Jodorowsky's Dune

JODOROWSKY’S DUNE            B+          
USA  France  (90 mi)  2013  d:  Frank Pavich     Official site

Dune will be the coming of God.

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

Part of the monumental task of creating works of art is first conceiving original ideas, followed by the development of a plan of execution to bring these concepts to light so they can be viewed and evaluated by the public.  What this film documents is the case of a classic artistic derailment, where the colossal ideas are by all accounts staggering, brought to life by an always exuberant, ever optimistic Alejandro Jodorowsky at age 84 who simply loves recounting the joys of his creation in front of the cameras, describing his own wildly ambitious take on Frank Herbert’s 1965 operatic sci-fi novel Dune, the world’s best selling science fiction novel (which included five sequels, where Jodorowsky hadn’t read the book, but a friend had told him it was great), where in the mid 70’s he began shopping around his own ideas about bringing his vision to life, eagerly pursuing some of the greatest music and special effects artists of the era, some who had never worked before in the movie business, but brought their own unique sensibilities to this mystifying creation, where Jodorowsky’s exaggerated sense of euphoria surrounding his own project is delightfully charming.  In order to better understand just who we’re dealing with, a quick background check is in order, by Keith Phipps from All-Movie biography, Alejandro Jodorowsky movies, photos, movie ... - All Movi:

Born in 1929 in Chile to Russian-Jewish immigrants who owned a dry-goods store, Alejandro Jodorowsky seems an unlikely candidate to become one of the godfathers of the American midnight-movie scene. But essentially every turn in his career has been unlikely, a career that has found Jodorowsky taking on the roles of director, screenwriter, author, actor, cartoonist, editor, artist, composer, mime, guru, mystic, and tireless self-promoter. A famed raconteur, it's occasionally difficult to sort the facts of Jodorowsky's early life from the myth. Entering the theater at an early age, Jodorowsky eventually enrolled at the University of Santiago, where he developed an interest in puppetry and mime. After creating a theater company that, at its height, employed 60 people, Jodorowsky departed for Paris, breaking with his parents and, according to Jodorowsky, throwing his address book in the sea.

Once in Paris he began a lengthy collaboration with Marcel Marceau, collaborating on some of his most famous mimeograms. He also worked both in mainstream theater (directing Maurice Chevalier's comeback) and offbeat productions. For the next few years, Jodorowsky would alternate between working in Mexico City and in Paris, developing his interest in the avant-garde and staging the playwrights who would be major influences on his film career, including Samuel Beckett, Ionesco, and August Strindberg, and the surrealists. Of special importance would be Theater of Cruelty champion Antonin Artaud and Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, with whom he launched the Panic Movement (from the god Pan) in conjunction with artist Roland Topor. By the mid-'60s, the Panic Movement began yielding full-fledged "ephemeras" or "happenings," theatrical events designed to be shocking. One four-hour ephemera starred a leather-clad Jodorowsky and featured the slaughter of geese, naked women covered in honey, a crucified chicken, the staged murder of a rabbi, a giant vagina, the throwing of live turtles into the audience, and canned apricots. This privileging of the provocative above all other qualities would prove to be a sign of things to come in Jodorowsky's early film career.

