- The Observer,
- Sunday April 14 2002
No, no. I mean life, the universe, and everything. What is real? What is fantasy? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Will there still be a Marks & Spencer open by the time we get there? But that's just where this movie - the M&S question aside - can help you out. Dreamt up by director Richard Linklater - the man behind Slacker and, appropriately, Dazed and Confused - it's, like, a meditation on the Big Questions in which a regular Joe, splendidly named Wiley Wiggins, elicits the Meaning of Life from around 60 people, including Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, co-stars of Linklater's previous movie Before Sunrise. The live footage is then graphically 'painted' by a team of 30 animators to create a sort-of moving impressionistic mindscape - imagine a grunge version of the cosmic light show at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey - and put a really, like, trippy spin on things.
To the point where we don't know if we're sleepwalking through our waking state or wake-walking through our dreams? Whoa man, is that a Pink Floyd lyric? Sure, it's a world where monkeys give lectures, where people ride in boat-cars, where newspaper taxis appear on the shore, waiting to take you away, climb in the back with your head in the clouds and you're gone.
I'd take more Golden Virginia with it if I were you. What's the reaction to this hazy-crazy opus been? Decidedly mixed. A reviewer on the Internet Movie Database was suitably tranced-up: 'The concepts saturate your nervous system with reinforcing patterns that will later "echo" in your dynamics in synergistic ways.' The LA Times was pithier: 'Wearying and yawn-inducing.'
So what is it then? Well, like we said, it's this movie, and...
No, no. The Meaning of Life Same as always. Live your dreams, eat your greens, and never trust a man with a beard but no moustache.
