Blogorium Review: Jodorowsky's Dune

 If you haven't heard of Alejandro Jodorowsky, it's not going to surprise me one bit, and that's okay. Jodorowsky is best known for making El Topo and The Holy Mountain, two exercises in cinematic surrealism that aren't necessarily known for their accessibility. El Topo is considered by many to be the original "Midnight Movie," and includes extreme violence, bizarre imagery, Jodorowsky's son, Bristol, naked for much of the movie, and sporadic cruelty toward animals. It's a western. The Holy Mountain is... stranger than that, but arguably easier to stomach. I'm not saying that they aren't worth seeing, but it takes a particular type of adventurousness to want to watch them. If I had my druthers, I'd give The Holy Mountain the edge, but you might want to read a little bit about Jodorowsky before you dive in blindly.

 So this might explain why some of your friends went nuts with excitement when they heard Frank Pavich (N.Y.H.C.) was making a documentary called Jodorowsky's Dune. At least you maybe recognized the second word, even if the significance of the first didn't resonate. For fans of science fiction on the big screen, Alejandro Jodorowsky's adaptation of Dune is the great "what if?" of the genre. It's mentioned in The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made (although it didn't make it into my review of the book, for some reason) and exists in a certain realm of "Hollywood Urban Legend": the great unmade epic that influenced every science fiction film made for the next four decades. And finally, we have it on film. The story is every bit as mad as Jodorowsky himself, and every bit as compelling as it sounded when you first heard about it. I have no idea if his conception of Dune could even be made, but I'd love to see it.

 Jodorowsky states that he wanted his Dune to feel like "being on LSD without actually taking LSD," and thanks to the exhaustive book he and producer Michel Seydoux prepared for every studio in Hollywood, it's clear from the concept art and storyboards that he meant it.  In 1974, after El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Seydoux offered Jodorowsky the opportunity to make "whatever he wanted," and the director decided he wanted to adapt Frank Herbert's Dune. He'd never read Dune, but friends of his had, and the idea excited him. Jodorowsky set about concocting a grand plan for the film, to push the boundaries of what was possible in cinema, and assembled his team of "warriors": artists, actors, and musicians he could find to make his dream a reality.

 Many, including the Cap'n, have wondered why it took so long for someone to make this film, but I suppose it's not worth complaining about too much. Even at 84, Jodorowsky remains energetic and sprightly, but many of the most tantalizing pieces of his puzzle have long since passed. Three major contributors to Jodorowsky's vision died not long before the documentary and the other very recently (thankfully, he's in the film and one of the others is featured in archival audio).  Jodorowsky sought out a team of artists to help him conceptualize the worlds of the book: Dan O'Bannon (Dark Star, Lifeforce), Jean "Moebius" Giraud (Tron, The Fifth Element), and science fiction cover designer Chris Foss traveled to Paris to create Arrakis, Giedi Prime, and the various spacecraft used in the film. Moebius also drew the storyboards that make up much of Jodorowsky's massive concept book in order to give a clear idea of how the director planned to make the impossible imagery a reality.

 With his ideas in place, Jodorowsky excitedly moves on to how he planned fill in the other pieces of the film in order to sell it to studios. For Duke Leto Atreides, he brought on board David Carradine, and for the Duke's son, Paul Atreides, Jodorowsky again turned to his son Bristol. For the corpulent Baron Harkonnen, Jodorowsky tracked down Orson Welles and convinced him to agree to the picture by promising to hire his favorite chef to serve him food (this is not a joke or some crack at Welles' weight - Jodorowsky tells the story himself). For Feyd-Rautha, he sought out and found Mick Jagger (in one of the story's many coincidental meetings, the only parts of the tale I found hard to believe) - in the actual Dune that David Lynch completed (more on that later), Sting plays the role, for those curious.

