A Few Words on writer/director/artist/genius Alejandro Jodorowsky

Have you ever seen an Alejandro Jodorowsky film?

How about Fando y Lis?

What about El Topo?

Holy Mountain anyone?

If you have, consider yourself lucky. If not, stop what you are doing, go out, and find one. Jodorowsky, after all is in the same business as Andrei Trakovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Terrance Malick, David Lynch, etc. which is to say the art business. The masterpiece business.

Jodorowsky is maybe the most influential filmmaker whose influence has gone mostly unsung. His 1970 film El Topo essentially invented the American Midnight Movie phenomenon and then quickly disappeared until 2007 when a box set of his best work was released.

The three second version of why this was: John Lennon saw and loved El Topo, convinced his man Allen Klein to distribute that flick and foot the bill for it's follow-up Holy Mountain. However, a falling out resulted in the films being yanked from distribution and basically locked away.

But you've seen Jodorowsky's influence everywhere. Nary has a Marilyn Manson video not provided at least some kind of wink and nod to Jordorwosky (his Shia LaBeouf-directed video for Born Villain even directly quotes Holy Mountain). 

I should probably throw out that this video is very NSFW.

    

And what do you know, the new Ryan Gosling/Nicholas Winding Refn pretentious art-film piece of shit collaboration Only God Forgives is dedicated to Jodorowsky.

But now, I'm poking fun and getting off track.

Okay sure, Jodorwosky's films are violent:

Surreal:

And blasphemous:

And boy, you thought the iguana's in Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans were weird?

Well how about the Conquest of Mexico reenacted with frogs and lizards?

But now I'm reducing Jordowosky to no more than a weirdo whose films should be shared with a group and a bong.

Well, ya, but anyone who has read this space on a regular basis knows that I also believe in art, especially trash art, and art Jodorowsky most defiantly is.

What's my definition of art? I think film becomes art when it meets two sets of criteria:

1) It fully utilizes the power of film as a visual medium:

And 2) it transcends the filmic medium. What the fuck does that mean? When you take the film away, you're still left with ideas, ways of thinking, emotions, whatever, that exist outside of the running time of the film. The ideas are what's important, the film is simply the medium which brings them to life.

But alas, what Ryan Gosling going on a violent killing spree or Marilyn Manson finding eyeballs in vaginas, etc lacks is that the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, if you can brave them, are also beautiful, spiritual and leave you feeling fully empowered. 

Jodorowsky, who, besides being a madman, is also an academic, writes books and conducts sessions in which he acts as a spiritual healer of sorts, is always pushing his viewers to find enlightenment. In El Topo his gunfighter is on a quest to kill four other master gunfighters, who each first deliver a powerful lesson to him, and in Holy Mountain, a group of people descend a mountain in hopes of finding enlightenment.

Being a visual artist, this is all hard to take in upon first view, especially for those not accustomed to stories being told almost solely through images. But it all really dates back to a performance that Jodorowsky wrote for famous French mime Marcel Maceau when he apprentices under him.

To paraphrase, the mime encounters three people along his journey, each of which he kills and tries to eat their heart. The third is a child. Once the child's heart is eaten, the mime is so overcome with guilt from what he has done that he kills himself and offers his heart back to the child so it can live again. A positive through negative; beauty through violence; enlightenment through knowledge; redemption through self sacrifice. We could go on all day.

So what's Jodorowsky's purpose? To find balance in life. That's where enlightenment is. To come to grips with oneself by destroying one's past self and being reborn from the ashes. Jodorowsky's teaching asks it's subjects to look back through their family tree, pinpoint the moment in life where some sort of negative force arose, and to give away all the baggage that has been building up over the years as a result of that action/situation/relationship/whatever it is that is holding you back. With nothing in one's past and with complete knowledge of oneself one can move forward facing outwards, looking ahead to new experience instead of back at old ones. Or something like that. 

