Waking Life [HD]

A triumph
Richard Linklater is one of the great independent directors working today. No matter what you think of his work, you cannot deny that he is an original voice. I don't like all his movies, but I invariably look forward to trying out each new one. Waking Life is one of the good ones.

To start with, its very existence is a sign of this man's imagination. He films the whole thing and edits it into a feature. Now at this point, most directors would consider their film finished. But not Rick Linklater. No, now he gives it to Bob Sabiston at LineResearch to totally cover over with rotoscoping animation using Sabiston's own 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 use 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...

Ideal late-night college hallway conversation
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...

Extraordinary feast of images and ideas
No movie that I have ever seen contains such an overwhelming abundance of ideas. Good ideas. Penetrating ideas. Ideas about life, reality, the meaning of existence, and lots and lots of ideas about dreams. Linklater must have been a philosophy major at the University of Texas. I say this partly because of the sheer abundance of philosophical explorations of a huge variety of topics, but the presence of actual University of Texas philosophers. I spotted two with whom I am familiar (Louis Mackey, author of one of the best books on Kierkegaard and who portrayed the "Old Anarchist" in SLACKER, and Robert C. Solomon, a prolific publisher of books on a variety of philosophical topics).

But I don't mean to mislead someone and intimate that this is a movie that solely addresses the head, and not the imagination or the heart. It does. Visually, this is one of the most remarkable films I have ever seen. Most individuals anticipating seeing the film are probably already...

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