 Jodorowsky's great coup was convincing Salvador Dali to play the "Emperor of the Galaxy", a feat that required many "tests" by the great artists and a series of demands that seem like they would (and should) have crippled the film. Dali demanded his own helicopter, for a giraffe to appear onscreen with him, an elephant, and most troubling to Seydoux, to be "the greatest paid actor in Hollwood." Dali told Jodorowsky he wanted "$100,000 per minute," which the director assured Seydoux would be feasible if they only paid him for the amount of time on screen - about three minutes. To further assure Dali's cooperation, Jodorowsky cast the artist's muse, Amanda Lear, in the film, despite her warnings that Dali would "destroy the project."

 Whether he would have wrecked Dune or not, Dali did bring one major piece to the design of the film by introducing Jodorowsky to the art of H.R. Giger. Giger joined the film to design the world of the Harkonnens, and some of the concept work might look quite familiar to viewers of the film Prometheus (in particular, the pyramid). Among many of the shifts in adaptation, Jodorowsky mentions his ending for the film departs radically from the ending of the book (to give you some idea, the title of one of Herbert's sequels, Dune Messiah, is treated almost literally).

 With much of his dream cast in place, Jodorowsky and composer Christian Vander set about wooing bands to craft music for each of the planets featured in Dune. The only two mentioned in the documentary are Pink Floyd and Magma, and only the members of Magma appear on camera, but it seems like both were excited to make albums exclusively devoted to Arrakis and Giedi Prime (respectively). With a budget of 15 million and his pieces in place, Jodorowsky and Seydoux set off from Paris to Los Angeles to pitch the film. The end result, as many of you have guessed, is not a happy one for Alejandro Jodorowsky.

 The interesting thing that I found from Jodorowsky's Dune is that the studios were receptive to the books presented to them. They liked the concept, the execution, and found that the seemingly impossible requirements of visual effects had logical workarounds. The only sticking point was that they didn't want the man who put it all together: Alejandro Jodorowsky. There are a number of suggestions bandied about as to why they simply refused to make the picture with him as a director, but the end result is that his vision of Dune was never made because the studio system didn't trust the man who put all of this together to be able to make it a reality. The sense of heartbreak in Jodorowsky's voice, late in the film (he speaks in a combination of broken English and Spanish) is the hardest part. His frustration that they wouldn't even let him try to make Dune, and would instead let the rights lapse is palpable.

 Jodorowsky's Dune does touch on the aftermath, when the De Laurentiis Company bought the rights and David Lynch took over as the vision behind the film. Jodorowsky admits that he had no desire to see the film, and worse still, because he "admired David Lynch," he feared it might be even better than his vision. His sons convinced him to see Dune, ten years after he began work on his aborted project, and to his great relief, "it was awful!" Jodorowsky admits that this is "a human response, one that I am not proud of, but it was my response." He doesn't blame Lynch for the failure of the film, but rather the producers.

 The books remained with the studios, and the influence of his unrealized vision filtered into almost every science fiction film made after 1974. Many of the participants in the film not involved Dune's production - among them Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher, Drive), Richard Stanley (Hardware), producer Gary Kurtz (Star Wars), and online writers Drew McWeeny and Devin Faraci - point out direct influences on Star Wars, Flash Gordon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Masters of the Universe, and Contact. These are accompanied by storyboards and art which are hard to argue didn't come directly from the book, particularly Contact, in which Robert Zemeckis executes a reverse of Jodorowsky's planned opening: an unbroken, continuous shot through space which ends on Arrakis.

  More noticeable, particularly if you move past Star Wars, is the indispensable role Jodorowsky played (in absentia) in the creation of Alien. Following the collapse of Dune, O'Bannon returned to Los Angeles, dejected, and eventually wrote the screenplay for what became Alien with Ronald Shusett. When he met with Ridley Scott about the film, who did O'Bannon recommend to design the film? Chris Foss, Jean "Moebius" Giraud, and H.R. Giger, his fellow artists from Dune. It's also interesting, in a roundabout way, that Ridley Scott considered taking over the DeLaurentiis Dune after finishing Alien, but decided instead to adapt Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, leaving David Lynch - who had turned down Return of the Jedi - to step in. Jodorowsky's often unspoken influence on a generation of science fiction films finally gets its due, up on screens and not just in blogs and books.