If that's not a good definition of enlightenment, what is?

And, look, I didn't even need to drop any acid!

Side Note - The Dance of Reality, an autobiographical look at Jodorowsky's life in Chile and first film since 1990, is currently making the festival rounds and looks like it will be one to keep an eye out for.

A Few Words on Brick

So question: Is Rian Johnson writing a straight forward film noir (genre dialogue and all) set in a modern day high school brilliant or pretentious?

Of course, I'm opening up an endless debate to which there is no right or wrong answer.

So I'll put my foot down: it's mostly fucking pretentious Mr. Johnson.

But what you will notice from the very first frames of Brick right until the very last is that Johnson and his crew know how to make a movie. Seriously. This film is cinema, plain and simple. It's empty gimmick cinema, but it's cinema no less.

During the moments when I simply sat and looked at it, it conjured in my mind thoughts of Malick:

And Kubrick:

And Lynch:

This is a filmmaker that knows a thing or two about production value.

But the whole thing is such an empty, meaningless experience. Who was this film made to appeal to? What is it supposed to be about? It's influences are too broad and don't make sense together.

So the film, below the aesthetics, is all pose and swagger...A handful of intriguing with a spoonful of who cares. There's no heart and it just doesn't add up in any meaningful way.

It's about a high school private eye played by Joseph-Gordon Levitt. His character, probably having watched The Maltese Falcon one or ten too many times, says things like this, "No, bulls would gum it. They'd flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes and probably find some yegg to pin, probably even the right one. But they'd trample the real tracks and scare the real players back into their holes, and if we're doing this I want the whole story. No cops, not for a bit." He wisely at least delivers these gems straight.

He's on the case to discover who killed the apple of his eye, which leads him down back alleys, dark corridors and so on and so forth until the trail leads him to a femme fatal:

A heavy:

 

A local kingpin known as The Pin:

 

 

And a frame, composed in just such a way, that a chicken juice container distracts from an entire scene in which The Pin's mom offers orange juice:

 

 

You see, pretentious. 

 

Johnson, over the course of three feature films has proven that, as a writer, not a lot unlike Malick, Kubrick or Lynch, he's more into concept/idea than story. That's fine. His problem, however, lies in his inability to elevate his concept above the base level of gimmick, leaving the details of the plot to hardly matter.

 

 

The charm of Brick then is in that someone thought to do it. Now that it's been done, let's get over it and all move on with ourselves. 

 



The Shining

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is a masterpiece. Let's get that out of the way. How much of a masterpiece it is, I don't know, and whether it's a masterpiece on the level of 2001 or Dr. Strangelove is doubtful, but it is a masterpiece none the less.

And the single reason why it is a masterpiece is that it never gives any indication of how a viewer should feel about it.

Is it a story about a recovering alcoholic writer and abusive father who's former demons spark up when he relocates his family to live in an isolated mountain top hotel for the off season?

Or does he actually sell his soul to the devil for a drink in that scene at the bar, forever doomed to repeat this horrible experience for the rest of eternity?

Maybe it's a film about a mother who is desperately trying to save her son from a deranged and abusive husband who tries to murder them after falling off the deep end into insanity?

Or maybe it's about an emotionally abused child who buries his pain so deep inside that he creates an alternate personality and horror fantasy in his mind in which the abusive drunken father who terrifies him is driven into a murderous rage? Is the entire hotel a stand in for the kid's imagination?

How about it's an object of study because of it's mysterious auteur who rarely ever gave interviews and even more rarely ever spoke about his work? As if the artist has left his art in order for paranoid intellectuals to sift through in hopes of unlocking something about Kubrick's inherent inner genius?

But then the film is more yet. It's a brilliant psychological experience in which we encounter first hand the madness going on inside the head of each and every character. It's also an exercise in perfect film form and style.

Every note on the score is calibrated to coincide with what is happening on screen; every performance plunging deep into the madness and torment of these characters as it escalates. Every perfectly composed frame indicating a certain unease that must be lurking just below the surface.

