A student lent me a few DVDs recently.

Waking Life: A heavily philosophical film exploring the nature of dreams and reality through a series of loosely connected vignettes, all done in experimental animation techniques. You'll either love it or hate it. I thought it was well done, but I kept wanting the speakers to slow down and define their terms. Some of the philosophy was thought provoking, while other parts seemed like transparently self-contradictory mumbo-jumbo.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Very, very good. A couple gets sick of each other and decides to split up and erase their memories of each other from their minds. (This would place it in the sci-fi section of the video store.) Shortly thereafter, they meet again . . . and fall in love. It says a lot about the value even of negative experiences. Also, the character Clementine has almost the exact same personality as Sunny. (Hi, Sunny!)

Touching the Void: A documentary with reenactments. Fifteen years ago, two mountain climbers were up a South American peak that had never been climbed before. One of them broke his leg. His partner tries lowering him down the mountainside with a rope, but winds up accidentally lowering him over the edge of a bluff. He isn't strong enough to pull him back up, and as the hours go by, he is slowly pulled to the edge himself. He cuts the rope. His partner, after falling nearly a hundred feet and being left for dead with a broken leg, crawls out of the crevasse and across several miles of glacier and rocks with no food or water for days to escape. Very tense; very good. I didn't think I'd like the "reenactment" bits, but the story was told by voiceover of the two men involved, and it worked.