Today’s slate of online store additions is a little more robust than usual, as the pairing of Johnnie To’s “Election” and “Election 2” bumps the total from the usual three up to four. Also joining the fray are Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and Spike Lee’s “Mo’ Better Blues.”
Ever since bursting onto the scene with his hipster homage to Max Ophüls’s “La Ronde,” 1991’s “Slacker,” Richard Linklater has demonstrated a proclivity toward making movies that feature lots of walking and talking. Whether it’s the stoners of “Dazed and Confused,” the disaffected loiterers of “SubUrbia,” Jesse and Celine from the “Before” Trilogy, “Boyhood”‘s Mason and his family and friends, or those jocular jocks from “Everybody Wants Some!!,” there’s no shortage of waxing philosophical in Linklater’s filmography.
This is all taken to its not-quite-logical extreme with “Waking Life,” where thanks to the rotoscope animation by Bob Sabiston’s team of graphic artists Linklater’s characters have moved beyond mere ambulatory options to include flying among their methods of transportation and the pontificating has reached levels of mumbo jumbory far headier than anything ever uttered by Slater-san or the author of “Conspiracy A-Go-Go.”