Waking Life Streaming
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Waking Life Streaming.
Movie Title: Waking Life Waking Life is available for streaming or downloading. |
Richard Linklater is one of the vast independent directors working today. No matter what you believe of his work, you cannot narrate that he is an unique direct. I don’t like all his movies, but I invariably survey forward to trying out each unique one. Waking Life is one of the suited ones.
To initiate with, its very existence is a tag of this man’s imagination. He films the whole thing and edits it into a feature. Now at this point, most directors would judge their film finished. But not Rick Linklater. No, now he gives it to Bob Sabiston at LineResearch to totally mask over with rotoscoping animation using Sabiston’s beget software. So, basically, he’s made two films in one. And we’re the luckier for it.
If you’ve seen Slacker, you’ll be familiar with the style. In that film, one scene blends into another through the exercise a minor character from one scene (often no more than a walk-on) becoming the focus of the next scene. Well, here the blend is not so logical. Several scenes appear to be dreams from which our hero (played by Wiley Wiggins from Dazed and Confused) awakens at the demolish. Only even his awakening appears to be portion of the dream. Eventually, he realizes that he is not really waking up, and this begins to disturb him. (How to sigh when you’re dreaming–and beget the most of it–becomes the subject of one conversation.) But he continues to meet up with people, often trying to interrupt their monologues with his maintain questions about his dilemma. Until he finally runs into a guy playing pinball (Linklater) who tells him simply to “wake up.”
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But does he?
Animating this film was the best thought Linklater had. Often one’s mind wanders during these characters’ monologues (several of them unprejudiced aren’t that enthralling), but the animation surrounding them keeps your interest. It not only saves the film, but makes it better. It transcends itself. Instead of becoming Slacker meets My Dinner with Andre, it turns into art–that rarest of creatures, cinematic art.
Conversations that would be as unimaginative as a dormitory-kitchen knife are enlivened. Concepts not understood become graspable through the exhaust of illustrative drawings. Even the actors themselves (primarily amateurs including several professors from the University of Texas at Austin) are shown in a fresh light through the eyes of the animators. (One wonders what they idea of the animators’ taking license with their likenesses.) My favorites were the “human interaction” scene, the “holy moment” scene, the tale told in the bark, and the above “pinball” scene, where Linklater tells the film’s most enthralling yarn about Phillip K. Dick’s discovery after writing one of his novels.
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Have your possess “holy moment” and immerse yourself in the dream world of Waking Life.
(Notice on the DVD: This baby is loaded. Making ofs, interviews, several commentaries, and a very compelling bright short film called “Snack and Drink” featuring an autistic boy. Very educational regarding the process of bringing this movie through its paces and very inspiring as well. Well worth the stamp.)
Richard Linklater calls this a “movie about ideas,” and it is indeed unlike most movies. It has only the slightest semblance of a site. 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 steady thoughts from tantalizing street philosophers like Race 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 quick-witted dreaminess of the ideas. Linklater’s animation technique, which uses computers to paint on top of live digital video footage, is objective upright for this film. It is as conclude as I’ve ever seen to having visuals actually embody the ideas being expressed verbally by the characters. A original, titillating alternative to the documentary as a visual medium for ideas, and impartial as credible an advance as that of, say, David Lynch, for reproducing the sensation of dream. The animation awakens the reality objective 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.
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