Last night, Laura and I watched this Anthony Hopkins movie Slipstream. It’s actually written, directed by and starring Anthony Hopkins. And it’s fucking crazy.

The movie’s only an hour and a half but Laura and I had a hard time getting through it. The movie’s about a writer who is writing a murder script but he’s going crazy and his characters start to appear in his life, and his life in the script. If I hadn’t known that ahead of time, I probably would have been completely lost but even knowing that going in, it was terribly difficult to follow.

Let me try to explain. Imagine a movie about a movie, where it starts out telling a story about a murder and as it gets up to one of the climactic scenes of the movie, it pulls back to reveal that what you’ve been watching is a movie being filmed in the movie you’re watching. Then it goes on to show the troubles on the set of the movie and the life of the writer who is working on the script and needs to work on rewrites.

Are you with me so far? Pretty straight forward.

Okay, now completely remove all continuity from the film on all levels. Completely. The scenes are no longer in the right order. Take the yellow sports car, make it purple in some shots, sometimes facing the other way around. The actor that was standing in room A? Make him jump to room B the next time the camera shifts. This actor played the writer’s wife? Now she’s an extra in the movie, now she’s a bartender who’s never met him. The guy who got shot earlier, now he’s complaining about being killed off a few scenes too early and then appears as a cop on the highway. Oh, and from the very beginning of the movie, start splicing in single frames of key moments from the rest of the film.

Did I enjoy it? Um… not especially. I watched it and it was different. I usually enjoy the artsy movies but this was too much of a muchness and I didnt even want to bother. At the end, the individual parts cannot be put together to form something cohesive except to say that it is a movie about the author of a script going crazy. Too bad, not one of his best.