[Jacob McCraw]

I watched Slipstream last night - written and directed by Anthony Hopkins and I'm trying to decide what to make of it. I want this to be a discussion thread so there will be spoilers.

I got a lot of the Hollywood satire aspects of the film; especially John Turturro's producer character. If you have ever seen "Barton Fink" you will get a kick out of Turturro railing against writers and there is even a cameo by Michael Lerner - funny stuff - as is the conversation on the golf course with the cut phone cord about Hopkins doing Lecter 4 and wanting more money.

The rest of the film? I don't really know. It feels like the love child of David Lynch and Oliver Stone. The diner scene with Jeffrey Tambor and Christian Slater was like a "Natural Born Killers" deleted scene and even felt a bit like Tarantino.

There was a comment about continuity with Camryn Manheim's character being killed and there were some aspects of it that were like a movie within a dream within a movie and something in the beginning about past lives.

I guess at this point Slipstream to me is some good pieces that don't really gel together to make a whole. I'm thinking a lot about it which leads me to believe I liked it - but I'm not sure. Is it a brilliant mess or a spectacular failure. I don't know.

Discuss.

[Jacob McCraw]

Here is a Hopkins quote from Wikipedia:

"I'm fascinated by time. I've written a script about the nature of reality... It's about reality and the illusion of life because life to me, as I get older, is so illusion-like, so dream-like, that I think it's all a dream. It's about a man, who's caught in a slipstream of time falling back on itself and he remembers his own future. My own interpretation is if there's a God, that God is actually time. I'm fascinated by the fact the older I get every moment just slips past. What is real? You grasp this moment and then it's gone. I was talking 10 minutes ago but that's all gone, it's all a dream. Maybe the puzzle of life is asking what it's all about. I've got a theory that at the moment of impact of death we'll wake up and say, 'Ah, that was it all along.' My life has been governed a lot by those thoughts and feelings."