only get ACCURACY, but more importantly, BREVITY so that a WIDE SCOPE OF IDEAS could be crammed into ONE MOVIE. That means only a FEW MINUTES for each POINT OF VIEW. Just think about the ENORMOUS task of breaking down Sartre's 900 Page, Nobel Prize winning masterpiece down to a 12 minute monologue - trying to retain the BREADTH of his meaning, and without giving a bastardized representation. That means that some fancy words and dialogue have to be ASSUMED on the audience's part [SORRY, no time to explain EVERYTHING - we've only got a few minutes of airtime], and that's where the PRETENTIOUSNESS comes from. that's what people are COMPLAINING ABOUT, since they DIDN'T UNDERSTAND IT - it all went TOO FAST. Well here's the thing: it's not possible for most of us to understand it. Unless you've read the text before watching the movie, and 95% of us haven't, you're not going to know what's going on. It is DIFFICULT ENOUGH to understand Sartre in an entire SEMESTER of lectures, let alone to make full sense of it in a cartoon movie. Still, I think Linklater did an excellent job considering the obstacles against him. The portion that he tried to show was a great choice: people misunderstand existentialism to be about DEPRESSION AND HOPELESSNESS. Sartre did not want that. He said that **WE** must TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for our own actions, up to US to make our own lives better. Your answers to life are NOT in this movie. But what you will find is the affirmation that you are NOT ALONE when you have these thoughts about life. Because we don't discuss these things at work, or talk to our family and friends too often about it, doesn't mean that they aren't important to us. These are the thoughts that are in the periphery of our minds in passing moments, or the ones that keep us awake at night when we're alone - but we aren't alone. Other people out there THINK TOO. DON'T BUY THIS MOVIE IF:
1) if you're not constantly questioning the purpose of life, or if you think you've got it all figured out.
2) if you think that PRETENTIOUSNESS people are the ones that talk about things that YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND... Because the truth of the matter is... if you truly KNOW something about these people, then you will LOVE this movie. anyone can easily REVERSE NAMEDROP [dropping names to give the FALSE impression that they're knowledgeable, only to DISMISS THEM]. The concepts of some of these thinkers are very hard to grasp and it's EASIER for people to just call them boring or pretentious. Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's GOOD, but it CERTAINLY doesn't mean it's BAD either.
Most of you who didn't like it, i'm afraid have missed the point [Just take a look at your horrendous spelling skills as one rubric of intelligence].
Rating: 
Summary: My Dinner With Anime
Review: Trippy and incisive or visually irritating and pretentious? Half-empty or half-full? Richard Linklater's unique rotoscoped treatise on the Meaning Of Life seems to polarize its reviewers like night and day. If you like neat little tied-up Hollywood endings prefaced by neon signs flashing plot points along the way, you are likely to find this one a snoozefest. If you go into this one with an open mind and an objective philosophical stance, you'll find it at least mildly engaging, and never boring. The fact that the film suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder is what makes it most interesting to this reviewer. Try this at home: Pop this film in the player while you're watching your favorite commercial TV program. During the spot breaks, instead of hitting 'mute' or surfing channels, watch "Waking Life" in 3 to 5 minute serialized segments. It all suddenly makes much more sense, doesn't it? It all boils down to perception (and I believe that's the point of the film).
Rating:
Summary: another take
Review: i think most reviews of movies like this focus on the wrong thing. this is a film for a discriminating taste - one which appreciates irony, and one which is also capable of separating substance from diatribe. i see jim carrey movies as pretentious, not movies like this. 'my dinner with andre' had a further reach of accessability than this film - anyone with half a BA and half a sense of humor will love this trip to death.
Rating:
Summary: Psychological and theoretical thoughts, w/out reading books
Review: This movie is fun to watch when you are in a very theoretical and psychological mood. It jumps from section to section of how people think, to why people think, to why even think. The movie is kinda hard to watch, because of the background moving all the time, but you will get used to it. It is a good movie to own if you want to weird out one of your friends or yourself. I'd suggest renting it before you buy it, just on the fact that this movie is not for everyone.
