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By John Demetry
Wiggins' encounters remind me of how I felt during 12 festival preview screenings, which run for the public from October 4-18 at Chicago's Landmark and Music Box Theatres. To make Waking Life, Richard Linklater directed live actors on digital video and then had a team of animators digitally paint each frame using some new computer technology. It's one of those dreams-within-dreams, "Is he dead or dreaming or both?" movies. It feels like it has been processed through a movie cliché computer template. The animation is both uninspired and uninspiring. Characters say something "heavy" and then the animated surface morphs into illustrations of the characters' words. That's a "Loony Toons" take on a Philosophy 101 smoke break - as subtle as a cartoon anvil falling from the sky. Self-reflexive rather than self-reflective, it fails to achieve the dreamy buzz of even mediocre movies. Call this pretentious bore: "Sleeping Death". It actually hinders visual and philosophical sophistication. Take away the animation, and it's a bad student video. With the animation, it's an overblown and queasy ego-stroking trip - a bad student video that people at parties will exclaim, "You've just GOT to see!" My friend quipped in my ear: "It's just one big bohemian orgy." Linklater doesn't allow any embarrassing emotionalism to crash the party. Its theme reassures the film festival crowd: "All hipsters go to Heaven." Most of the movies at the festival are as easily shrugged off as one of Linklater's coffee-shop quacks. And those that aren't, engender the hipster retaliation of superior-than-thou laughter.
The central female character being an actress and male character being a failed musician, Chereau pushes his performers and audience to new sexual and emotional screen dimensions; a volatile blurring. Chereau fully scrutinizes the modern performance of cynicism and nihilism through a sexual microscope. He keys up anguish and the resulting desperation to an electrified, devastating pitch (like the blazing soundtrack). Then, he flips that very microscope back on the process of artistic performance and spectatorship. So intimate, it's embarrassing.
The film undercuts its own realism in a daring pop-emotional long take: the girl dancing, suddenly alone, at a once-populated club. That's the heaven and hell of an adolescent crush worthy of the best pop songs. One critic returned to this 65-minute movie after a lengthy piss break, catching only half of this amazing shot. He missed the self-consciousness that expresses a common emotion with uncommon prescience. Her film abundant with such waking life, Grisebach could teach Linklater a few things. Mistaking cynicism for the pleasure of critical thinking, most critics simply no longer matter. Trust your instincts; trust your feelings - they matter! Critical thinking is not the province of critics only. Critique not only the films, but, especially, your own responses. That's something most critics never do anyway. Thus, one critic told me that Waking Life conveys its meaning via "osmosis." For the love of movies!
Kissing Jessica Stein finds first-time feature director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld mounting the improv-style humor of the two female stars with an All Over the Guy-gone-noir style as gauche as the film's romantic simplifications.
I doubt that American audiences will have the chance to see the Chinese The Orphan of Anyang, the Korean Address Unknown, or the Iranian Runaway outside of the festival circuit. They're not very good, but they're not unworthy of experiencing. Although not new to Asian cinema, the meditative spatial and temporal formalism of Anyang might seem new to many American moviegoers. Featuring a girl getting eaten out by her beloved pet dog, Address Unknown is too relentlessly sensationalistic. It does, at least, announce the war-torn scars of American imperialism. Lacking the rhetorical incisiveness of good documentaries, Runaway's cast of runaway girls and their families, play-acting for the cameras, still provide cross-cultural fascination.
Film festivals are a much-needed marathon workout for the ol' bullshit detector. |
Waking Life
Intimacy
Kissing Jessica Stein 
Iron Ladies 
Address Unknown 
© 1997-2002 BEI