Slipstream

Slipstream

Directed by Anthony Hopkins (R)

A screenwriter confuses his work

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on-screen with his life off-screen.

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Slipstream proves that stream-of-consciousness is a concept better suited to literature than to film, said Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. This film is yet another case of an actor ill-advisedly turning director. Anthony Hopkins also wrote the script and, for good measure, composed the score for this tale of an aged screenwriter who cannot “discern fantasy from reality, past from present, memories from dreams.” Sometimes Felix Bonhoeffer’s characters appear in life, and sometimes his life appears in the movie he’s writing. The line is far too blurred by Hopkins’ nonsensical use of cinematic tricks. He saturates Slipstream with jump cuts, flash frames, time-bending, and subliminal stock footage of media and movie clips. If Clint Eastwood as a director represents one extreme of classical restraint, Hopkins represents the other, said Robert Koehler in Variety. The “veneer of stylistic hyperactivity” can’t disguise the bland dialogue or performances that seem “hardly directed at all.” Hopkins has claimed that the film’s experimental style was a “creative joke,” said Sid Smith in the Chicago Tribune. With that in mind, it can be fun to watch. To sit through it, you’ll need “an exceptionally good mood and a high tolerance for artistic self-indulgence.”