(BY ALI NADERZAD) Anthony Hopkins has written and directed a complicated and perhaps too self-aware film called Slipstream, which was screened to a room of journalists last night in New York. The idea behind it seems to be the loss of control, when your thoughts are sucked into a sort of cerebral vortex and your dreams mesh with reality and vice-versa–you get the picture. That Hopkins wrote and directed such a picture gives reason to pause and think: after such pictures as Silence of the Lambs and The Remains of the Day, Slipstream registers as a little immature, like a study in nombrilism. Hopkins plays Felix Bonhoeffer, a screenwriter whose latest picture goes awry after production falls apart. He falls apart with it, and his manic reveries are hurled at us in overload visual fracas. The elaborate visual spectacle that is Slipstream owes to the talent of Italian cinematographer Dante Spinotti (LA Confidential and The Wonder Boys). Slipstream is prone to fast-moving vignettes and psychedelic montages that emulate what our dreams look like. It’s rather like riding an infernal roller-coaster while being dead asleep. The story gets passably smashed into pieces in the process, and what we are left with are pieces and bits of lives and the characters leading them, submerged in dreams’ troubled waters. About his convoluted picture Hopkins explained, it’s about a man, who’s caught in a slipstream of time falling back on itself and he remembers his own future. I’m intrigued by the fact that the older I get, every moment slips past. What is real? What is fantasy? You grasp this moment and then, suddenly, it’s gone. I was talking ten minutes ago but that’s all gone, it’s all a dream. Slipstream also stars Christian Slater, Jeffrey Tambor, Lisa Pepper, Kevin McCarthy and Camryn Manheim (no official release date yet)

ALI’S RATING *