The Cult of Personality

A disappointing double feature:

JODOROWSKY'S DUNE (B) -  A fun but ultimately disappointing look back at what might have been: Cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky was recruited in the mid-'70s to film the cult classic book "Dune."

The Chilean progenitor of the midnight movie seemed like the perfect candidate to step to the Hollywood big leagues and translate Frank Herbert's story of an alternative world. Working with a French consortium in 1974, Jodorowsky began planning the adaptation, recruiting big names in the graphics world, such as Jean Giraud (Moebius), Chris Foss and H.R. Giger (who went on to create the look of "Alien"). Here was a chance to realize "Star Wars" two years before George Lucas hit the big screen and made cinema history.

Director Jack Pavich never truly captures the excitement of the times and the bittersweet nature of the missed opportunity. We're not fully transported to the era, never immersed in that moment.

We see snippets from the huge book of storyboard images that Jodorowsky and Giraud created. We get stories of how Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali were signed up to star. How Jodorowsky thought Pink Floyd would be perfect to create the soundtrack -- until he met the band. It would have starred David Carradine, who's hit show "Kung Fu" was said to be based on Jodorowsky's breakthrough film "El Topo."

Things fell apart. Jodorowsky claims, straight-faced that his script would have resulted in a 14-hour film, and you believe him. The project was shelved. The rights lapsed in the early '80s, and history took a fateful turn as David Lynch eventually took the help and created one of the great bombs of film history.

This is a movie about what might have been. Maybe too much time has passed, but the old talking heads have trouble conveying the magic they were poised to make. 

THE DANCE OF REALITY (C) - The first film from Jodorowsky in more than 20 years was pretty much lost on me. The director looks back at his childhood, a time, presumably, before he started dropping acid on a regular basis (but maybe not).

This has been a heralded return, and there are those out there who would hail it as a delirious masterpiece. I didn't get it. It's one thing to trip out on the amber glow of "El Topo" or "Holy Mountain" 40 years later at a late-night screening, reveling in the hippie-dippie kitsch. It's another thing to watch an 80-year-old man try to recapture some former glory when time seems to mostly have passed him by.

Here, Jodorowsky's son portrays Jodorowsky's dad, a communist in Depression-era Chile under a dictatorship. The father, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, rocks a Stalin look, with the mustache and jacket. The 10-year-old Jodorowsky prances about in girlish locks, a true mama's boy. The mama has a bounteous bosom and expresses all of her lines operatically. It seems like quirk for quirk's sake. (At one point, in a silly but affecting scene, she covers the boy in black shoe polish and they dance around naked together, somehow raising the specter of blackface and incest in one fell swoop.) Meantime, the father subjects the son to ritualistic humiliation, in an over-the-top effort to butch the kid up.

In many ways, this is a typical mind-bending circus funhouse (literally at times) from the expanded consciousness of Jodorowsky. Like in "Santa Sangre" we get amputees, and not just a few here and there; in this film we get a streetful of them, including a couple of guys missing all four limbs.

The politics here come off as facile and clunky. The father sets out on a long, boring journey to assassinate Chile's leader. His odyssey veers off into an extended scene revolving around the tending of horses. The film meanders more than it entrances. And it sags under the weight of its 130 minutes.

I'm not the best guide to Jodorowsky's film. They are curious little oddities to me. It felt like more of a trifle than a great work of cinema. It makes you wonder just how much worse "Dune" could have been, after all.