USA / 2007 / 96mins
director ANTHONY HOPKINS
Australian premiere
“The year’s most experimental film....Brilliant” Roger Ebert
“...Slipstream itself is a very interesting outlook on cinema and artistic vision, but in such an experimental way, like David Lynch and sometimes like Terry Gilliam...” Alex Billington, FirstShowing.net
Slipstream is the debut into independent filmmaking by Academy Award-winning actor Anthony Hopkins. If it is ever possible to sense the liberation and creative passion unleashed by such a newfound freedom, we can experience it with Hopkins’s inventive and multilayered work. The film features a sterling ensemble cast, including Christian Slater, John Turturro, Stella Arroyave, Jeffrey Tambor, and Hopkins himself. Aided by acclaimed cinematographer Dante Spinotti and celebrated costume designer Julie Weiss, Hopkins takes us on an incredible journey into the combustion of a writer’s mind and the nature of the creative process.
At times, this film appears to be a conventional, concrete, and straightforward tale about a screenwriter, Felix Bonhoffer. Then it turns riotously hallucinogenic, taking off on tangents and down rabbit holes into dream worlds and streams of consciousness. As the characters from the writer’s fictional universe begin to appear in his “real” world, the audience starts questioning the limits of the human brain.
With a structured elegance, at times an overwhelmingly visceral kinesthesia, overflowing with film and artistic references, Hopkins announces he is a filmmaker with an unwaveringly artistic vision on a mission into the ineffable. |
