wake up

Now i am aware that this film is a love or hate situation.

but Linklater's 'Waking Life' made me feel differently about philosophy.
It made me realise it is something very relevant and real and applicable to our every day selves bumbling along in our moments joined up by the beautiful and boring and mundane.

The intensity of the conversations held within this film blew me away. of course i understand that the content can be seen as pretentious and over the top... bringing too much together too fast... kind of like a montage of different views of what is happening around us right now. but i found myself reaching for a pen and paper to scribble notes and pause for thought when my brain caught up with the wavering images.

It tells the story of a young man lucid dreaming.
He is contastantly having 'false awakenings' believing that he is waking up, but ultimately he just keeps waking up into another dream throughout the whole film.

road in It captured so entirely the idea of the 'the human spirit refusing to submit' for me that a friend and i coined the term for our own lives. now we have 'waking life' conversations and moments of our own. I remember so vividly a moment of such when sat outside a greasy spoon cafe on lewesbrighton. just me and rhi, our reflections in the window beside us, a cold winter day with hot chocolate and warm apple pie, talking about how incredibly important the people are in our lives who transcend the normal and become spectacular. We caught each others smiles and suddenly a murmeration of starlings silently emerged from behind her head in the bright winter sky and we both watched quietly until they left our sight.

If you haven't seen any other of Linklater's films.. i highly recommend 'slacker' for those who are of the 80's/90's teenage generations. you have got to love the apathy captured so brilliantly in the characters and their bad fashion statements shuffling through the wide streets of america. clerks eat your heart out.
...and if your a raging emo nostaligic romantic like me... you have to take some time to watch 'before sunrise' and 'before sunset'. absolute gems for those dreamers out there.
The couple also feature in waking life as the couple in bed discussing the idea of 'observing your own life from the outside'.

i've just been trawling through clips to out up here from waking life and its reeeally difficult to chose one. but i think this will do for now. the simplest can be the most effective.
enjoy.