Whatever Jodorowsky’s artistic merits may be prior to this film, they are largely absent in this documentary, which instead is set strictly in the present in Jodorowsky’s Parisian apartment and allows the man himself to describe, in minute detail, how he envisions his infamous lost film, recreating character by character, scene by scene, adding the conceptual brilliance of several of those hired, including French artist and cartoonist Jean Giraud (Moebius) who created illustrated storyboards for the entire film, Swiss surrealist painter H. R. Giger, who created the basis for the set and character design, but also John Carpenter’s special effects man, Dan O'Bannon, and sci-fi book illustrator Chris Foss painted detailed designs of the otherworldly costumes, while also luring into his cast the likes of David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, Amanda Lear, and Udo Kier, while also training his own 13-year old son Brontis in an intensive two-year training session with a world renowned martial arts instructor in order to prepare him for his role as an intergalactic warrior.  Every bit of Jodorowsky’s wit and charm was used to capture the attention of some of these world renowned megalomaniacs, but his precise recollection is often hilariously revealing, where one can only imagine how all of this would come together, while also enlisting the mind altering space rock of Pink Floyd and the French progressive rock band Magma, who invented their own (untranslated) interplanetary language Kobaïan for the lyrics from a fictional planet called Kobaïa for their ten concept albums.  What we begin to realize as all this materializes before our eyes is the gargantuan scope of this absurdly surrealist sci-fi project, all of which takes place in Jodorowsky’s head, taking creative liberties from the source material, and having already spent nearly all of his projected $15 million dollars in pre-production costs, where the ideas were consolidated into an enormous book the size of a phonebook with all their costumes, set, and production designs, not to mention planets and space ships, that literally serves as an instruction manual for shooting the film, shot by shot, where according to director Frank Pavich, “Everything is there, everything is in the storyboard book Jodo made — the artwork, every scene, every bit of dialogue, every camera move, everything.”

In truth, with visions of grandeur, Jodorowsky’s goal was nothing less than to change the world, using an interstellar space opera to expand the consciousness of youth the world over, reproducing onscreen the mind-altering effects of LSD without ever having to take the drug.  Best known for his experimental, avant-garde films, often filled with violently surreal images, his films might be described as transformative visions with a hint of the religious bordering on the mystical, where Jodorowsky is a revered cult figure, as until recently his work was largely unseen except by a core of midnight enthusiasts.  According to director Nicolas Winding Refn, “You could read about Jodorowsky through a few books and magazines, but his films were basically inaccessible.”  With the backing of a young French oil heir named Michel Seydoux, Jodorowsky immersed himself into this project, spending two years completing all the necessary prep work before sending his book of Dune to all the Hollywood producers, showing how serious they were by having the film ready for shooting, with shot by shot storyboards completed ahead of time in the event any studio heads had any questions, and while they admired his ideas, even his professionalism, they refused to authorize the final few millions needed to complete the film, as they simply didn’t trust the weird and bizarre antics of Jodorowsky himself, who was not adverse to the idea of a 14 or 20-hour film, who continually saw this film as one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind, marking the arrival of an “artistic, cinematic God,” while Hollywood only saw dollar signs slipping down the drain.  Hollywood simply didn’t understand that something this oversized was marketable, as Jodorowsky was going after oversized creative personas who were just as mad as he was, where their appearances in the film might have been jaw-dropping to audiences.   

This venture into the world of Hollywood capitalists offers significant insight, as Hollywood is a business that is afraid to try new ideas, that is much more comfortable with two or three scripts lying around that replicate the formula of other successful films. Jodorowsky wouldn’t budge at the thought of someone else shooting the film, as it is after all his vision and inspiration, and Hollywood refused additional backing, leaving Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune among the scrap heap of greatest movies never made (Beyond Jodorowsky's Dune: 10 greatest movies never made), along with Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Orson Welles’ Don Quixote, or Stanley Kubrick’s heavily researched Napoleon.  After the production of the film collapsed, with the disappointment still etched on Jodorowsky’s face, the rights to the film eventually expired, snatched up by mega producer Dino de Laurentis, who employed David Lynch to direct the film in 1984.  That film tanked at the box office and received scathingly negative reviews, as Lynch’s artistic concerns were largely ignored and his three-hour film was recut by the producer to a standard two-hour movie, described by Roger Ebert in his one-star review, Dune Movie Review & Film Summary (1984) | Roger Ebert, “This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.”  Perhaps ironically, this was the disaster that Hollywood originally refused to finance. 

