Waking Life is a must-see

Waking Life is an original and ambitious film about ideas and thoughts rather than plot and characters. It is a semi-filmed, semi-computer animated feature that is so heavy with words it is absolutely impossible to grasp it all the first time around. It is a must-see for anyone who enjoys using his or her brain.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's happened again: the man of a thousand negative words is writing another positive review. For such a crappy year in movies it is really ending with a bang.

This latest great film of 2001 stars Wiley Wiggins (Dazed and Confused) as a guy who's just floating through life. Never sure if he's dreaming or awake, he meets different characters who spout off their views on life and the world. There is no real plot; the movie is more of a forum for all these ideas and philosophies.

Filmed on digital video, the movie was put into a computer and each scene was basically painted to give a cutting-edge computer animated look. Each character and each section of the movie is animated in a different style; sometimes it looks like a Manet painting and other times it is just black lines and solid colors. Technically superb, this effect adds so much to the film and its dream-like quality. The backgrounds are almost never solid, and everything is floating. Also, small details are added to the characters to make their points hit home. For instance, one character is talking about how the "ongoing WOW is happening right now." As he says this, his eyes bug out, his hair frizzes up and stars explode behind his head. Anything can be done to add to what everyone is saying.

Director Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused) is coming back to familiar territory with this film. Made in the same style as Slacker, this film is composed of a bunch of disconnected characters chatting away about life. When the movie first started, I was quite disappointed. All I could think was: "This is the most pretentious piece of fecal matter ever." But slowly Linklater started to answer my questions, and the movie began to fall into place.

While I would not want to hang out with the characters in this movie, it's engaging to watch them and hear what they have to say on screen. A lot of it is "coffee shop talk," which some may find too much to handle. But if you give it a chance and really listen, you will take something away from the experience.

Linklater is very well-read, and this script is extremely dense. One character rages, "Start challenging this corporate slave state." Another character asks, "They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?"

This movie goes in a direction and takes a stance very seldom seen in this industry. It is willing to question everything people live by and force philosophies on the audience. But, somehow, it succeeds. The movie even ends up poking fun at itself. A man in a coffee shop is writing a novel, and when asked what it's about he says: "There's no story. It's just people, gestures, moments, bits of rapture, fleeting emotions. In short, the greatest story ever told." This could be just a description of the movie itself.

As you can see, the movie is filled with many ideas. Linklater explicitly dissents from the standard Hollywood format in the script and in the way the film is made. He brings up the fact that "people just don't dream anymore." He tries to answer the meaning of life and the afterlife: "I believe reincarnation is just a poetic expression of what collective memory really is."

He gives you all of these different ideas, and then one character says, "You life is yours to create." Everything seems to relate back to this main theme. Whether in a dream or in reality we must take control of who we are. We need to think for ourselves again. Don't be satisfied with what you have to do with what you're given; life is beautiful and you should take advantage of that. Another line from the movie is: "While technically I'm closer to the end of my life than I've ever been, I actually feel more than ever that I have all the time in the world."

I know there have been many quotes in this review, but there are just so many characters and so many points of view worth citing. So I will end with another quote right after telling each and every one of you to see this film. "If the world that we are forced to accept is false and nothing is true, then everything is possible."

Waking Life opens this Friday at the Charles Theatre. Check out http://www.thecharles.com for more info.