Slipstream DVD with Lana Antonova, Stella Arroyave, Lindsay Barth (R) +Movie Reviews +Used DVD available for Swap

Absolutely unwatchable if you're prone to nausea

Doctor Chilton | Baltimore | 04/02/2008

(1 out of 5 stars)

"I love elliptical, even trippy movies. What I can't stand is an aggressive visual style, with shaky cam, flash cuts, 1-frame inserts, random images thrown together. My flicker-fusion threshold is slightly faster than average; I see florescent lights flicker when others don't. I also get sea-sick extremely easily.

This made me sick, and angry. The first 7 minutes are a complete visual assault. I didn't get past them.

This was edited, not by Hannibal Lecter (he has some taste) but by Multiple Miggs in the cell next door.

Just because it's possible to hurt the viewer with these techniques doesn't mean you *should.*

A must to avoid for the sensitive: Or, viewable only with a scopolamine skin-patch and sedation.

update: I gave this a second chance. I found the rest to be as unwatchable as the first part. And, it's not even interesting thematically--life-as-movie? Come on. I don't want to watch actors improvise about How Confusing It All Is.

I'm a big fan of metafiction like Adaptation. This was no Adaptation."

Just became number one on my all-time worst movie list

Gina Emacs | LI, NY, USA | 04/28/2008

(1 out of 5 stars)

"I like Anthony Hopkins and most of the other actors in this movie; I felt it had a great cast. Those who liked it may have read what it was about beforehand. Try watching it like most people, just seeing the trailer/commercial. You're led to believe Slipstream is more of a time travel movie where the person is sent into the past to change things they're afraid of, etc. (this definition of the word slipstream is stated by one of the characters talking to Anthony) but that never happens. So, with that introduction, and no information or sense of what his current life/reality is, you watch the movie trying to figure out which parts are past, present or possibly future. As it turns out, it's all "present" but you never really get that.

I have a good sense of humor (I don't care for the "Three Stooges" type of humor, but today's type I enjoy) but I saw NOTHING humorous about this movie and didn't even realize it was supposed to be a comedy 'til after I'd seen it. I'm also not "easily confused" as a reviewer felt negative reviewers might be. When someone asks, for example, "Do you know the time?", it is generally understood to mean, "Please tell me the time if you know it" and the typical response may be, "12:35". However, another valid, but less expected (and less enlightening) response would be, "Yes, I do. Thanks for asking." This is sort of what goes on in this movie. When they said they lost the plot, since the movie is about people filming a movie, it's naturally assumed the person is referring to THAT movie's plot, NOT the one you rented ("Slipstream").

Everything else I have to say against this movie has already been made clear in other people's reviews. All I can add is that we felt we'd lost that time we could've spent watching something worthwhile instead of this misleading waste of time."

A Rarety

India S. Turner | Seattle, WA | 03/04/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Slipstream is a rare kind of movie. Read the other reviews (not the 1 stars) if you want to get a fairly inclusive overview. What makes Slipstream so special is that it is experienced by the left brain as utter nonsense, but the right brain can catch on. It is possible to "get" this film without being able to say what you got. Isn't that delightful! The scenes are an indecipherable kaleidoscope that gave me a headache on my left side (true); there is a rhythm, rather than logic and a relatedness, rather than linear unfolding. Perhaps this film is even brilliant. If you can bear to be in a state of not-knowing, this movie can work for you. If you enjoy not knowing, if you enjoy not having complete control over your experience, you may thrill at this film. Early on, you'll realize that the "plot" is too complex for it to all come together at the end. So don't wait for it. Instead, let yourself enjoy your bafflement.

By leaving understanding entirely in our hands, the movie presents us with pure possibility. How often can we say that? Even though it was too violent for my taste, I felt exhilarated and inspired. What it left me with: Each of us is in a wildly individual, and often even significantly divergent, experience. What allows us to be related to another's experience is our ability to step out of our unique perspective and recognize the commonly held narrative in which we each have our own experience. I have no idea if the film delivered that or if my firing-furiously-at-novelty neurons invented it, but such is the wonder of this marvel, that I could be left with this delicious insight. What might you find?

The least of Slipstream's virtues are lighting, cinematography, editing that becomes a "character" and Hopkins' ability to get an excellent performance out of his actors. Bravo.

"

Disjunction, desperation and alienation!

Hiram Gomez Pardo | Valencia, Venezuela | 05/12/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The febrile and fevered mind of a sly screenwriter - Felix Bonhoeffer - is constantly baffled and besieged by personages of the fiction of a play he's writing for the big screen and his tormented past, when these characters intermingle themselves, and appear blended with his memories of the past, acquiring such dimensions of trueness that become a horrid nightmare of undecipherable horror in his alienated mind.

This film made remind to Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote a forceful but descriptive brief tale about "The memory of Shakespeare" (a superb and relatively unknown tale) in which describes the sharp physical tensions into a creative mind in process, as final outcome of a well coveted ambition of any writer. In this sense the sleeping process may work out either liberator device or alienation mechanism. And that's why Hopkins, smartly makes reference to this cult movie "The invasion of the body snatchers", which is (at least to my mind) the most pyramidal science fiction picture ever made in the Fifties. That interesting portrait about alien organisms, that masked into pods are capable to reproduce with absolute fidelity a human being after he has slept.

So these brief interludes of the suspended conscious or the pores of the infiniteness acquire life, being absolutely to distinguish in this ambivalence state what is reality and what `s unreal, will take over the mind of Felix leading to the last frontier of unexplored and even wasteland territories of our memory's labyrinths, carving once more in relief, the demons of the reason produce monsters."

Along the history of cinema, there have been other films that have remarked this process of sudden breakthrough of the reality and the fiction. Paul Wengerer started in 1913 with his anthological film "The student of Prague", in the middle twenties was Murnau with "The last man"; during the thirties "The blue angel", during the forties "Dead of night" ; in the fifties "The seven seal"; in the sixties "Shock corridor" and "Seconds" ; in the seventies "Catch 22" and "Someone flew into the cuckoo's nest" in the in the eighties "The stunt man", "Brazil" and "Altered states", while in the Nineties "Zentropa," "Twelve monkeys" and "Window to Paris."

So, this film is not an easy film to watch. You must keep in mind all these previous references, because otherwise you would be able to stand without understanding this disintegration hell.

A true masterwork!

"

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