One things for sure, they certainly don't make 'em like this any more. Nor, I suspect, would anyone want them to. El Topo ("The Mole") is the deeply eccentric brainchild of veteran dingbat Alejandro Jodorowsky as he embarked on a film-making career as the 1970s dawned. As viewed through the out-of-their-gourd brainstems of a generation of American hippies, it was a key part of the "midnight movie" phenomenon, as celebrated by the recent documentary. If you're stone cold sober, it comes out a charmingly slapdash assemblage of mostly extraordinary - though sometimes idiotic - images and setpieces, culled seemingly indiscriminately from the planet's more lurid myth systems: Christian, pagan, pre-Columbian, you name it. There is a tenous narrative logic - in which Jodorowsky himself, dressed in cowboy black, must gun down four desert-dwelling killers - which gives the film a measure of watchability. But it's hardly deep.
-some douche
"If you are great, El Topo is a great picture. If you are limited, El Topo is limited."
-Jodorowsky
|