but she's a girl...

Waking Life

We watched a great DVD on Saturday: 'Waking Life', directed by Richard Linklater. For a start, the visuals are really stunning. Linklater shot the entire film with real actors on film, and then got animators and artists to paint over every frame of the film. The scenery shimmers and sways, and the characters have subtly shifting features, emphasising their words and enhancing the weird, dream-like feeling.

The plot—such as it is—concerns our hero who is dreaming, and encountering various thinkers, artists and philosophers along the way, who explain various concepts, vent their rage or otherwise rabbit on about stuff. At various points, the hero thinks that he has woken up, but later realises that he has just woken into another dream.

Now, I'm a die-hard empiricist, and I consequently often get very frustrated with hard-core philosopical concepts; if you can't falsify a hypothesis by testing it, what's the point in asking the question? Nevertheless, I have a kind of 'rabbit in the headlights' fascination for philosophy. Some of the ideas raised in the film were gripping, some were a bit vague, and others sounded uncannily like pretentious waffle. Part of the appeal of the film was in wanting to watch the whole thing again, just to work out which question was which. It's certainly not a run of the mill film, and well worth a watch. Depending on your outlook (or how much alcohol you've consumed), you'll probably think that it's the best or worst film you've ever seen.