Waking Life

Awful. One of the worst films I've ever seen. Someone else said that "Requiem For A Dream" is the film of choice for those who don't know anything about film- I'd put this in that category, too.

personally i liked Waking Life a lot--and i even found the animation to be stupid and ugly too.

can i immediately disqualify and future comments to effect of "this was like first year undergrads talking about philosophy."

I never did philosophy, so it would be somewhat foolish of me to put it down for those reasons, but I took classes in dull and vomit-inducing at the university of life and I know what's what...

;P

C'mon, at least Requiem was watchable...

Isn't it just a stoner movie for snobs?

there is a notion in the film, that of meaning-making as game, of life as slow drift through consciousness, that i like, and that I find especially pertinent to explore on film. as such i dont find the film particulary profound (it really couldn't be, since it doesnt advance a position itself), but i do think it's fun to see once or twice.

it's not that life as a dream isn't philosophically profound (at least i think it can be) it's that the film doesnt really follow up the consequences of such a thought - it just wanders off into conversation after conversation, possibility after possibility (and if i didnt think linklater was a hippy it could almost be a satire of sorts).

Oh, and when I saw this for the first time in a theater my co-worker's girlfriend found out that her completely unnotable everyday-average-guy uncle is one of the speakers. Well, at first she just thought that the animation sorta looked like him, but then we watched the credits and it was him. Pretty weird, eh?

i like stoner movies! and i pretty much like waking life, but the animation left something to be desired--specifically the fucking little literal representations of whatever people were talking about that kept popping up! terrible!

but i thought it was one of those rare movies that got better towards the end, where it started to get more nightmarish

I took my wife to see this before we got married, and it's still a sore point! I'm not joking!

Well, we liked both of them; in fact, we each have the DVDs for both.

is Dazed and Confused a stoner movie?

How stoned did you have to be to seriously ask this?

2. Individually I found some of the segments pretty interesting, though about halfway through I wished that they'd taken it to the Cartoon Network and said, "can we just break this up into chunks and air it on Adult Swim?" It seemed like there wasn't any arc to the story anyway, and it almost felt like it would have *benefitted* from commercial interruption (in that it would have given you a little time to think about the discussion that had just transpired before launching into the next one)...

The problem here is that they did testing of it well before shooting the film proper (the test film they did is a bonus feature on the DVD). Also, I think that the way that the animation makes the background move tends to evoke the dreamscape far better than any live action ever could.

Individually I found some of the segments pretty interesting, though about halfway through I wished that they'd taken it to the Cartoon Network and said, "can we just break this up into chunks and air it on Adult Swim?" It seemed like there wasn't any arc to the story anyway, and it almost felt like it would have *benefitted* from commercial interruption (in that it would have given you a little time to think about the discussion that had just transpired before launching into the next one)...

Well, maybe so, but the film, I feel, fights the urges towards ebbs and flows mostly by mixing up different people's approaches. While there were a few mini-lectures strung together towards the beginning (the only place where you could keep any attention towards them at all), for the most part each section is vastly different from the two bookending it. This, for me, tends to shift my approaches. I think that the boredom effect often comes more from the monotony that occasionally occurs WITHIN certain scenes, for which your "Adult Swim" suggestion would offer no respite. But that's inevitable - certain talking heads and animation styles used in conjunction with them are simply going to be more fascinating than others. And certain subject matters will be more interesting to individuals than others.

The more fascinating thing I wonder about is that most peoples best/worst lists for this film are completely unique to themselves. So in that sense the viewing pleasures and agonies are more personal and variegated than the average film.

For an aesthetically similar technique within one story line, I think that Tape succeeds admirably.