It's also a European art film dragged through the dung heap of American popular culture.

And an adaptation of a great American horror novel.

It's also a perfect example of how to build tone and mood up until a breaking point in which all holy hell breaks lose, in this case, in an extended sequence of terror that is so frightening in how engaging it is that you don't care how it ends, just for the love of god let it end already.

And with that, it's also a hell of a genre flick.

At the end of the day, there is no relief from this film. That's why we keep coming back to it. That's why there is soon going to a feature length documentary trying to shed some light on it and explain all of it's mysteries.

So, The Shining is a masterpiece then not only because Kubrick gives us no easy in or out or indication of what all of this means, but because, no matter which angle you look at it from, it's nearly flawless from all of them.

Whether wanting to sift through the mysteries of the plot, look at pretty pictures for two and a half hours or just have the holy fucking bejesus scared out of you, you'll walk away feeling sure you've seen a masterpiece every time.

That's what truly makes it special: It's a masterpiece in it's details which all come together to create an even bigger masterpiece.

The Sub-Criterion Collection?

Speaking of the Criterion Collection is like speaking of God or royalty to the purest of movie aficionados. So sacred and important is the Criterion Collection line of laser discs, DVDs and Blu-Rays that, many months ago, when I suggested that Oliver Assayas' Summer Hours was an odd choice for Criterion to release seeing as it was a minor film, one Sam Juliano got red in the face, threw personal attacks and made an overall ass of himself. Thus is Criterion.

But, as one Tony Dayoub enlightened me, titles like Summer Hours, Everlasting Moments, A Christmas Tale, Gomorrah and Che (none of which I personally think really needed Criterion treatment) were all the product of a joint venture between the company and IFC to release their films. My problem at the time with Summer Hours was not really with the quality of the film but that, with the price tag of a Criterion DVD, at 30 to 40 dollars, being so high, why put out films that are readily available on perfectly acceptable region one DVDs when there are hundreds of other films (both contemporary and classic, foreign and not) that have still never seen the light of day on region 1 DVD and desperately cry out for it? Where, after all, is Richard Linklater's Suburbia, Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, Eric Rohmers Autumn Tale and so on?

Now, seeing what Criterion has in it's line-up of upcoming releases, I further question if, just maybe, we film lovers are getting one step closer to losing one of our most valuable resources. At the time of the Summer Hours debate I embraced the pairing of Criterion with IFC because, if the company was releasing more mainstream DVDs and this meant that the prices of their more valuable upcoming releases would go down, well hey, I'm all for that. Now we're just waiting on those valuable releases.

I may be just worrying for no reason. In the past couple months Criterion has gifted us with Antonioni's Red Desert, returned Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout and Godards My Life to Live to us and rescued Ingmar Berman's The Magician from obscurity. But then that's four titles amidst a sea of upcoming releases that certainly don't make much sense to me. Sure, they are all great films in their own respect, but all, once again, exist on perfectly acceptable and affordable region 1s. Sure having something with the Criterion brand on it is certainly nice and, depending on what kind of film lover you talk to, may increase the overall value of the film, it just seems unnecessary when there's more important blanks to fill in the world of film history.

Look at the list of new and upcoming releases. Malick's The Thin Red Line, Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, Stanely Kubrick's anti-war masterpiece Paths of Glory, Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, Chaplin's Modern Times, Guillermo Del Toro's Cronos, and the one that really got me scratching my head, James L. Brooks' Broadcast News.

The thing about all of these titles is that, they've all been available in North America at more than reasonable prices. Sure, some of them are out of print but still can be easily found. What's interesting is that they are all films that are associated with big name directors who have considerable pull within mainstream (albeit sometimes independent) film.

