第一次尝试英文影评，欢迎大家砸臭鸡蛋过来。。。

    I have been a big fan of Richard Linklater ever since I came across his masterpiece Before Sunrise & Before Sunset years ago. He is everything that should be about American independent movie. well, maybe "School of Rock" was a bit of a mainstream affair, but aren't we all tired of the blockbuster bullshit by now?
    And yes, I wasn't really expecting a cartoon when Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's face appeared on the poster. So it was no surprise that when I saw this film, I spent about ten minutes after the credits had rolled staring at the screen in silence - you know the way you felt after watching any piece of work of David Lynch for the first time? Bingo.
    However confused I was then, "waking life" is undoubtedly one of the most thought provoking movies I've ever seen.

    What struck me most was the way in which the superb animation was layered over the film. Every frame of this movie is pure, drugged up, mind-bending craziness. What this achieves is indeed a sense of a dreamlike viewing experience. The jumpy nature and fluid characteristics of the animation really help to create that very same feeling while viewing the film.

    The plot of the movie is rather simple, or, according to some critics, there was no plot at all. Basically this movie talked about a young man who had trouble in seperating dreams from realities. He wandered around, found himself in different places in a unexplainable way throughout the 150-minute-long animation. At first it seemed to me that every single one of the people he encountered was just giving their own opinions as if you were overhearing/having a meaningful conversation with them.

    Take Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy for example, they are still the Jesse and Celine in "Before Sunrise".
    And this time their discussion was once again about reincarnation.

Quote:

     Yeah. I've been thinking also about something you said.
　　
　　What's that?
　　
　　Just about reincarnation and where all the new souls come from over time. Everybody always say that they've been the reincarnation of Cleopatra or Alexander the Great. I always want to tell them they were probably some dumb fuck like everybody else. I mean, it's impossible. Think about it. The world population has doubled in the past 40 years, right? So if you really believe in that ego thing of one eternal soul, then you have only 50% chance of your soul being over 40. And for it to be over 150 years old, then it's only one out of six.
　　
　　Right, so what are you saying? That reincarnation doesn't exist, or that we're all young souls like where half of us are first round humans?
　　
　　No, no. What I'm trying to say is that somehow I believe reincarnation is just a - a poetic expression of what collective memory really is. There was this article by this biochemist that I read not long ago, and he was talking about how when a member of our species is born, it has a billion years of memory to draw on. And this is where we inherit our instincts.
　　
　　I like that. It's like there's this whole telepathic thing going on that we're all a part of, whether we're conscious of it or not. That would explain why there are all these, you know, seemingly spontaneous, worldwide, innovative leaps in science, in the arts. You know, like the same results poppin' up everywhere independent of each other. Some guy on a computer, he figures something out, and then almost simultaneously a bunch of other people all over the world figure out the same thing. They did this study. They isolated a group of people over time, and they monitored their abilities at crossword puzzles, right, in relation to the general population. And they secretly gave them a day-old crossword, one that had already been answered by thousands of other people, right. And their scores went up dramatically, like 20 percent. So it's like once the answers are out there, people can pick up on 'em. It's like we're all telepathically sharing our experiences.

    How thought provoking!!!

    Linklater has always been fascinated with the question of what we should doing with our lives. Our responsibility is to contribute something lasting and meaningful to our society. But what exactly is that? Where and when should I do it? Who with? How do I know if I've really found it? Why is it so important again, anyway?

    My favorite part of the movie is the discussion on human's free will.

Quote:

      In a way, in our contemporary world view, it's easy to think that science has come to take the place of God. But some philosophical problems remain as troubling as ever. Take the problem of free will. This problem has been around for a long time, since before Aristotle in 350 B.C. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, these guys all worried about how we can be free if God already knows in advance everything you're gonna do. Nowadays we know that the world operates according to some fundamental physical laws, and these laws govern the behavior of every object in the world. Now, these laws, because they're so trustworthy, they enable incredible technological achievements. But look at yourself. We're just physical systems too, right? We're just complex arrangements of carbon molecules. We're mostly water, and our behavior isn't gonna be an exception to these basic physical laws. So it starts to look like whether its God setting things up in advance and knowing everything you're gonna do or whether it's these basic physical laws governing everything, there's not a lot of room left for freedom.

      So now you might be tempted to just ignore the question, ignore the mystery of free will. Say "Oh, well, it's just an historical anecdote. It's sophomoric. It's a question with no answer. Just forget about it." But the question keeps staring you right in the face. You think about individuality for example, who you are. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices that you make. Or take responsibility. You can only be held responsible, you can only be found guilty, or you can only be admired or respected for things you did of your own free will. So the question keeps coming back, and we don't really have a solution to it. It starts to look like all our decisions are really just a charade.

    This movie is the fiber of all life, it IS that collective unconscious from which we all draw our own, personal beings. It explains the philosophies of years gone by and minutes gone by in a way that anyone could understand them.

    Certainly it is not something for easy movie watchers, who prefer soaps or comedies with a predictable plot.

    I'd say that "Waking Life", rather than trying to reinvent philosophical theories, tries to present these ideas in the form of a film the same way as Jostein Gaarder's book 'Sophie's World'. It could in that way function as a sort of 'window' into the world of philosophy.

PS  这部片子我看了不下五遍。。可是每次都像第一遍看一样有新鲜感。。作为一部相当试验性的作品，Linklater对于情节的弱化可谓到了极致。。毫不夸张的说，这部片子从任何一段场景来看，都能够独立存在，前后段的衔接非常梦幻，实在很难分清楚传统意义上的“主线”。。然而，通篇来看，Linklater这么处理是非常有必要的，尽管这也是本片受到最多非议的地方。。但是只有弱化所有旁枝末节，才能突出那些谈话中的“精髓”，相信这也是Linklater花大力气把拍好的胶片转成动画的原因吧。。

换了新的背景音乐，Jason Mraz —— Mr. Curiosity
听着这首歌走在初夏的阳光里，看到摇曳一地的班驳
 突然会很想念你
和那时的我们