Slipup/Slapup

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Today's movie is Slipsream

This is how IMDB describes it:

Aging screenwriter Felix Bonhoeffer has lived his life in two states of existence: in reality and his own interior world. While working on a murder mystery script, and unaware that his brain is on the verge of implosion, Felix is baffled when his characters start to appear in his life, and vice versa.

I have a few alternatives:

* A collection of interrelated dreamlike vignettes and plot fragments, loosely clustered around the character of a film writer, played by Anthony Hopkins, who also wrote the screenplay.

* You know in those pop-psychadelic films of the 60s (like "Head" - the film of The Monkees, or Truffaut in "accessible" mode), there were moments when there's a series of rapid jump cuts, or the film runs backwards or freezes in the middle of a line, or the last ten minutes' action turn out to be a film within a film?

Moments of deliberate, vertigo inducing surreality, or of Brectian estrangement where the audiance is forcibly reminded that they're watching an artificial construct.

If, like me, you enjoyed them, you wondered whether an entire film could be composed of such moments...this is such a film.

So, this is either the pile of pretentious wank that my pretentious thirteen year old self dreamed of making, or a brilliant image of a highly stressed but constantly imaginative mind, seen from the inside.

I don't know. You decide.

* When students are learning how to use edit suites, their practice sessions result in something like this.

* It doesn't start having a cohearant plot until 70 minutes in. The film within the film is called "Slipstream". There's several references to "Slipstream" being a "piece of crap" or "written as a joke". The entire film runs backwards under the closing credits.

* A steady stream of arresting images that mean absolutely nothing, bricolaged into a story that means absolutely nothing.

* It annoyed me while it was playing. But when it stopped I wanted to see it again.

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Last night's movie was to be Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. But after fifteen minutes, I couldn't be bothered.

I think to enjoy the Bill and Ted films you need to be either:

1) An American stoner kid
2) Have a crush on either of the lead actors
3) Be capable of supreme ironic detatchment

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Have you ever tried chili sardines?

Before today, I'd never heard of them. Now I think it'll be one of the things I miss when I go back to England. Together with enormous tubs of chocolate spread, amazingly cheap vodka, and the healthy-living, strong bodied college types they have around here, with fake-faded knock-off jeans and retro moptops.

If only there were some way I could bring the three together...

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I think I'm losing a bit of weight. There's a good reason for this. In this country it's difficult to overeat because, if you eat too much of most of the stuff available, you feel ill.

I call it "The Bad Food Diet".

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Speaking of which, the other culinary discovery. Poultry Pate.

That's what's written on the tin. Not pate made from chicken, or goose, or any other specific animal, farmyard or otherwise. Pate made from "poultry". Coming soon, books written by "Author" and alarm clocks that buzz at Time'o'Clock.

The worrying thing is, I quite like it.

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