Thus begs the question: is Criterion trying to get away from bringing classic foreign and hard to find films to North American shores and instead concentrating on those films that still have enough cred to keep the brand relevant but that will sell more copies off the shelves? Now that Broadcast News (a great film no doubt) will be out on Criterion DVD can the world expect a Criterion version of Terms of Endearment? As Good as It Gets? Spanglish even? Does the world really need them?

Maybe I'm just worrying for no reason or resentful that Criterion is in a stage where they seem to be releasing only films that I already have in some other version on DVD instead of bringing out films that I am dying to get my hands on. But then again, when Criterion starts releasing films like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Life Aquatic or Antichrist, that certainly, if unjustly, raises a touch of concern.

What do you think? Is it good that Criterion are expanding their horizons or is this the beginning of the end?

The Box Or How I Learned to Stop Worring amd Learned what a Kubrickian Masterpiece Is.

In one of the first published reviews of Inception Anne Thompson called that film a Kubrickian Masterpiece as if, 11 years after Stanley Kubrick's death, that phrase can now refer to just about anything as opposed to works that are 1) masterpieces and 2) feel like Kubrick movies. Today the term has evolved because it has become, theoretically speaking anyway, part of public domain. It hardly matters if it's user knows the first thing about Kubrick because if the film is psychological science fiction and engulfs the viewer in it's mammoth scale awesomeness, well it's no ordinary masterpiece: it's a masterpiece of Kubickian proportions. At least that's how I've read it over the years. The term is ironic because A) Kubrick only made two sci-fi films, only one of which (2001) is a masterpiece and B) although his latter day epics such as A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket and The Shining are more prolific in that they are more recognizably what we have come to associate as being "Kubrickian" the early, shorter films such as Paths of Glory, The Killing and Dr. Strangelove are just as much, if not more so, masterpieces as the latter. However, if Inception is a masterpiece (we won't debate it again here), it certainly isn't a Kubrickian one as the film owes little to Kubrick other than that it is A) psychological science fiction and B) over two and a half hours in length. If we were to break down Kubrick into pieces (the droning soundtrack, the deliberate, surreal pacing, the meticulously symmetrical framing, created by the hand of a true knit-picker, the emotionally distant characters, the devious visual sarcasm) you'll find that very little of Inception translates. It's too sloppy, too full of ideas flying around in too many directions, and too loud and hyper active to be anything Kubrick would have associated himself with. Although it is no masterpiece (or even all that good), if you want to see true Kubrickian influence, look no farther than Richard Kelly's The Box, a strange, enigmatic and wholly Kubrickan sci-fi affair. That Inception was adored to death and The Box hated and swept under the rug is just one more notch of proof that it owes a lot of what it knows to Kubrick. The Box, Kelly's best film, whatever that's worth, is more or less exactly what he's spent two features doing: spinning complex yarns that turn in upon themselves so many times that the only thing they can be about is challenging their viewer to try and figure out just what they heck they are about. However, unlike the interesting but failed Donnie Darko and the abomination Southland Tales, this time Kelly is 1) working from source material and 2) has more control over himself stylistically. Number two is what's most important. It hardly matters what this story is about, if it is even about anything. What's interesting is how Kelly manages to control all of these chaotic elements (a mysterious button, the offer of a million dollars, amputated toes, abrupt nose bleeds, a man with only half a face, strange meetings by the poolside and so on) and keeps them grounded within his stylistic mold. There's something ever so ominous about the muted 50s household naivety; the way the wallpaper in the kitchen is so bold it always seems as if it is about to swallow its heroes whole; the way the faceless man speaks in the clipped tone of someone who is never really saying everything they know; and the way people silently seem to be stripped of their souls, one by one. All of this is very creepy, maybe in part, or maybe in full, because one never quite knows just what is going on at any given moment. Because Kelly is so restrained visually in that mysterious Kubrickian manner, it allows him to go completely over-the-top thematically. That's exactly what Kubrick got away with. That's exactly why his masterpieces have become an adjective all unto themselves.