 While it's clear that he can't bear the thought of trying again, Jodorowsky does express relief that most of the conceptual art found its way into the world through his collaboration with Moebius in graphic novels. Moreover, he hopes that after his death someone will take the book and create an animated film of his Dune. If the semi-animated versions of Foss' paintings (kind of like The Kid Stays in the Picture) are any indication, it would be a welcome substitute to look forward to.

 It is still hard to imagine that Alejandro Jodorowsky's mad plan could have translated to film, although I'd love to have seen his try. He only made three films after Dune's collapse - Tusk, Santa Sangre, and The Rainbow Thief (I've only seen Santa Sangre) - but being involved in Pavich's documentary led Jodorowsky and Seydoux to reconnect, and together they made The Dance of Reality last year. I hadn't heard of it until Jodorowsky's Dune, but it's described as a "metaphorical, poetical" autobiography, so I plan to seek it out in the near future. In the meantime, I highly recommend Jodorowsky's Dune, both to people who have been aware of the story and to people wondering what we were all so excited about. This review only really scratches the surface of what's covered in the film - I left out almost all of Jodorowsky's best stories - so don't worry that you'll already know everything going in. Just sit back and enjoy what might have been.

"Q" is for Q - The Winged Serpent

 In the continuing effort to maintain a "Larry Cohen" presence on the Blogorium, it only made sense to include his 1982 film Q - The Winged Serpent (aka "Q") in The ABCs of Movie Masochism. While it may not be as well known as The Stuff or It's Alive or even just movies Cohen wrote like Maniac Cop, I thought it deserved a place in the alphabet of film reviews. Also, it starts with Q - all by itself, in fact. Take that, The Quiet Man!

 Q - The Winged Serpent is often trying to hold together three separate movies together, even if they barely fit together when, in theory, they should all nicely dovetail into one story:

 First is a neo-noir-ish story about a down on his luck guy named Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), who really just wants to play piano in a bar but keeps getting dragged into robberies because they pay. Jimmy's convinced that he can hit the big time and then enjoy the easy life, even though it's clear to the audience - not to mention his much beleaguered girlfriend (Candy Clark) - that he's a total loser. When the heist he agrees to drive for goes south, Jimmy - who has strongarmed into joining the robbery - loses the diamonds, is hit by a car, and discovers that his lawyer won't return his calls. This, of course, after he walks to the Chrysler building to go to his office. But instead of legal representation, he runs into a security guard happy to chase him up to the top of the building...

 Meanwhile, two cops who have seen it all. played by David Carradine and Richard Roundtree, are busting noses and talking shit to any perp who crosses their path. They get roped into investigating a series of ritualistic murders that involve the victim being skinned alive, with no apparent motive behind the killings. When Shepard (Carradine) follows a hunch to the natural history museum, he discovers that rituals much like the murders taking place around New York resemble sacrifices made to the Aztec god Quetzlcoatl.

  Meanwhile meanwhile, a giant flying lizard monster is picking up people and eating them - if they're lucky - mostly at random but generally speaking if they happen to be on top of a building. It doesn't care much about subtlety, so body parts drop onto the street and freak people out. The police are convinced it's some kind of big bird or something, but Shepard begins to wonder if their "flying lizard" might be Quetzlcoatl. Could the rituals be tied to the appearance of this monster?

 The answer is.... maybe? The people doing the murdering seem to think so, but the titular "Q" seems to be tooling around town whether or not the sacrifices are being committed, so I guess it's up to how you interpret the ritual's meaning. Or something. I don't think it was part of the plan for Quetzlcoatl to nest at the top of the Chrysler building, but that sure is what Jimmy Quinn finds when he's hiding out from a security guard who gives up almost immediately.

 Here's where you'd think everything would tie together - see, Shepard goes to the bar where Jimmy is trying out his "piano man" routine one night, so we know they're going to cross paths again.  The monster is pretty much just there to punctuate endless "investigation" scenes so that we can see Q kill a guy watching someone do push-ups or a construction worker who has his lunch stolen by the foreman - don't forget the gratudity from a topless sunbather! But seriously, what's going on with this movie?

