First off, whodda thunk we would post about Sir Anthony Hopkins twice in one week? Secondly, whodda thunk the congenial and estimable Academy Award winning actor of all people would write, direct, score and act in a seemingly impenetrable, non-linear and absurdist jumble of chaos about a screenwriter who… meets Fate and then “discover that life is random and fortune is sightless as he is thrown into a vortex where time, dreams, and reality collide” (according to IMDB).
Titled, “Slipstream,” when searching for analogous films, the Village Voice reference Charlie Kaufman, Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” and “Natural Born Killers” and said Hopkins “raised the bar to batshit insanity with this maddening passion project.” They also refer to the film as “a non-Euclidean freak-out of repeating sequences, excruciatingly long dissolves, superimposed Hitler footage, ridiculous zooms, epileptic flashes, sepia-tone inserts, horizontal frame flips” and other seemingly preposterous and unfortunate directorial choices.
Of course Hopkins and even star John Turturro claim the movie is supposed to be a comedy or an absurdist take on showbiz, but lord, that sounds atrocious (the cast also features Christian Slater, Michael Clarke Duncan, Arrested Development’s Jeffrey Tambor and Lisa Pepper).
Cinema Signals said, “the editing-on-speed renders Hopkin’s ‘experiment’ inaccessible to the degree that the movie will be lucky if it makes two cents” and the Hollywood Reporter wrote, “The veneer of stylistic hyperactivity can’t conceal the starkly banal dialogue and a roster of performances that seem, under the circumstances, hardly directed at all.”
The slightly positive review is Variety who said, “[It] can either be viewed as one huge home movie or a plaything from an actor who has been observing other filmmakers for decades.”
Don’t worry if you’re confused though, apparently that’s the point. “It’s not meant to make any sense. I wrote it as an experiment. I just put a few scenes down on the computer and thought, Well, this is interesting. I knew it was going to annoy people,” Hopkins told Time Out New York.
Ummm, ok then. Good luck Anthony Hopkins, your movie is going to need it!
Trailer: “Slipstream” (holy shit, watch this it’s kind of hilarious)