Rating: 
Summary: What a disappointment
Review: Hey, I love cartoons & old comics & graphic novels. I love Kierkegaard & Sartre & Schopenhauer & Norman O. Brown & Rupert Sheldrake. I love playing with Adobe photoshop, especially the Artistic Filters. And I really think Slacker was one of the major breakthrough films of the last 50 years. So I think I may know where Richard Linklater was coming from when he made this movie. But I don't understand what happened. The animation concept was fantastic, but the result is horrendous. What's with the weird expressionless eyes that shift out of register in every frame (as does just about every other element in this amateurish & ugly pic)? The long shots look like they used a totally different animation technique from the close-ups. Worst of all, though is the adolescent drivel drooling (or sometimes sputtering) out of the mouths of the "characters". Slacker was funny because everyone was spouting a different "personal" philosophy (or "life-take"). Here you get the kind of theoretical brain showers adolescents experience when doing their first joint. BIG MISTAKE.
Rating:
Summary: Empty, but Fascinating
Review: A philosophical young man (Wiley Wiggins) wanders through a dream state of animated types who ramble on about life and other abstract topics. The speakers range from average women chatting in a cafe about time and aging to spaced-out wizards and nice, cultured professors in their dens. Some of the topics discussed are dreadfully boring; many are plain ridiculous, and some are casually intriguing. Much of the film is wildly funny in a comic, absurdist way. It's intended as a grab bag of ideas and concepts to try out and take on or throw back into the bin--all the same, we're interested. It's Linklater's most irritatingly brainy and frustrating film as well as his most risky; like his others, it's alive and pulsing with thoughts--everyone is constantly thinking. At times the whole thing feels like intellectual psychobabble pushed to the extreme, a psychobabble casserole, if you will, and I thought of Woody Allen's quote from Annie Hall about mental masturbation. Ten years from now, however, I have the feeling it will feel like those old, dated underground films from the 1960's that were once so visionary and are now so very boring. If nothing else, though, the sheer visual look of Waking Life is unbelievably interesting, which is helpful since it allows us to get lost in the pictures whenever we get bored with the dialogue.
Rating:
Summary: hmmmm . . .
Review: Waking Life was a horrid dissapointment. It was trite and dull -- the whole movie was like listening in on the ponderously introspective conversations of suedo-bohemian yuppies in starbucks. Those people who hear a lot of interesting names and theories and then repeat them as if they had a clue what they were talking about. It's the kind of movie to watch if you want to SOUND smart without doing any thinking on your own. It's not a thinking man's movie, it's a people who like to think they're thinking men's movie.
Now you say, "Well, why rate the movie four stars and then rank on it so?" Simply because the animation is astounding. It's fluid and beautiful -- slipping styles seemlessly. The only clever humor (the only clever anything) comes in through the animation. It is really worth suffering the bordome of false intellectualism to see this animation.
Rating:
Summary: Waking Life--Mind Trip
Review: This movie is extremely strange, and certainly catches one off guard with the unorthodox animation. Shot on equipment many people have in their own homes, the many vignettes were then animated by artists who colored over the original live footage. The animation pulses (not the cold ueber-realistic 3D kind, nor the flat expressionless cartoon kind), deeply individualistic--and sometimes borders on the weird, as when a chimpanzee gives a lecture. Deeply thoughtful, often shocking, this movie is eerily reminiscent of a half-conscious five A.M. dream--the main character wanders (and sometimes floats) around speaking to decidely strange characters who spout off about life, music, the dream state. This is a brilliant movie--but only if one allows it to be. Some of the intense philosophical discussion can be wearing (even boring) if one doesn't pay attention and get into the spirit of the thing.
Rating:
Summary: Get it, rent it, it's too much fun not to
Review: I've read some of the negative reviews and I want to stick up for this fantastic film. The only parts that are spoon-fed to you surround the character's growing awareness of the dream, the actual plot line. There is some beautiful, rewarding thought in this movie and drawing out the path of the conversations--why this guy comes before that guy--is a gratifying exploration of theme and ideology. The first half hour alone justifies this movie ever being made. I feel those that didn't get it were used to a spoon-feeding extravaganza of a blockbuster bent or simply don't get turned on by humanistic existentialism and a little thrashing of post-modernism.
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