Waking Life
by Bob Sabiston, Richard Linklater
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DVD details
Actor: Ethan Hawke, Glover Gill, Lorelei Linklater, Trevor Jack Brooks, Wiley WigginsDirector: Bob Sabiston, Richard Linklater
Brand: WIGGINS,WILEY
Writer: Richard Linklater
Producer: Anne Walker-McBay
Producer: Caroline Kaplan
Producer: John Sloss
Producer: Jonah Smith
Producer: Jonathan Sehring
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Anamorphic, Animated, Color, Dolby, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 100 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-05-07
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Product features:
- Condition: New
- Format: DVD
- Anamorphic; Animated; Subtitled; Color; Dolby; NTSC
DVD Reviews of Waking Life
DVD Review: Get to the end, and maybe start over
Summary: 3 Stars
This film reminded me to obey an important maxim: you should not write a review of a film that you have only watched the first fifteen minutes of, unless, of course, the film is fifteen minutes long. And this film is much longer than fifteen minutes--much longer. Like other reviewers here, within the first minutes, I started writing a review in my head because I immediately disliked this film--didn't hate it (after all, it did occassionally have some interesting animation)--but was aesthetically repulsed by it's monotone cerebral rambling. It's like the mouth of some really boring philosophy PhD. is a baton that is passed from one "animated" character to the next, and as soon as the mouth of the new character opens, the same in-session bookish dissertation is continued unabated, dull character to dull--well, at best, semi-dull characters.
In my disgruntled state early on while watching this film, my armchair movie critic hat came on right away, and I immediately started to compare it to "My Dinner with Andre"--that wonderfully successful filmed philosophical conversation which, at the same time, also contained so much passion and humanity--qualities which the "Waking Life" is mostly devoid of. "Andre" was a story weighted with strong characters, with a beginning and a middle and an end, with rising action, humorous diversions, pathos, love, fear, a climax, and great moments of human-tethered insight and inspiration, all within a simple dinner conversation. It was a tour de force of philosophical musing by two very human characters grappling with great ideas within the confines of their own disappointments and highest aspirations. "Waking Life," on the other hand, is suspended effluvia--some well-wrought ideas salvaged from the philosophical literature that ride in the airy upper recesses of the scholarly cerebrum. These are characters who move through their world with their bodies doing a lot of walking and gesturing, but with their minds carried around on a neverending, and very verbose, speculation meathook. My eyes glazed, my hearing stopped--it's like when some sophmore aquaintance sits down at lunch with you and is spitting out some grandeloquent diatribe that got stimulated by a class, or a paper, or an episode of Star Trek. He's throwing things out with some newly unfettered verbal confidence and a newfound intellectual bicep, tossing in quotes from Kant and Satre and Kierkegaard, in one long heady monologue, and you've stopped trying to follow his train of thought as you sit there, arms crossed, smiling patronizingly. And while he wildly articulates his grand ideas, you are desperately calculating when and how to excuse yourself from this benedicto elucidatum.
This film's dream also stimulated a comparison in my mind to that famous case in the psychological literature of the man who lived with a metal spike that had accidentally gone through his brain, and parts of his consciousness became thereby separated. This movie's dream would be that man's lucid left brain dream, with all his intellectual, rational left brain synapses firing but butting up against the spike and falling back in upon themselves only on the rational left side, never intercoursing with the right side of the brain--the side of the soul and the emotions and the personality. This dream is populated with a few latent remnants of the right side--the templates of character and storyline, but templates now only infused with content from the left ganglia. Spock might have liked this dream. It was an alien dream to me. I don't know the dream in this movie. I know dreams about being chased, about realizing I've gone to class naked, about falling but not hitting the ground, and about unfinished passion with Uma Thurman. The dream in this movie is like some dis-sensational librarian's purgatory.
Well, patience is a virtue, they say, and this is a film for the virtuous. It gets someplace, but it takes a long time getting there, and in the long getting-there, it acquires a certain pace, a certain timing. You don't even really need to listen closely to what the expounders are saying, you just need to catch their rythm, because it's the rythm of the film that goes to the higher place, and when it finally arrives at some very entertaining heights, at that point, you will really listen and catch a few mind expanders. In the end, the getting there may be worth it. My advice is to not try too hard to follow all the philosophizing. You'll eventually lock on later in the movie, or maybe, just at the end, which is all you really need. Then after finishing it once, you might be inclined to review the film and lock in better with what's being said during second and third viewings.
It's not the great philosophical, experiential film that "My Dinner with Andre" is--which you must see if you haven't (and actually, you don't even have to watch "Andre," you can with equal enjoyment, just listen to it--which is another very telling contrast between these two very different, but goal-similar films). "Waking Life" is what it is--something different, something attempted--and it's well enough to just allow it to be what it is and enjoy it despite the pain of first encounter. Whereas "Andre" is the chuckle and the "OM" of the wisened guru, "Waking Life" is the clever new mantra of the cute new priest--a new song which is rewarded by the guru with a wide loving smile and the enlightened affirmation, "not that, not that."
Description of Waking Life
From the director of Slacker and Dazed and Confused comes one of the most imaginative animated features ever made. This funny, ingenious film, which Rolling Stone Magazine calls "nothing short of amazing," explores the fascinating question: "Are we sleep-walking through our waking state or wake- walking through our dreams"? Join Wiley Wiggins as he searches for answers to lifes most important questions in a world that may or may not be reality in the "most visually alive movie of the year." (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times)Waking Life is a film that never settles down. Or maybe it never wakes up. Regardless, Richard Linklater's animated meditation seems to strike a perfect balance between the plotless meanderings of Slacker and the unquenchable knowledge-seeking of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Any way you look at it, this is a weird, original movie.
As he attempts to figure out what separates dreams from reality, the protagonist (Dazed and Confused's Wiley Wiggins) hears an earful from everyone he stumbles upon. Ramblings range from the scholarly (Linklater's former college professor Robert C. Solomon gives a monologue) to the banal (of which there are plenty). Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Steven Soderbergh, and Adam Goldberg all get animated cameos, basically playing themselves. The dream-centered dialogues eventually grow mind-numbing, but that's OK; the animation steals the show. Each frame of the movie, which was first shot with live actors, was painted over, and the process renders a distorted and trippy collage of sights and sounds. Linklater's film is ultimately quite poignant, but, as with any good journey, you'll need to sit through some fairly tedious moments before reaching the destination. --Jason Verlinde
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