As I enter the final third of this year’s Sydney Film Festival, still
with a loaded schedule, here are some of the films I watched on Days
5-8.
Jodorowsky’s Dune (Frank Pavich)
Alejandro Jodorowsky and his assembly of creative geniuses/spiritual
warriors reflect on the most ambitious film never made. After blowing
audience’s minds and broadening the boundaries of the possibilities of
filmmaking with El Topo and The Holy Mountain, AJ became obsessed with
adapting Frank Herbert’s sci-fi bible, Dune. His unbridled ambition, a
god-like desire to ‘change the world’ through art, involved a longer
long-take than Orson Welles ‘A Touch of Evil’, forcing his son through
years of combat training in prep for a role, the casting of Salvador
Dali and Mick Jagger, and incorporating the music of Pink Floyd. His
version, in 1975, involved a brutal multi-amputation and themes as grand
as the Cosmos. Would it have changed the world if he pulled it off?
Maybe. He certainly possessed the passion, and the madness, to do it.
One of the most fascinating things about this film is how the mammoth
blueprint for this film, which was never green-lit, had a thumbprint on
many later sci-fi epics (including Star Wars, 1977). The
epic story-boarded screenplay and concept art is animatedly brought to
life, and piece-by-piece we come to see the big picture as it was
envisioned. We hear from critics, colleagues and fellow filmmakers (like
Nicolas Winding Refn), but you cling to every word from the crazy
84-year-old. He’s a real marvel. His frustration at never being able to
realize his dream has been bottled up inside all these years, and he
exorcises all of those feelings here. He takes great pleasure in telling
the stories of how he found the team to make that dream a reality, and
can’t hide the pleasure he felt when he first realized Lynch’s version
was a failure. With real insight into the creative process, this is a
cinematic, briskly paced and thoroughly entertaining documentary about
one of the industry’s eccentric geniuses. ★★★★
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