Couldn't make it through

Maybe experimental film isn't your forte. There's nothing wrong with that. But expecting the usual cinematic language and structure from something that clearly never purports to be that, is setting yourself up for confusion and disappointment. I found Slipstream incredibly watchable and anything but random (just a bit more quantum than linear) but I can understand it's not for everyone. Inland Empire is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of cinema and Lynch's finest film. Again, I can understand that to some people it seems random and slow and unbearable (if I'm not in the mood for it, I agree), but if in the right mindset, it's subtleties yield all manner of strange information and it truly does things with cinema that I don't think have ever been done before. Very bold, but incredibly challenging and massively dependent on your mood/mindset/consciousness while watching. Some people don't want to be forced to engage on such an intense level with a film, and that doesn't mean they are "stupid" or "don't get it" or whatever. It just means perhaps they prefer films that speak in a different cinematic language.

Basically, it comes down to the idea that in Inland Empire, nothing is objective or solid. It's very much up to you to discern what you think it's about (which isn't to say that it's meaningless, just that instead of choosing one definable meaning to project onto the audience, it wallows in deep pools of possible meaning, then aggressively refuses to tell you that one or another interpretation is right or wrong.) I like that kind of ambiguity. There's a power there if done correctly. Not everyone likes films that are so nebulous and in-your-face subjective. That's okay.

But to say this film (Slipstream) is just "meaningless" does not ring true to me. Hopkins is again putting the completely subjective nature of consciousness and the universe in our face (something that quantum physics confirms more and more each day.) Time after time in Slipstream, Hopkins sets up a definable reality and then as soon as you get used to it, pulls the rug out from under you and everything collapses into a different telescoped layer of reality, until eventually all of these realities flow freely between each other. And of course, it's a comment on filmmaking itself as well and how that artform relates to, molds itself from, and warps external "reality." It's an internal vs. external thing. The relationship between the measurer and the thing being measured breaking down. I could go more into this if anyone is interested in why I don't see this film as meaningless random drivel, but probably none of you wants a lecture on the nature of consciousness. Shout out to Alfred Korzybski though!

Call it... friendo.

I think the people that enjoyed this film were on some kind of drug, to make it cool. Without some mushrooms or acid, it's pointless. I wanted to turn it off the entire time but I'm a Hopkins fan and wanted to give him a chance. Now I wonder what drugs he was on. It really should not have been shot like a bad music video. The music he composed for Slipstream wasn't as bad as the rest of the movie.