>Be me
>At Dimple Records
>Planned on purchasing 'Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar'
>In line, see a gorgeous clerk
>Looks like Cybill Sheperd 
>Long ass line
>Finally the penultimate person at the front of the line
>I take that back, she looks more like Ingrid Bergman
>Hear her mention her favorite director - Richard Linklater
>Get nervous
>Spaghetti falls out of my pockets 
>I run out of line, nearly slipping on the spaghetti
>Picked up 'Waking Life', trying to impress her with my taste in film
>Discard the Disney masterpiece
>Line is shorter when I get back in
>Getting more nervous
>Start farting
>Shouldn't have eaten Taco Bell for breakfast
>See her laugh at her co-worker 
>Her smile is…

I briefly checked the letterbox'd page for this before deciding on whether or not to watch it and glanced at the top review - "The most pretentious film ever made" - it solemnly says, half a star. Interest is piqued. The synopsis says "A man shuffles through a dream meeting various people and discussing the meanings and purposes of the universe", erection rising, well, whatever could this film be.

Linklater ramps up his desultory magnetizm to the highest level of his career, the oneiric nausea is tantalizing and palpable, the rotoscoped directory creating waves of surreality and somnambulant endearment that create the absolute essence of batshit insanity aka the human kaleidoscopic dream. The number one rule of lucid dreaming they…

Like the picture itself, I’m just going to convey some of my impressions really quickly. The untitled main character of Waking Life finds himself in a perpetual state of lucid dreaming, but it soon becomes clear that the dream he’s stuck in is no ordinary one: this is the dream, one that will change everything about the way he perceives, experiences and directs his life once he finally wakes up from it (if ever). It consists of brief separate conversations between himself and random figures who shoot philosophical thoughts at him, ranging from abstract existentialism to more accessible life-choice analyses. We see our protagonist evolve, learning to control his dream and take a more prominent stance in it. Whereas the…

70/100

Third viewing, first since 2002. A lot has happened to me since then, dreamwise—I now have occasional lucid dreams*, which had never happened to me back then, and have also experienced multiple consecutive false awakenings, which really is disturbing as hell. (The factoid mentioned here about adjusting light levels is 100% true, by the way. When I suspect that I'm still dreaming, after seeming to awaken in my bed, I head for the bathroom and try to turn on the light, which never works and usually wakes me up instantly for real. What's more, the house is always darker than it should be, though it's hard to perceive that in the moment.) So I identified more with Wiggins' feeling…

I can basically sum this up as "not my cup of tea".

For as fascinating as some of the ideas and beautiful the style were, a lot of it gets pretty tiring and borderline obnoxious with both of those very things.

But as much as I hated watching most of this (I considered shutting it off around the end of the first act), I do admit that it does improve itself as it goes along (the conversation between the main character and a red haired girl is worth watching the rest of the film for) and the final moments do offer some genuinely interesting insight into the world around us and will say that I do think it's worth watching…

By far Linklater’s most peculiar project, ‘Waking Life’ tailors around the experiences of an unnamed main character who journeys through the dreamland via lucid dreaming. On his mind-bending journey, he encounters a roster of strange individuals whom question the values of life and the philosophical and existential ideologies that come with it: life and death, free will and determinism; notions that linger forever in the human mind. 

Through Linklater’s mesmerising, life-like animation, we become the dreamer; with his thoughts becoming ours. He merely exists in his dreamworld, listening to the rambles of those he encounters; the philosophical and the victimised, the rational and the irrational. He doesn’t challenge what he hears but just listens - his curiosity manifesting into a…