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Title: Waking Life (2001)
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| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
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Trevor Jack Brooks | ... | Young Boy Playing Paper Game |
| Lorelei Linklater | ... | Young Girl Playing Paper Game | |
| Wiley Wiggins | ... | Main Character | |
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Glover Gill | ... | Accordion Player |
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Lara Hicks | ... | Violin Player |
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Ames Asbell | ... | Viola Player |
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Leigh Mahoney | ... | Viola Player |
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Sara Nelson | ... | Cello Player |
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Jeanine Attaway | ... | Piano Player |
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Erik Grostic | ... | Bass Player |
| Bill Wise | ... | Boat Car Guy | |
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Robert C. Solomon | ... | Philosophy Professor |
| Kim Krizan | ... | Self | |
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Eamonn Healy | ... | Shape-Shifting Man |
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J.C. Shakespeare | ... | Burning Man |
Dreams. What are they? An escape from reality or reality itself? Waking Life follows the dream(s) of one man and his attempt to find and discern the absolute difference between waking life and the dreamworld. While trying to figure out a way to wake up, he runs into many people on his way; some of which offer one sentence asides on life, others delving deeply into existential questions and life's mysteries. We become the main character. It becomes our dream and our questions being asked and answered. Can we control our dreams? What are they telling us about life? About death? About ourselves and where we come from and where we are going? The film does not answer all these for us. Instead, it inspires us to ask the questions and find the answers ourselves. Written by Jeff Mellinger <jmell@uclink4.berkeley.edu>
This film, if seen by someone who has DEEPLY considered the mysteries of life, will thoroughly delight. If you don't have a spiritual bone in your body, avoid. It has its flaws, but only in retrospect or through the eyes of another will they be found--and then forgiven if you have even an ounce of heart or a particle of transcendence.
It gets beneath one's radar and past one's filters.
For instance, it hits you perceptually with constantly varying animation styles, and after some time, you adjust to this so much that when you leave the theater, THE WORLD IS ANIMATED--a poetic way of saying that your connection to the proposition that all things are real is loosen WONDERFULLY!
And then, it hits you intellectually by parading a dozen+ viewpoints of persons who would not necessarily disagree with one another, but show the vast importance to us of the personal way we manifest our philosophical axioms and how much that depends on our individual interests-not all of us are psychologically constructed to be philosophers, but all of us can be analyzed to have a philosophical set of suppositions. Waking Life challenges these suppositions by merely presenting to you, in dramatic form, persons who vividly present their `takes' on the concepts and how they are impacted by them...especially emotionally.
Ultimately, this is not a movie, and it shouldn't be viewed as such; instead, one should approach it as therapy. See it, be with it, relax, and GROW. Every time you see it again, the concepts saturate your nervous system with reinforcing patterns that will later "echo" in your dynamics in synergistic ways. A seed gets planted and with repeated viewings the seed gets watered.
Go to this event. See it from a seat that's within the first ten rows of the theater; immerse yourself. Let go. All you have to lose (loosen) is identification with a reflection of the real you.