Waking Life

Last night I decided to watch "Waking Life," a film by Richard Linklater ("Dazed and Confused," "School of Rock"). It's a sort of animated film using rotoscope, meaning that it was shot with actors and then animated over.

The film stars Wiley Wiggins (Mitch Kramer in "Dazed and Confused") as the Dreamer. The movie basically follows the Dreamer from one conversation to the next, making it comparable to Linklater's "Slacker" or even "Dazed and Confused." Wiggin's character is involved in some of the conversations, while the other he seems to be watching from afar, which is something common in dreams. The movie is a dream from beginning to end, featuring false awakenings and surrealistic moments. The Dreamer wants to wake up, but finds that he keeps going deeper into his lucid dream.

The overall reality is strange in this movie. For example, one character talks about the human body being mostly water while water starts to fill up his outline. Another character becomes redder and redder as he becomes angrier.

The conversations range in their topics, including lucid dreaming, existentialism, and even politics. Many of the conversations were interesting to listen to, but not all of them stick as Linklater throws each one at you, one after the other. The one that really stuck with me featured Julie Deply and Ethan Hawke playing their characters from "Before Sunrise." In this scene, they touch upon dreams and life after death, and the connection between the two topics.

 I think that the movie is well made and interesting and leaves us with some interesting concepts and ideas, which movies should do, but I feel that it goes on for too long and some scenes were boring enough that they could have been cut out entirely. "Waking Life" would have made been better as a series of shorts in my opinion.

Here's one scene that I really enjoyed (the man with the ukelele is the part I am talking about).

And here's the trailer.

"8 1/2": Inspiration for Terry Gilliam's "Brazil"

While I may have not seen the entirety of Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, upon reading the chapter on it in Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique, the first thought that popped into my head was, "I think I've seen this before." Terry Gilliam's 1985 cult classic Brazil is remarkably alike from both a stylistic and thematic standpoint.

According to its imdb.com storyline synopsis, Brazil is about the following:

Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is a harried technocrat in a futuristic society that is needlessly convoluted and inefficient. He dreams of a life where he can fly away from technology and overpowering bureaucracy, and spend eternity with the woman of his dreams. While trying to rectify the wrongful arrest of one Harry Buttle, Lowry meets the woman he is always chasing in his dreams, Jill Layton. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy has fingered him responsible for a rash of terrorist bombings, and both Sam and Jill's lives are put in danger.

While this may not sound so much like Fellini's classic, the main point of each movie is ultimately the same: a man is entangled within his dreams. Both films make use of vivid and often extensive dream sequences from the mind of the main character to illustrate his deeper desires. Guido, the star of 8 1/2, and Sam both have visions "of a beautiful girl in white [that] hold out an illusory promise of salvation and release from his mental stagnation" (Closely Watched Films, 155). The first dream sequences even bear a striking resemblance:

8 1/2 (sequence starts around 2:10)

Brazil (sequence starts around 8:59)

None of this is particularly surprising, though. Gilliam has consistently cited Fellini as a tremendous source of inspiration for all of his work. The actual working title, before Brazil became "Brazil," was "1984 1/2," a reference to both Fellini and George Orwell.

This all brings me back to our class's past discussions on how Fellini's film has impacted modern movie making. His influence is clear in the case of Gilliam, but if you take a look at IMDb's movie connections for 8 1/2, the extensive and diverse list of famous films (including The Godfather, Eraserhead, All That Jazz, and Pulp Fiction) further proves its powerful place in film history.

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A short of Terry Gilliam talking about Fellini's 8 1/2:

To read more, try these links:

"Sam's Dreams-Brazil-1985" video - youtube.com

A Short Biography of Terry Gilliam - smart.co.uk

Revival House: "Has Anybody Seen Sam Lowry?" - popdose.com

Nine comes after 8 1/2

After reading chapter 9, Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, a light went off in my head like I have read or seen something like this before. I couldn't figure it out for a while, so i called my dad back at home and read some of the plot points and characters to him that the chapter described. He told me it sounded a lot like the movie Nine. So i did some research to find out that I did in fact
see the movie, and that 8 1/2 did intact have an influence on the 2009 hit movie.

