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.
An actor and would-be screenwriter, who at the very moment of his meeting with Fate, comes to discover that life is random and fortune is sightless. He is thrown into a vortex where time, dreams, and reality collide in an increasingly whirling slipstream. It's a surreal and dreamlike tale of one man's journey.—Gregg Brilliant
A low budget thriller is being shot in the desert. We witness the shooting of a sequence in a diner, where Ray, the main bad character (played by Christian Slater), threatens everyone in a psychotic way, first with speech then with gun. But suddenly the actor falls, and then dies, apparently from a stroke.
The whole team is disorganized, and soon challenges the authority of the director, who finally has to call the sociopathic producer Harvey Brickman (played by John Turturro) who becomes hysterical on the situation. They decide to send Bonhoeffer (played by Anthony Hopkins), an aging overworked screenwriter, to the set in the desert to do some rewrite of the script and find a solution to this mess.
But soon, the need to satisfy everyone make heat and stress turn to exhaustion, imagination to delusion and even hallucination, and send the screenwriter's creative process into a confusion between imagination and facts, between characters and real people in a whirlwind of images.
A much underrated film deserving 7, although one can wonder on the necessity of the structure of the first fifteen minutes editing, which, instead of establishing the position of the character Bonhoeffer (played by Anthony Hopkins) as the main point of view on the story, confuses it with no real benefit because the confusion comes too early. Passed these first fifteen minutes, everything goes fine in a "natural born killers" hallucination style kind of way.
Very good acting.
