alejandro jodorowsky Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Dangerous Minds is one of my favorite new sites. It's the brainchild of Richard Metzger, the brilliant Brit once behind Disinfo.com pictured at left, and Tara McGinley, a costume designer/stylist (and Metzger's wife). Although the site covers everything from sex to pop culture and "kooks," my favorite is naturally the movie section.

Metzger and friends dig up and dissect the obscure, the weird, and the fantastic. Just a sampling of the website turns up info on an art show featuring "production drawings" and "commissioned work" from Alejandro Jodorowsky's aborted Dune adaptation featuring artists like H.R. Giger, Moebius, and Chris Foss, as well as a deep-cut discussion of the Mexican midnight movie staple Coffin Joe, which Metzger describes as "a rant-prone Nietzschean Übermensch with a top hat, cape and excessively long fingernails." Seriously, can you pass that up?

Sure, some of these movies are things you might never want to see, or might never be able to find, but you can read deliciously chewy musings on things you've never heard of, check out video clips, and even see interviews from Metzger and friends. They even ferreted out the test film from Spike Jonze's crack at adapting Harold and the Purple Crayon, which you can see behind the jump. (The post was part of a discussion about the recent profile of Jonze in the New York Times Magazine about his adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are.)

So check it out!

My synapses are tingling! The gears are finally turning on Alejandro Jodorowsky's latest project, King Shot, which has been getting indie weirdos chattering since 2006 or so. According to ScreenDaily, it will begin shooting this October.

Jodorowsky is the director of such cosmically trippy films as El Topo and Holy Mountain that were only recently released in region 1 DVD format after years of legal wrangling with his former partner Allen Klein of ABKCO films. He's also a tarot card reader and, according to his bio, "has developed a mixture of psychotherapy and shamanism called Psychomagic."

A so-called "metaphysical spaghetti western," King Shot stars Marilyn Manson, Asia Argento, Nick Nolte, Udo Kier, and Alejandro's son Adan Jodorowsky (who was also in his father's film Santa Sangre). Nolte and David Freaking Lynch are executive producers. Lynch's Absurda production company is also the worldwide sales rep.

According to Hollywood Reporter, "Marilyn Manson is touted to appear as a prophet in the Sin City-style film, which producer Eric Bassett said has enough sex and violence to guarantee an NC-17 rating."

Sorry, have to take a breather.

Okay, I'm back.

There have been rumors for quite some time about a collaboration between Jodorowsky and Marilyn Manson, and in fact the director performed Manson's uber-goff wedding ceremony to Dita Von Teese. There was also talk that Manson and Johnny Depp would star in The Sons of El Topo movie, which was later changed to Abelcaín, but has been abandoned due to difficulties financing the project.

Of course, since there's hardly any real info about King Shot, it's possible that King Shot is Abelcaín aka The Sons of El Topo, but as with many Jodorowsky-related things, who the hell knows?

Down at the bottom of the box office charts of the past few weeks, a couple of interesting items have been floating around. Two films from the legendary Chilean-born filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky have been revived and playing continuously for seven weeks on three screens apiece, El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). Unfortunately, said films only played for two days each at my local repertory house, and I missed them both. But they're both legendary in the annals of cult films as well as hard-to-see films. Jodorowsky, who recently turned 78 and is reportedly working on a new film, had a strange start and indeed his life story would make for several interesting books (maybe a biopic?). (Note: a new book "Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky" is due out this June.) He was a circus clown and a puppeteer. He studied mime in Paris with Marcel Marceau. He worked with surrealist playwrights such as Fernando Arrabal. He has written comic books and is apparently a licensed psychotherapist as well as a Tarot expert. He has become both a Mexican and a French citizen. His first film, Fando & Lis (1967), reportedly caused a riot at the Acapulco Film Festival, during which Jodorowsky was pursued by an angry mob and saved his own life by hiding in the trunk of his car.

Knowledgeable people have been talking a lot about documentaries lately, about how new, smaller digital technology is allowing people to get closer to their subjects -- not to mention producing films much more cheaply. It's a renaissance for documentaries, they say. Eight documentaries released in 2006 cracked the list of the top 100 highest-grossing documentaries of all time, and another 15 currently reside on the second hundred.

But here's a simple question: how many of these would anyone want to watch a second time? How many have a shelf life? For example, here's my personal documentary "shelf life" top five: Crumb (1995, Terry Zwigoff), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997, Errol Morris), Lessons of Darkness (1992, Werner Herzog), To Be and to Have (2002, Nicolas Philibert) and My Voyage to Italy (1999, Martin Scorsese).

I've seen some weird movies in my time -- or so I thought until I saw an Alejandro Jodorowsky movie. The director has a resume that includes tarot expert, mime, comic book writer and new age psychotherapist. His career as a filmmaker has been rocky to say the least: His first film incited a riot at it's premiere screening, and most of his other works have only been accessible through bootlegs and selected midnight screenings and festivals.

The director spoke with Premiere Magazine about the upcoming release of a DVD box set of his films including El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and Fando & Lis. The director oversaw the restoration of the films and said, "For the first time in my life I have the picture as I like it." Jodorowsky says he is currently working on a gangster project titled King Shots with Nick Nolte and Marilyn Manson as a 300-year old Pope. Manson is a huge fan of Jodorowsky and even had the director officiate his marriage to Dita Von Teese in a costume from The Holy Mountain. Jodorowsky has always had a rough time of finding investors, so it could be a long time before the project even gets off the ground. Until then, fans will have to be content to sit down with the box set and enjoy the insanity from the comfort of their living rooms.

[via Dark Horizons]