Reading further into the chapter, the author kept using the term "double mirror construction," and what that refereed to was how the movie was portrayed. Unlike Hollywood films where each scene leads into the next and you can make connections, this new style of cinema took the audience into the mind of how a human really thinks, and put that on the screen. From dreams and emotions, to thoughts and ideas, you never knew what was coming and what was what. In one scene, Guido Anselmi, the director in the movie (not of the movie) would be doing something and the screen would radically change to what he was thinking of in his head. Whether it was a problem with his life, or something he didn't like in the film. Nin

e did similar cinema style, creating images of the on the screen to what the character was thinking.

As crazy as it seems, I can also relate 8 1/2 to a recent film called Inception. Both movies have similar themes finding true personal happiness in a difficult, fragmented life. In one, Guido Anselmi is trying to create the perfect film through all of his mishaps and life problems, and in the other Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is trying to go through mazes and his life problems to get back to his kids. All of these movies are considered to be "second time movies" because you have to watch them twice to really understand what is going on.

If anyone has any comments or something to add, please do

steve kinslow

The Music and Script of Inception

After talking about the spinning hallway in Inception during class it got me thinking about this complex and intriguing movie. Underneath the effects there are many other great things this movie has including its music and story.

First for those who have not seen the film, Inception is a 2010 film written, directed and co-produced by Christopher Nolan one of my favorite directors who has done movies like The Dark Knight and Memento. It was also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Leonardo DiCaprio stars and plays Dom Cobb, a specialized thief. Instead of robbing, banks he steals ideas from the unconscious minds while they are asleep and dreaming. This is called extraction. Cobb has been on the run and unable to go home to America to visit his children because he is wanted for his wife's murder. Cobb is offered a chance to go home and have his old life back if he could perform the impossible task of inception; the planting of an idea into someone's subconscious. That is Inception in a nutshell. It is a lot more complex and a definite watch for anyone who loves science fiction, action or heist movies.The music from Inception is just beyond epic. Hans Zimmer, who has worked on movies like The Lion King, The Dark Knight, and Rango, completed the score. Now the score is described as a very electronic score but the coolest part about Zimmer's Academy Award nominated score involves Charles Dumont's 1956 song "Non, je ne regrette rien." In the movie this song is used as a "kick" to wake up them up. To know they are running out of time in the dream the song softly starts as headphones are placed on the dreamer's ears. The music builds and then they are awakened.

Now as explained in the film, time moves differently when people are dreaming or when they are dreaming within a dream. ("It's a week the first level down. Six months the second level…"). Zimmer used this information and incorporated this into his soundtrack. Listen carefully to "Non, je ne regrette rien" and then to Zimmer's "Half-Remembered Dream" from the soundtrack. Do you see what he did there? When slowed down the song, like it would be in the dream world for the characters. Check out this video for an audio comparison. Another user also did the opposite and sped up "Half-Remembered Dream" to have it sound like Dumont's song!

Two final points, one small and one large, I want to bring up involve the story and the script, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Let's start small first. Nolan was so detailed when writing the script that some of the character names are allusions. Ellen Page's character Ariadne is an "architect" who creates the various dreamscapes, which are designed like mazes. The name alludes to a princess in a Greek myth who aided by the hero Theseus by giving him a sword and a ball of string to help him navigate the labyrinth, which imprisoned the Minotaur. Ariadne in the movie aids the hero Cobb and the rest of the characters on how to navigate the dream mazes.

The other point I must bring up when talking about Inception is the ending. The ambiguous and controversial ending involves a spinning top wobbling. For the characters in the movie they each have a totem that allows them to find out if they are dreaming or in the real world. For Cobb if the top stays spinning he is dreaming but the ending fails to show if the top falls or not because of the abrupt cut. In other words the audience is unsure if the final sequence of the film is reality or just another dream. While many of speculated and even came up with theories involving Cobb only wears his wedding ring during dreams and that is your clue to look for, Nolan has denied this. When I first saw the movie I was a little confused and looked for clues to find out what happened but after my second viewing I realized how it doesn't matter what happened. Whether he is dreaming or not, Cobb is not looking at the top for the answer but is looking at his kids. If he doesn't care, neither should we. Nolan has backed this in interviews but the audience is free to believe whatever they want. Maybe they should sleep on it and dream their own ending to this wild movie.