Waking Life

Okay, I know the one or two readers of this blog were expecting a riveting dissertation on what a crapass movie Catwoman is, but since the rapture, I was blessed with the viewing of an outright terrible film, Waking Life. Now, when this movie first came out, the reviews were through the roof, it was almost like an ass kissing festival. Wait, I got a better one. It was like listening to John Madden talk about Brett Favre. Directed and written by Richard Linklater, Waking Life is about an unnamed young man in a persistent lucid dream-like state. He initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions of issues such as reality, free will, the relationship of the subject with others, and the meaning of life. Along the way the film touches on other topics including existentialism, situationist politics, post humanity, the film theory of André Bazin, and lucid dreaming itself.

More then half the movie seems more like spoken word. The thing I personally never liked about spoken word, is it's monotonous droning that whoever is reciting it tends to use. To put this in a film is a terrible choice. The entire film seems contrived. I guess back in 2001 when it first came out, it was very impressive due to the animation. It uses a type of rotoscoping. I read somewhere that it used primarily off the shelf apple computers of the day. It then used the program Rotoshop exclusively. I thought that was pretty neat, but I'm a computer geek, so I would. The other impressive thing about the film was the sountrack. The Waking Life OST was performed and written by Glover Gill and the Tosca Tango Orchestra, except for one piece of Frédéric Chopin's that was used. The soundtrack was relatively successful. Featuring the Nuevo tango style, it bills itself "the 21st Century Tango." The tango contributions were influenced by the music of the Argentine "father of new tango" Ástor Piazzolla. The actual tango scores are revised renditions of Ástor Piazzolla's works. The music is very haunting. Completely done in an off tune type of way, it sticks with you for a while after seeing this film.

To describe this movie as a cerebral experience is just nonsense, It's mostly a demonstration of, 'look how smart I am' with its use of large , elaborate words that are thrown in to make the writer(s) appear intellectual. If you are confronted with the option to watch this movie or watch the grass grow, pick the latter, for that is a far more interesting waste of an hour and a half. I would like to thank Wikipedia for some of the information in this post.