 Instead of pulling everything together, Cohen has Quinn lure two mobsters up to the top of the building to be killed by the winged serpent, then Jimmy goes home and abuses his girlfriend and eventually ends up in the police station for questioning, when he FINALLY decides to tell them that he knows what's been eating people. But only if they make a deal with him wherein he's not culpable for any crime he may have committed or ever will commit. Oh, and also money and exclusive picture rights.

 Then we eventually get the police to the Chrysler building while John Shaft - er, Powell - is hunting down the ritual killer with the help of an undercover cop dressed as a mime wearing an Amadeus shirt and vest. And then *SPOILER* Q just up and eats Richard Roundtree! From what I can tell, Shepard NEVER learns this pretty important fact. That, or he's so jaded by his years on the force that the death of the one other cop he seems to get along with doesn't even faze him. It could go either way with this movie.

 It all eventually comes together, probably not in the order you expect, but by that point you're wondering what the point of Q - The Winged Serpent was. It's not a monster movie, or a gritty procedural, or even much of a neo-noir. Cohen tries to make it all three, but it's one too many genres to be juggling on a low budget, and the end result isn't as much fun as you'd hope for.

 There are still things to enjoy - the monster is pretty cool and used minimally for long enough that it doesn't get silly. Cohen also shoots the movie on the real streets of New York, often with what I'd like to believe was a lack of permits. The shots are quick, especially around the heist (at Neil's Diamonds), which also uses the low budget to its advantage.

 Fans of Reservoir Dogs will appreciate the economy of the jewel store robbery, which is told entirely from the outside of the building, so that the audience never sees how things go wrong, only Quinn's reaction as he comes hurtling outside with a briefcase full of purloined goods. It's worth noting that he's hit by the car first, which is what causes him to lose the briefcase in the street, but Jimmy never even bothers trying to find it. He just runs to a payphone to call his lawyer. Sure, we know he's a cowardly driver who didn't want to carry a gun or go in, but not looking for the jewelry is just silly.

 Q - The Winged Serpent probably has just enough going for it to recommend, and it can be entertaining in fits and spurts. There's just a lot of excess fat in the movie, and trimming it down from 93 minutes to 80 or so might have helped considerably. Still, you get to see John Shaft and Kwai Chang Caine as buddy cops and Michael Moriarty play the most unlikable protagonist you're ever going to see. Other than Candy Clark, I'm not really sure which character in this movie we're supposed to be sympathizing with. Unless it's Quetzlcoatl.

 Yeah, that has to be it. Clearly Quetzlcoatl is the hero of this film. I mean, that's why it ends the way it does, right?

 Up Next: a buddy cop movie from Walter Hill that's much better than Bullet to the Head. Stay tuned...

Retro Review: A List of "Sword and Sorcery" films I've Seen (or Think I've Seen)

 So while I was working on the Your Highness review, I made a concerted effort to think of every movie that falls into the "sword and sorcery" category that David Gordon Green's movie is paying homage / gentling mocking. If you saw the review, I narrowed it down to Conan the Barbarian (have seen) and Krull (have not seen). I also mentioned The Barbarian and the Princess because, if I remember correctly, the VHS has a four-breasted woman on the cover. It turns out that such a movie does not exist, because it's actually called The Warrior and the Sorceress. Again, I'm not really an expert on this subgenre.

 While thinking carefully about it, I realized I could name a few other movies that I've seen part of, all of, or think I might have seen when I was younger. Here is a list with any thoughts that possibly come to mind with them.

  Masters of the Universe - A He-Man movie has to count in some capacity. I've never seen Masters of the Universe, but it was playing in the background during a birthday party / sleepover I went to. That and A Nightmare on Elm Street, I think.

 Circle of Iron - Hey! I actually reviewed this movie - it's a kung-fu, sword and sorcery, parable sort of thing, but there's lot of loincloths and warriors and stupid crap with David Carradine as a leopard dude.

 Deathsport - So I watched the first thirty minutes of this Roger Corman produced ripoff of Roger Corman's Death Race 2000. Instead of cars, there are motorcycles, but first peasants ride around on horses and avoid mutants, and David Carradine is rocking a loincloth / cape combination but also shoots some kind of weird laser gun. Technically it's more "post-apocalyptic" but it reminded me of some of the dumber "sword and sorcery" shit.

