Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Waking Life - 2001

My love for movies has a touch of schizophrenia to it I think; because I have a love-hate relationship with Hollywood and the whole movie making machine. I've had this attitude even before attending classes on cinema and studying the industry a bit, so it's not simply a matter of familiarity breeding contempt; though there is fertile ground for contempt there. The most likely thing I can attribute this to is a disdain for falseness or pretense. The lies and falseness of many celebrities, the scratch your back mentality of movie financing, and the pretentious nature of many films and the festivals that host them. I feel like a bigoted crack addict at times. I love the product that comes out of the movie industry, but I don't care for how we often come by it.

So I was set to dislike this film, I had only looked it up because of my love for animation. It had the earmarks of a pretentious film, as it professes to have no real theme or plot while exploring philosophical ideas about dreams and the purpose of life. Too often in films this means somebody pushing their own ideas upon us. Add to this the use of rotoscoping to achieve the animation; I suspected somebody had found a new toy to play with and was foisting their experiment with this tool as a film gimmick.

If you need a movie to have a concrete plot and a clearly defined meaning, this isn't your cup of tea. In fact you may be left with the notion there was no meaning to the film at all, because it doesn't try to push one on you. I think the pretention I suspected is present after all, but I had to look for it and it's a quality of a couple of the characters not the film itself. Instead, questions are posed for you and you are invited to largely find your own meanings and answers. You won't find a neat little package of someone elses answers, and if you are at all inquisitive about some of the ideas brought up you won't find your experience complete when the movie is done.

The DVD extras prompted me to learn more about the producer, director, and art director. I learned that the rotoscoping technique they had developed was not in fact new to them. In watching the movie, the technique is absolutely essential to the story, the dreamlike quality it lends is almost it's own character in the film.

SPOILER!! One of the sequences in the film involves a man dousing himself with gasoline and setting himself ablaze, in protest of man's inability to affect real change in the face of authority. This is a reference to the public self immolation of the Buddhist monk Quang Duc, in protest of the US backed South Vietnamese government, their persecution of the Buddhist religion and grossly overt favoritism of Roman Catholicism. Having read Stanley Karnow's Vietnam-A History I was familiar with this and was prompted to revisit the history of the event; Wikipedia gives an appropriately gruesome account of the incident. This allusion is appropriate on many levels, especially pointing out our interconnectedness and directly refuting the powerlessness we fear.

The movie is chock-a-block with references like this, and a cornucopia of unique quotes; I'm sure to be annoying my friends with many of them soon!

On the surface, this may strike you as just another exposition of how we are all a molecule in the fingernail of some other immensely more significant being. But at the very least it lends food for thought in an entertaining fashion. After all, aren't we all just the sum of our thoughts?

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