Following Jodorowsky’s failed debacle, Dan O’Bannon entered a psychiatric hospital, eventually working on thirteen different scripts, the last one being Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), the large science fiction spectacle in outer space that Jodorowsky had envisioned, a film that also employed H.R. Giger to create the original Alien creature, also Moebius and concept artist Chris Foss.  Hollywood, being the unethical enterprise that it is, basically stole many of the ideas from Jodorowsky’s massive book on Dune and redistributed them in future pictures, which uncannily includes STAR WARS (1977), FLASH GORDON (1980), RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC (1981), Blade Runner (1982), THE TERMINATOR (1984), CONTACT (1997), THE MATRIX (1999), and even Ridley Scott’s more recent Prometheus (2012), movies that made plenty of “other” people millions of dollars.  Not to be deterred, some forty years later, Jodorowsky’s unbridled enthusiasm for life remains intact, where his massive vision for this failed venture is enormously entertaining, as he relishes the idea of describing every nuance and detail of this film to a new generation, taking great pride in seeing his ideas live on, much like the original movie ending he envisioned where his ideas are literally reborn in the films (lives) of others, where perhaps he did change the world by altering the cinematic landscape of what’s possible.  Jodorowsky is a believer that art is larger than life, that it encompasses more than we can imagine, where this film literally encourages future generations to open their minds to new ideas and to embrace the challenge of possibilities.  If Jodorowsky’s living spirit is about anything, it’s about expanding one’s conscious mental awareness, where this film is literally a plea for the world to attempt the impossible.  As he points out in the film, “I have the ambition to live 300 years.  I will not live 300 years.  Maybe I will live one year more.  But I have the ambition.”

Only God Forgives

ONLY GOD FORGIVES                    C+                  

Denmark  France  Thailand  USA  Sweden  (90 mi)  2013  d:  Nicolas Winding Refn    Official site [France]

An overly somber style over substance film, where except for the excessively violent subject matter, one might think this is a Wong Kar-wai film, as the lush visuals combined with the highly eclectic musical soundtrack written by Cliff Martinez add a hypnotic, near surreal color palette.  Stylishly impressive, set in the dreamy underworld of Bangkok, Thailand, but the characters all feel like they’re sleepwalking through their roles, not unlike Gaspar Noé’s ENTER THE VOID (2009), a director singled out in the credits by Refn, stuck in a netherworld purgatory waiting to be judged by a martial arts policeman named Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), dressed out of uniform in loosely fitting and comfortable clothing, who like a spaghetti western Avenging Angel or God, restores order through brutal punishments, bordering on torture porn, but his judgment comes swift and decisive instead of inflicting prolonged agony.  Afterwards, in perhaps the most surreal moments in the film, Chang sings karaoke while his fellow cops sit around in uniform to listen.  While the surface effects can be near spectacular, as the composition of each shot couldn’t be more remarkable, along with an edgy use of lighting and a dazzling color scheme, shot by cinematographer Larry Smith who worked on three Kubrick films, recreating the spooky element of surprise in the long hallways shots of the Overlook Hotel, but there’s little to no interior involvement, where the viewer is never connected emotionally to anything onscreen.  The dialogue is so campy during some of the most violent showdowns that it borders on the ridiculous, adding an element of the absurd to the already over-the-top visualizations, making this a midnight run cult film at the time of its initial release.  Refn also dedicates this film to Alejandro Jodorowsky, a cult figure whose films depict picturesque horrors and humiliations, where Peter Schjedahl in his New York Times review calls EL TOPO (1970) “a violent surreal fantasy, a work of fabulous but probably deranged imagination.”  Jodorowski himself is quoted as saying, “Everyday life is surrealistic, made of miracles, weird and inexplicable events.  There is no borderline between reality and magic.”  All of which means this was meant to be a head-scratcher, something of a mindfuck of a movie, where the Argento-like atmosphere of menacing doom defines the film.

