There are those who will insist that the best way of approaching Waking Life (2001), Richard Linklater’s witty cosmic wow of a movie, is in a chemically altered state, and it’s easy to see why.
The screenplay for Waking Life, which the New York Film Festival is showing tonight and tomorrow at Alice Tully Hall, blithely tosses out a bouquet of theories about human consciousness — some intellectually rigorous, others ludicrous crackpot riffs — whose cumulative impact suggests a stoned-out Big Bang of human thought. [Read more…]