Kevin McCarthy & "Slipstream"(2007)

I just looked up Kevin McCarthy on IMDB: He's 95 years old and still working!!

He was just an infant of 93(!!) when he put in rather a lot of work as himself in Anthony Hopkins' "Slipstream", which, while made in '07 apparently, is only just now available in my local video salon as a "new release".

If you enjoy weird, hallucinatory, WTF, dreamlike films, then this is your meat and potatoes -- I loved it, and so did my wife, who has a low tolerance for weird and confusing movies. I think Hopkins shows real genius in this non-narrative film. He wrote, directed, starred in, and even composed the musical score, so there really is nobody else to praise or blame, depending on what you think of the final product. In one sequence, these "Pulp-Fiction"-esque villians -- Jeffrey Tambor & Christian Slater -- take over a diner. Slater's character goes berszerk when he learns that nobody in the diner has ever seen McCarthy's performance in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". He takes an autographed picture of McCarthy off the wall & starts pushing it in people's faces, going on and on about the film until he suffers a sort of seizure. Later in the film, McCarthy shows up as Hopkins' hallucinatory traveling companion & puts in random appearances throughout the film. Really quite a lot of work for a 93 year old man.

Scenes and characters blur together, yet somehow you accept that there is some form of reality grounding it all. It really is one of those films that beggars description. Loud, colorful, dreamy & slow, with massive quick-cuts and film overlays. Voices speaking things half-heard, that later have meaning. Repetitive scenes that don't reveal meaning until much later. Who is really dead, who is alive? There is a very funny scene where a dead(?) Michael Clark Duncan appears in Hopkins' back yard to tell him off -- "Man, why'd you kill me in scene 26? I had more to do! You shouldn't've killed me until scene 32!! 32, man! . . ." all this with a gaping head wound that looks like a coral growth.

Really, if you're in the mood for Damn Strange and Uncanny, I can't recommend this one highly enough --

peter johnson/denny crane