Cinema Suicide

This is actually really old news, but no one, apart from a Guardian film article from November of last year has reported on this. As disappointing as it is, given a seriously mind bending premise and some unbelievably sweet concept art that emerged from preproduction meetings, it’s not entirely surprising. Since The Rainbow Thief, Jodorowsky has had difficulty get any film off the ground and even prior to that, his involvement in the production of an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune is a sort of legendary cautionary tale for filmmakers flying too close to the sun.

Fundamentally, Alejandro Jodorowsky is box office poison but the difference between his features and some late era David Lynch shit like Inland Empire, is budget. Inland Empire may have, indeed, been three hours of nonsense but it was a cheap three hours of nonsense. Jodorowsky’s movies are always wild and genre oriented. They involved large sets and huge scope. Getting away with that kind of shit in the 70′s is the benefit of a permissive age of filmmaking and a wild art film that sparked the entire notion of midnight movies. However, today, the people making waves in Hollywood back then are now writing the checks and are only interested in explosions and robots that turn into trucks. If you want to produce an art film independently, you have to keep the budget small and scale  back any aspirations of making some kind of acid saga like Jodorowsky tends to do.

You can’t seem to keep this man down, however, and at 80 years old and looking extremely healthy thanks to a shocking abstinence from drugs, booze and smokes (not to mention a healthy lifestyle involving yoga), Jodorowsky plans to sequelize his signature picture, El Topo, by shooting Son Of El Topo and basing it on the intense hatred and ultimate redemptive experience he shared with producer, Allen Klein, who has more or less stymied Jodorowsky’s career since he refused to direct a picture adapted from the kinky classic novel, The Story Of O. On Klein’s deathbed, the two bitter enemies made peace with one another and Jodorowsky was left inspired to tell the story of two brothers whose hatred is earth shattering but in the end they unite to become one being. It sounds perfectly Jodorowskian.

I wouldn’t get my hopes up, though. Nothing about his latest project suggests that he’ll get that one off the ground, either. If you just have to have your crazy ass Jodorowosky fantasy, though, I strongly suggest that you look into his warped series of comic books, Metabarons.