Jodorowsky's Dune

I found that my public library has this BluRay edition of this 'movie'. There were zero online requests for it and the cover art looks interesting. So I snagged it.

And last night I popped the disc in. Quite a lot of the first part is just talking to set the stage and explain who Jodorowsky is and what kind of movies he made. As it moves along it gets more interesting as we are shown some of the drawings and the out-of-this-world concepts in this 'Dune' movie. That of course never got made.

This is a great program for dune-fan-atics. For me is was just of mild interest. I watched some, skipped forward some, and never watched it to its conclusion. I just wasn't that interested in a movie that never got made.

I couldn't resist the urge to paraphrase the Tenacious D lyric for this review's title, cause I can't imagine anything more fitting.

I watched this documentary in anticipation of Denis Villeneuve's Dune, trying to better understand why adapting Dune in film has been such a challenge. One answer I came away with is that the sheer magnitude, complexity and transcendental nature of the source material triggers the fantasy-turned-burden of creating the greatest film in the history of cinema. It's like the Dune film has been the holy grail of modern sci-fi filmmaking. Jodorowsky was the first to chase it and was - and still very much is - convinced he had it. If only those pesky studio execs could see past the director's unconventional M.O. and cough up the money.

Jodorowsky's passionate and fascinating retelling of this epic adventure in filmmaking alone is enough to fill the screen for the whole 90 minutes, but we also get regaled with a good amount of the original concept art, animated storyboards and music that give us a taste of the project's intended aesthetic. The testimonies of some of the artists involved in the project help ground this implausible-sounding tale to reality.

I don't think the documentary makes any attempt to be objective, so it shouldn't be viewed as a complete chronicle of how this ambitious project went down. It's more a character piece on Jodorowsky himself, as a - slightly unhinged, slightly megalomaniac - uncompromising visionary, who at that one point in history managed to recruit an "army" (his term) of avant-garde talent (a jaw-dropping list of huge names from all over the artistic world from Orson Welles to Mick Jagger, from Salvador Dali to Pink Floyd).

Jodorowski the person is intriguing and flawed in equal measures. He reminded me a lot of Ayn Rand's Howard Roark (The Fountainhead) in the way that he put his art before anything and anyone else, displaying hints of cruelty: he admits to subjecting his 12-year-old son to a 2-year punishing training regime in preparation for his role as Paul Atreides, then he casually uses rape and "not respecting" women as a metaphor for creating great art (a bit you'd think the director would have chosen to cut out so as to protect the old man in this otherwise hagiographical portrayal).

In all, it's well worth a watch, especially in light of 2020's Dune, but it's good going into it knowing what to expect and what not to expect.

"Visionary" is the most misused term in film circles of late, thrown around by idiots who wouldn't know a D.W. Griffith film from a Warhol. Such is the fate of Alexandro (proper spelling) Jodorowsky, a darling of cultists.

Unlike the particularly lame set of experts rounded up here (fan boys as film critics and untalented film directors Richard Stanley and Nicolas Winding Refn), I was a film buff in the '60s and '70s and properly placed Alexandro's work ("El Topo", "Fando & Lis", "The Holy Mountain") in the context of his betters: Glauber Rocha from Brazil and the fabulous European surrealist Arrabal.

Frank Pavich who directed this documentary fails to mention even in passing that "Fando and Lis" was adapted by AJ from a play by Arrabal. "Viva la Muerte!" by Arrabal was just as influential a midnight movie at the outset of the '70s as AJ's "El Topo", and all the art-house directors of that era owed plenty to the innovations of Rocha in a series of films from which "Antonio das Mortes" stood out, and would still be a reference point if folks did their homework.

In covering AJ's work this documentary is incomplete and misleading. The most famous anecdote regarding "The Holy Mountain" concerns star Dennis Hopper going crazy during filming and leaving the set, forcing AJ to replace him. Nowhere is that level of historical research encountered here.

Instead we have AJ pontificating, gesticulating, and basically acting the part of "the mad genius" for Pavich's camera. This routine, favored by Werner Herzog in recent decades gets old in a hurry and made watching "J's 'Dune" a real chore. I interviewed Terry Gilliam in 1981 in Manhattan on his promo junket for the release of "The Time Bandits" and he behaved in person one-on-one quite similar to the way Jodo acts here. Both men are so full of enthusiasm and passion concerning making movies that they literally seem about to blow a gasket at any moment.

Both Jodorowsky and Gilliam have become famous over the years for the outlandishness (and scale) of their projects, and their becoming folk heroes by going Don Quixote-like up against the windmills/giants of the Film Establishment, i.e., the guys who hold the purse-strings.

Much is made here of Hollywood's inability to see the power of AJ's meticulously (and permanently) enshrined shooting script that is bound in hardback the size of an unexpurgated Webster's dictionary. Both he and Gilliam seem to have a mental block against recognizing the difference between making a large-scale, say mature David Lean- scale, movie and writing the Great American Novel or crafting the ultimate Broadway Play. Self-appointed "visionaries" need not apply - only fools like Bob Guccione and his "most expensive porn film of all time" Caligula can do that. Artists like these should sensibly follow in the footsteps of avant-garde filmmakers, Maya Deren, Ed Emshwiller, Stan Brakhage and Stan Vanderbeek: create independent, no-budget, uncompromising underground cinema. Leave the $200,000,000 projects to hacks like Michael Bay.