 Willow - I saw Willow when I was young, and even then it seemed like a pretty weak knock-off of Star Wars, but with witches and Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer. I seem to remember the whole two headed dragon growing out of some sort of sac grossed me out and I haven't watched it since.

 Cave Dwellers - I saw it on MST3k.

 The Scorpion King - from the director of A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: The Dream Warriors and the pro-wrestler-turned-crappy-cgi-effect formerly known as The Rock. This isn't even a guilty pleasure - I openly enjoy this silly movie that's part Conan the Barbarian, part Conan the Destroyer.

 The Beastmaster - I'm not positive I ever saw all of Don Coscarelli's The Beastmaster. I'm not even really sure I've seen some of this movie, or at all. Maybe I just know what it is.

  Dragonslayer - Like Willow, I saw Dragonslayer and it creeped me out in parts. Specifically the parts with Peter MacNicol.

 Ladyhawke (?) - Forgive me, because I don't remember many swords. I guess there probably were, but mostly I remember Matthew Broderick from War Games and I remember not knowing who Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer were.

 The Lord of the Rings - These movies don't count, do they? I kept finding it on lists, along with Highlander and Excalibur, which I guess kinda technically count. Your Highness does borrow a few helicopter shots of our heroes on their journey, one of which reminded me of a similar shot used in the trailer for The Hobbit.

 Jason and the Argonauts / The 7th Voyage of Sinbad / Clash of the Titans - The Ray Harryhausen triptych of movies I guess are unmistakably "sword and sorcery" or at least "sword and Greek mythology" films. I saw all of these as a kid (funny how I didn't see many of these films after age nine...) and the robot bird Simon in Your Highness is most definitely a nod to that stupid robotic owl in Clash of the Titans. I forgot its name and don't know that I need to know it. I'll pretend its name is Archimedes, which I'm pretty sure is the name of the owl in The Sword and the Stone.

 The Black Cauldron - Speaking of Walt Disney, I never even considered this movie to qualify, but more than one list mentioned both The Sword and the Stone and The Black Cauldron. I saved The Black Cauldron for last because at least I have a story about this movie.

 I saw The Black Cauldron when it opened in theatres and was apparently the one kid in the world that didn't think it was the nadir of Disney animation (see: Waking Sleeping Beauty). In fact, I couldn't wait to rent the VHS tape when it came out... which was funny, because it DIDN'T come out on videocassette. Not until I was in high school, as a matter of fact. Like Song of the South, The Black Cauldron simply vanished from the lips of anyone involved with The Walt Disney Corporation for the rest of the 1980s. It took the better part of a decade before anyone could watch it again. I still don't really get the "sword and sorcery" categorization, mostly because I always connect that subgenre with the desert, but I guess it does fit in.

 Do you like how I mentioned two different Nightmare on Elm Street movies even though they are in no way topically related to these films?

 So I guess there were more movies than I led you to believe yesterday, although I've seen maybe three of them in the last ten years in their entirety. Several of them I only saw once, when I was pretty young, and they didn't make much of an impression. That might explain why Your Highness was slightly perplexing to the Cap'n.

Blogorium Review: Circle of Iron

Circle of Iron, also known as The Silent Flute, was the brainchild of Bruce Lee and his student James Coburn (Snow Dogs) in the late 1960s, before Lee broke big with Enter the Dragon. In an effort to make a kung fu film that represented more Zen philosophy and less chop sockey, The Silent Flute takes place in a fantasy world "that never was and always is" where the bravest warriors face a series of trials for the right to meet Zetan and read from the Book of All Knowledge. In their proposed version, Coburn would play the hero, Cord. Lee would play four parts, each representing an aspect of the trials (The Blind Man, Monkeyman, Changsa, and Death).

At this point you're either thinking a) why have I never seen this movie, b) how did something this weird ever get made, or c) okay, what's the catch? The answer to all three is that when Lee and Coburn sent the script around, no studio was interested in making it, so Bruce went back to Hong Kong and made Enter the Dragon. The rights were eventually picked up by Sandy Howard and Paul Maslansky, who made the movie with director Richard Moore almost ten years later. With Lee dead and Coburn no longer interested, who would fill the lead roles?

