Weekend Box Office #85; Also "Slipstream".

This weekend, the only thing opening in more than a handful of theaters is:

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (4260 theaters). Obviously, this is going to make a fortune; reviews have generally been positive, though not all have been raves. The studio wisely released it yesterday, to help cut down on the weekend rush, while Memorial Day weekend is generally huge movie-wise (there are usually 2 or 3 big new releases fighting it out).

So it'll probably do $150 million for its first five days. At least.

*****

So yesterday I watched "Slipstream" on DVD, as part of my aforementioned decision to review 5-6 movies a month for a website, not only for the free DVDs, but to make me watch movies I otherwise wouldn't seek out.

For those who don't recognize the title, "Slipstream" isn't a big sci fi epic, but a weird little film that Anthony Hopkins wrote, and directed, and stars in. He even did the music.

Basically it's a David Lynch movie, if David Lynch had no idea what he was doing (and for those of you who don't think David Lynch knows what he's doing, watch "Slipstream".)

Basically it's yet another variation of the tale in which really weird things happen to the main character, and it turns out that it's because he's dying, or just died, or something.

Here, it means we get odd scenes with actors like Michael Clarke Duncan, Christian Slater and an overacting John Turturro, all edited by someone who seems like they were being paid if they threw in every editing trick that anyone ever invented.

So we get double exposures, shifting colors, things turning to black-and-white and back again, images suddenly being flipped, images speeding up or slowing down or repeating.

It's all headache-inducing and completely pointless.

In the commentary track, Hopkins happily states that he's not a writer (several times), and that he doesn't care if people liked the movie or not, because he was trying to make an "anti-movie".

Dude.

He also self-defensively states that he showed the script to Steven Spielberg, who only had nice things to say about it.

Which made me laugh, because come on. You're Steven Spielberg, and Sir Anthony Hopkins sends you a script to read, and it's an incoherent pile of crap. Not even Spielberg is going to tell him that.

I guarantee he simply told Sir Anthony that he liked it, while crossing his fingers and praying that Hopkins wouldn't ask him to produce the damned thing.

Or maybe Hopkins did, and Spielberg said he couldn't, because he had to go make Indy 4. And then he greenlit it, and now here it is.

See? It's all circular.