Waking Life
I’m trying to do a “survive without listening to music until France” competition against myself. And there surely is no better measure against the urge of listening to music than watching a film.
I wonder if Linklater is a person who talks all day – or never talks. Somehow I can’t imagine the middle thing, because it seems all his films seem to involve lots of talking; even more than that: dialogues are the essence of his films and no interesting animation or pictures can ever change that.
The main merits of the film are not the dialogues in my opinion, but the artistical merit of the animation. But, the animation leaves me with nothing to say besides that I like it; the dialogues however are much more interesting for me personally.
I guess one of my problems is that I don’t know much about existentialism – and if I knew something about it, I would probably find the conversations about it not deep and well-thought enough. Take the conversation about free will: I understood everything and could easily follow because I’ve been there with those thoughts; existentialism however is completely new to me, and this film definitely is not a good introduction to the topic.
Aside from that, I found the way those people spoke with each other quite memorable: No thought is really developed, the story jumps from one conversation to another, and inmidst of a conversation, the people jump from one topic to another. Well, it’s a dream after all, but I tend to expect a certain structure when it comes to complicated thoughts which is more or less missing in this film.
There are quite a lot of citations that are so true, such as “I think that what we don’t take into account when we’re young is our endless curiosity.” However, it’s just two women talking about it, without elaborating or explaining what it means, why it is like that or why it might be critical, and which (huge!) consequences this fact results in. Most of the philosophical talking seems descriptive rather than doubtful to me, what an easy way out. *g* Since I tend to prefer “why” questions over “how” questions, it might be a reason why I never have conversations like in the film myself?
By the way, the endless amount of conversation makes me feel like I have been watching the film for two hours already even though only 40 minutes have passed. Who knows, maybe a 5-hours-marathon of “Waking Life” will cure me from my sickness of always wanting somebody to talk to *hrr hrr*
“Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear or laziness?” I’d say it’s stupidity, really XD
In sum, I totally approve with the film and it was good that I fully knew what I had to expect from it. I also fully enjoyed the soundtrack. The only sad thing is that I actually had hoped for a little bit more of ‘screen tme’ for Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.
PS. We watched 25th Hour today. I think I never watched a film again so fast, and this time, it made me want to live in New York – interesting, eh? When we visited New York when I was 9, I hated the city. I found it ugly and dirty, and I felt like I can’t see the sky because of those huge buildings. But now, I’m kind of interested…
What I didn’t realize so clearly when I watched the film the first time was what made me so fascinated about the film: the way people lied to each other. If trust determines a friendship (or a love relationship which is, to me, just a part of a friendship and not the other way around), then how should one handle the question about when one ‘should’ lie to your true friends? More than everything else, that’s probably what makes 25th Hour so special to me because I have yet to see a film that raises this particular, so simple question.
“On really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.”
:love:
the first band practice sequence was so wonderful.
I loved the art style of this film, not to mention the off-kilter soundtrack (it seems to know when it’s appropriate in a scene to have no background music playing at all too). As for the themes and ideas…I found them interesting, some more than others but overall felt a bit frustrated by the ‘whistlestop tour’ through modern takes on philosophy. I think that if I were an expert rather than an overly curious movie fan I might have found that it didn’t go in-depth enough.
Still, this is supposed to be a movie, not a documentary for philosophy students so it succeeds in what it sets out to do – which is to be an interesting movie that makes you think. In fact it’s possibly the film that, more than any other I’ve yet seen, has made me think for ages about it afterwards. Leaving that cool rotoscoping effect to one side, it presents us with so much food for thought about so many topics.
It’s kinda hard to believe that this all comes from the same guy who did School of Rock! If you like the visual style and direction BTW, I highly recommend A Scanner Darkly. It’s so faithful to the novel that it’s eerie! Another awesome Linklater effort.
Hey Martin, it’s nice to see that you’ve found here! I hope my rantings are interesting to you in a way or another (you will easily see that there are better and worse ‘reviews’ – I don’t exactly spend much time on structure and wording or anything, it’s mainly just some first impresions.)
The soundtrack is absolutely gorgeous, of course, now that you mention it. Usually, I perceive the soundtrack as a really important element of a film, but in this case I think I haven’t spoken about it because I was so immersed into the topics the people talked about.
“Whistlestop tour” is exactly the word I was searching for: Philosophical ideas need time and space to develop and these are just tidbits; and that’s not really doing justice to the complex questions that the film raises. Even though it’s interesting to see it as a ‘collage of questions’ without getting too deep into the answers, it bugged me. Also, the film has gotten me really interested in these topics, I should dig some books about them.
I will definitely keep an eye on “A Scanner Darkly” – and I only know School of Rock by name, but I did get the impression that it’s refreshingly different from his usual work. Linklater and comedy somehow does not sound right together, heh.