WAKING LIFE (DVD) Dir: Richard Linklater

Ever get the feeling that, rather than participating in a social reality, you're merely part of one extensive consensual hallucination? What type of existential crises would that create, especially during harrowing periods of wartime and waking, when the dream seems over? Or, as one of the many colorful (literally) street philosophers asks in Richard Linklater's woefully underrated, Waking Life, are we sleepwalking through our lives or wake-walking through our dreams? These tangled theses are at the heart of Linklater's continuing exegesis on cultures above, below and outside of the mainstream, but this time he's achieved a visual majesty unheard of in the days of Slacker and Dazed and Confused. While the last remnants of Generation X try to shake off the New Economy's master failure, Linklater's Waking Life has been busy expanding that generation's more talkative political promise, building grand designs with big words only to tear them down in the end by setting his protagonist, Wiley Wiggins, adrift toward an eternal loneliness. And while some may tire of the film's extended conversations, others may simply blink and lament the long-lost days when people talked about things other than who wore what to the Oscars, who married a millionaire, and who had sex with who in the White House.
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