It was Dino De Laurentiis (along with Joseph E. Levine and Alexander Salkind) who initiated the era of big-budgets we currently live with: back when Dune by AJ was being worked on and shopped the entire film industry was functioning under very tight budgetary restrictions following the near-collapse of the studios in 1969: no film in the '70s was being green-lighted with a budget as high as $15,000,000, which Dune would entail.

For the record, it was 1976 when Levine's "A Bridge Too Far", Dino's "King Kong" and Salkind's "Superman" were independently produced at much higher budgets, opening the floodgates. And not coincidentally it was Dino, through his daughter, who ended up producing the David Lynch flop of "Dune".

So the doc's argument about AJ's war with stupid studio execs is completely off- base and ignorantly presented -their hands were tied at that time.

Worse than that, the movie's implication about the power and influence of AJ's Dune, even without it being made, is 180 degrees off the mark. Sure, we see trotted out a who's who of ultra-creative talent that was working on preparing the movie: Giger, Moebius, O'Bannon, even hangers-on like Welles and Dali. Ridley Scott is rightly shown to be the chief recipient of the fruits of their labors -going from the promising art-house director of "The Duellists" to fame and fortune (via hiring AJ's technicians) with increasingly bigger- canvas epics like "Alien", "Blade Runner" and ultimately "Gladiator" and many others all of which not coincidentally resemble the '60s epics that sank Hollywood's fortunes and led to that moratorium on big-budget projects in the first place.

The legacy of this unfinished film is not launching top technical and creative talent in a host of blockbusters but rather the industry's ongoing fascination with flashy, mindless crap, currently emblazoned by the application of 3-D (a tarnished medium from the early '50s) to so many pictures as well as fake IMAX (not using the IMAX photographic system) to market the junk.

What Pavich presents as AJ's strengths are in fact his fatal flaws. Rounding up the top talent - it seems like he has the Midas touch in finding the best in each field, does not disguise the obvious fact that had he actually been able to make "Dune", AJ would be calling all the shots, like a Robert Rodriguez (writer/director/cameraman/editor). Evidence of this creeps into the doc with the segment dealing with Doug Trumbull, who is sloughed off as arrogant or not a team player when AJ rejects his participation out of hand, when in fact it is obvious that AJ is the arrogant s.o.b., not Doug.

AJ would have a firmer and more legitimate place in film history had he remained independent and tackled smaller-scale films that expressed exactly what he wanted to say, a la the models of Jim Jarmusch or Woody Allen.

This documentary is about the making of the movie "Dune". No, not the 1984 mess of a film and financial disaster helmed by David Lynch, but an earlier version by the surrealist director, Alejandro Jodorowsky...a version that never ended up being made.

The film gathers together the surviving members of the production crew to talk about the Jodorowsky version and how great it might have been. And, through the course of this film, you see many of the story boards, concept art and more.

As I watched this film, I couldn't help but think that if the Jodorowsky movie had been made, it probably would have been much weirder, much more violent* and much more confusing than the Lynch version. The Lynch film was mostly confusing because it was cut to pieces and should have been at least a 3-4 hour movie. The Jodorowsky version, in contrast, would have been so surreal as to make Lynch seem like an ordinary filmmaker! So, while everyone associated with this project thought the movie would have been great, I just have no idea WHO would have actually gone to see it...especially since Jodorowsky wanted to make a 12-20 hour film AND completely re-write the ending, in which Paul would die! I just can't see the fans wanting to see this...especially when in this documentary Jodorowsky talked about wanting to 'rape Frank Herbert" (not in a literal sense)!

It's a fascinating film where you get to follow Jodorowsky's thinking and the steps taken to try to get the film made. However, I cannot see this as a 'masterpiece' as some have said. First, it never got made...so how can it be a masterpiece? Second, while it could have been an amazing film (who knows?), it also might easily have been one of the biggest debacles in movie history, though the chances of the film being made seem insanely remote as you watch the documentary.

Overall, the documentary was fascinating and well worth seeing....the "Dune" project, however, sounded like a nutty gamble to say the least!



*If you don't think the film would have been uber-violent, watch Jodorowsky's "El Topo" and listen to some of the ideas the filmmaker wanted to incorporate into the movie (castration, dismemberment, etc.).

This is the only movie I watched twice at the True/False film festival in Columbia, Missouri in 2014. I am a fan of Frank Herbert's Dune and was pulled into the epic mythos of this 1970s film that never was.

Although the story of this "failed" project is fascinating, it was Jodorowsky's passion and drive that made me pay to see this movie twice. This is an absolute must-see for sci-fi fans but should also be viewed by artists, writers, film makers, sculptures, dancers, foley artists or anyone who has creative passion.

It is inspiring to see a man, albeit a near lunatic, with such vision, scope and ambition.