David Carradine was offered the role of Cord but turned it down because it resembled his role on Kung Fu too much. He instead expressed interest in the Bruce Lee part(s), and with financing in place, The Silent Flute / Circle of Iron began shooting in Israel. This is the version you can find on dvd and (soon) Blu Ray and with that necessary backstory out of the way, I can tell you a bit about the movie itself.

I enjoyed Circle of Iron but will readily admit that it's a very silly movie. While I can appreciate what Lee and Coburn were trying to do, it takes the film out of the realm of kung fu and into a mystical realm that all to frequently resembles the "Sword and Sandal" genre that was omnipresent in the late 70s and early-to-mid 80s (Conquest, Beastmaster, Conan the Barbarian), interspersed with a sprinkling of fighting styles.

Carradine handles all four roles with aplomb, and if I hadn't known (from the trailer) that he played four parts, it's likely I wouldn't have guessed. You can tell he's Changsa, the sultan of pleasure in the desert, but I don't think I would've guessed he was Monkeyman or Death. Carradine brings a different type of physicality to each role and finds subtle ways to shift his body type for each character. Well, Death doesn't get much screen time, but it's because he looks really goofy in a leopard outfit shot in "negative"-vision, and when you see the leopard suit briefly during a final battle in broad daylight, it looks even sillier.

It would be easy to crack wise about the Monkeyman sequence, but the truth is I don't know how else it could have been done. The first trial puts Cord into a cave surrounded by monkeys and their leader, who he must defeat to continue on the path to Zetan. Carradine has some, um, how shall I put this, Zoobile Zoo-esque makeup and the rest of the monkeys are dudes wearing masks that look like Planet of the Apes molds made on the cheap. Admittedly, actual monkeys would look even stranger and may have been impossible to film, but it doesn't help make the film less goofy.

Speaking of which, you're probably wondering why I haven't mentioned the actor who plays Cord, Jeff Cooper. Okay, the biggest hurdle in taking Circle of Iron seriously is that fact that the lead character is a buff white dude with curly, feathered blond hair and a perpetually doofy look on his face. This was the only picture I could find of Cooper straight on in the film:

Now imagine this guy wearing a lion cloth bikini bottom with furry boots and that's your hero. When he doesn't look like that he's making this goofy smile and following around Carradine's Blind flute player like a puppy. Cord is so obnoxious at points that I really wondered whether audiences were supposed to believe he could achieve Enlightenment, which to be honest is dubious even at the end of the film.

The other element of the film, aside from the goofy lead male or the silly outfits or the scenes where Cord and the Blind Man jump kick horses (seriously) is the random "stunt casting". For no apparent reason Roddy McDowall is in the beginning of the film and Christopher Lee at the end, both playing roles that have next to no impact on the film. Even stranger, Eli Wallach (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) plays "Man in Oil", which is a stranger Cord meets in the middle of the desert. Wallach is trying to dissolve his legs and his chonson by sitting in oil for ten years, which doesn't appear to be a lesson Cord pays any mind to, nor should anyone else.

Additionally, Circle of Iron brings you the following silly happenings: frog sign language, Cord-encouraged seppuku, a bickering boatman and his wife, samurai fighting alongside barbarians and Centurions, gratuitous kid slapping, crucifixion, Christopher Lee's condom hat, cow punching, and implied polygamy. I do enjoy the film, but certainly not as Lee intended. Circle of Iron is far too unintentionally goofy to be taken seriously, but it has some dumb charm all its own.

The version I watched was purportedly from the "Uncensored" international cut, which to be honest I only agree with because the opening credits say Circle of Iron and the closing credits say The Silent Flute. The latter title (which was the original title) actually is more appropriate for the film, as there is no "circle of iron" to speak of in the movie. Still, I'd say it's worth renting, especially since it sets up elements of Carradine's Bill in Kill Bill volume 2, and you get to see him fighting monkey style.