I was recently poring over some of the excellent books by the late British educator and popularizer in the world of philosophy and critical self-reflection Bryan Magee. Throughout this lovely spree of reading and serpentine contemplation, I was enjoying myself and hop-skipping from page to page, practically dilly-dallying in all the wisdom of books that I can include among the most influential on my worldview as a human being, such as Confessions of a Philosopher and Ultimate Questions. I was recognizing in his words some familiar sentiments and ideas—and when you happen across an author who brings into the light everything that you were mulling and even stumbling over in…
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It is evident as a kind of motive intrinsic to the vast majority of media and entertainment that it believes it matters, and this entertainment continues to exist for a single correlative reason: as viewers in the audience, we believe that it matters. But neither of those assertions actually implies that it in itself matters enough to be worth watching, much less valorizing and investing the better part of our nighttime leisure and emotional livelihood in what amounts to noise in a box sustained by corporate profits and the lower instincts of our nameless, faceless, anonymous viewers that are right now sitting away in their nightly armchairs. It is a…
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In the cinematic hub of Austin, Texas, home to a reputable university, shortly after the turn-of-the-century and the disaster of September 11th, Waking Life plays out its enthralling rotoscope dreamland with what seems like a disordered, chaotic flurry of dialogues. It is all very unremitting—loquacious, academic fuzziness, street-talk and bone-dry theory rattled off as though it were the effluvia of something in the air, a vapor or an intoxicant, a poison maybe. While most narrative films, including those that are experimental, avant-garde, tend to exploit film as a visual medium, using dialogue as a supplement to the bread-and-butter of the cinema—the moving image—Waking Life emphasizes dialogue, which is so densely…