Ryan Gosling is Julian, who along with his brother Billy (Tom Burke), run a Thai kickboxing club, which we learn later is just a front for a major drug operation.  Julian’s demeanor is so calm and understated that he barely utters more than a sentence or two throughout the entire film, where he doesn’t act so much as sulk, but like Chang, he’s more of a presence than an actual character.  When his brother inexplicably goes berserk, raping and killing an underage prostitute, leaving her lying in a pool of her own blood, the sickening aspect is so acute that the regular cops turn to Chang, something of a specialized expert only called upon in the most hideous crimes, where his unique method renders immediate judgment, with no arrest, no trial, and no imprisonment, as if he’s not really a part of the human condition, but an elevated force to contend with, seemingly drawing upon supernatural powers.  Except for his lightning quick martial arts strikes, he does everything else in a Zen-like calm, in near slow motion, as if he’s hovering over the consciousness of these criminal suspects with their fates in his hands, outraged at hearing their pathetic, self-justifying defenses, demanding that they admit to their crimes, enacting a savagely vicious arm mutilation when they don’t answer swiftly enough.  In this way, the act of justice is decisively rendered and remains permanent, not some idealized concept.  When Chang allows the girl’s father to take his revenge upon Billy, it’s as if the world turns upside down.  Kristin Scott-Thomas arrives on the scene in an outrageously over-the-top performance as the diabolical mother mourning the death of her firstborn, still fuming and in a state of rage that Julian hasn’t exacted revenge for his brother’s murder, re-establishing her iron-like control over the drug operations, and ordering Julian around as if he was still an insolent child.  The scene of the film is a formal dinner sequence between mother and son, where Julian is joined by Mai (Rhatha Phongam), a prostitute pretending to be his steady girlfriend, where the vile flamboyance of the mother turns this into a classic scene and one of the memorable highlights of the year, a uniquely horrific and thoroughly embarrassing moment where Scott Thomas becomes a dragon lady that turns belittling and malicious humiliation of her son and his hooker girlfriend into an artform, initiating an assault of crude language so debasing that she’s a contender for the most evil mother in screen history, something of a parallel to the Albert Brooks character in Refn’s previous film Drive (2011). 

Thematically, a film this very much resembles is Taxi Driver (1976), another avenging angel film where Chang has to literally clean up the scum and garbage on the streets, holding the same contempt for moral rot and decay as Travis Bickle, using many of the same unorthodox methods as well, creating an eternal bloodbath as human salvation.   But Scorsese’s film is deeply rooted in an incendiary, character driven performance, something altogether missing here, as outside of the commanding performance of Scott Thomas, the rest may as well be zombies or the walking dead.  With each successive shot so perfectly rendered, Refn uses the photograph-like composition to advance each scene, where except for the violent action sequences, much of this film is a picture of stillness, an induced calm, like an oasis on the horizon, but something of an illusion covering up the internal turmoil hidden within.  The sins of the world are covered in a kind of toxic moral laziness, while Chang’s job is to root out each rotting soul one by one.  Scott Thomas blames Chang for allowing her son to be murdered, completely overlooking Billy’s own wretched acts, and sets into motion a series of blistering assaults on the police designed to remove Chang from the picture, but it’s as if he’s from a different realm, inscrutable and untouchable, surviving every attempt, until ultimately Chang finds Julian.  In exaggerated spaghetti western fashion, the two head for the ultimate showdown playing out in Julian’s own boxing ring, now nearly deserted except for a few miscellaneous cops, Mai, and  Julian’s mother.  In the emptiness of the room, Julian proves no match, as his opponent is a phantom, a demented godlike figure with a bloodthirsty appetite for inflicting pain, literally pulverizing his victims before walking away unscathed, leaving behind a grim and overly solemn world that resembles a morgue.  The film lacks the energy and entertaining appeal of any Bruce Lee movie, but overwhelms with its superb production design, ultimately feeling like an empty experience that is all surface visuals with little more to offer.  Lacking the well-crafted characterization of Sergio Leone, this feels more like a cartoonish homage to the macho revenge genre, where the Tarantino-ish, overly stylish bloodletting continues, but it all feels so meaningless after awhile, becoming a one note film that only grows more tiresome.