I usually love the avant-garde, the offbeat, the strange and the surreal. Being a fan of David Lynch, Takashi Miike and Terry Gilliam, bring me the weird and bizarre – but do not bring me "El Topo". This midnite movie cult classic is one of those films I had been told was a "must see", though I knew it was not that easy. Most viewers either love or hate the movie with no in between.
Jodorowsky delivered as writer/director/actor/composer a mixed bag of metaphor, allegory, imagery, spaghetti western, fantasy, horror and utter gore, weighed down with Buddhism and Christianity, and just about anything else from the philosophical and metaphysical kitchen sink. The aforementioned is fine, but when the final destination for the audience is nowhere, I can understand the passionate hatred from those who despise the film. Of its lovers, many told me it was "trippy" and they simply liked it because of that.
The narrative, however, is all over the place as El Topo (The Mole) travels the Mexican desert to face and kill The Four Masters of the Desert. Do they represent the Four Horsemen, the Four Winds, the Four Elements? It is anybody's guess. The movie is so loaded with imagery upon imagery it is as if Jodorowsky was purposefully stirring the pot just to keep people guessing. Maybe as lovers of the film try to decipher the layers of meaning, Jodorowsky is laughing somewhere.
This film did not satisfy me on any level because the result was a pile of primordial ooze that did not have time to gel into something coherent. Granted, I was intrigued by Topo's Zen-like transformation, especially when he worked so diligently to save the deformed cripples, but this was not enough to justify what came beforehand.
The movie is a circus sideshow with bits and pieces that are at times amusing while disgusting on other occasions. In this vein, Jodorowsky delivered the grotesque on a tortilla. At times both ridiculous and frightening, he shocks the audience with a stream of phantasmagorical scenes that lead only to the end credits and nothing more.
Whatever Jodorowsky was searching for, it was for him and him alone. The movie was self- indulgent and left me amazingly disappointed.
I can sit and discuss Lynch's disturbing "Eraserhead", Miike's over-the-top "Visitor Q" and Gilliam's Orwellian "Brasil", but Jodorowsky's work leads to a dead end because it is utterly nonsensical.
Jodorowsky delivered as writer/director/actor/composer a mixed bag of metaphor, allegory, imagery, spaghetti western, fantasy, horror and utter gore, weighed down with Buddhism and Christianity, and just about anything else from the philosophical and metaphysical kitchen sink. The aforementioned is fine, but when the final destination for the audience is nowhere, I can understand the passionate hatred from those who despise the film. Of its lovers, many told me it was "trippy" and they simply liked it because of that.
The narrative, however, is all over the place as El Topo (The Mole) travels the Mexican desert to face and kill The Four Masters of the Desert. Do they represent the Four Horsemen, the Four Winds, the Four Elements? It is anybody's guess. The movie is so loaded with imagery upon imagery it is as if Jodorowsky was purposefully stirring the pot just to keep people guessing. Maybe as lovers of the film try to decipher the layers of meaning, Jodorowsky is laughing somewhere.
This film did not satisfy me on any level because the result was a pile of primordial ooze that did not have time to gel into something coherent. Granted, I was intrigued by Topo's Zen-like transformation, especially when he worked so diligently to save the deformed cripples, but this was not enough to justify what came beforehand.
The movie is a circus sideshow with bits and pieces that are at times amusing while disgusting on other occasions. In this vein, Jodorowsky delivered the grotesque on a tortilla. At times both ridiculous and frightening, he shocks the audience with a stream of phantasmagorical scenes that lead only to the end credits and nothing more.
Whatever Jodorowsky was searching for, it was for him and him alone. The movie was self- indulgent and left me amazingly disappointed.
I can sit and discuss Lynch's disturbing "Eraserhead", Miike's over-the-top "Visitor Q" and Gilliam's Orwellian "Brasil", but Jodorowsky's work leads to a dead end because it is utterly nonsensical.