Movies 2007 #40 El Topo

El Topo

Jodorowsky is a mad genius. His vision is unique. I’ve ingested a lot of culture and there are very few people with a mind and creative voice like Jodorowsky. Take the average “visionary.” Maybe George Lucas or somebody like that that the media will occasionally coo over. Imagine all of the things that Lucas might have envisioned and put down on film. Jodorowsky probably came up with more fucked up, original, mind-blowing stuff than Lucas’ whole career in five minutes of this film or one or two pages of one of his comics (which are amongst my favorite produced anywhere in the whole wide world, by the way…)

Ewoks? Fuck an Ewok. If Jodorowsky had come up with Ewoks they’d have six heads, eight breasts (both men and women,) would wear Roman centurion helmets and would fly around on the back of a burning cross while quoting the bible. Backwards. In Russian. Except every fifth word would be backwards masked and dubbed by James Earle Jones.

Okay, me? I’m just drunk. Point being, if Jodorowsky thought up Ewoks they’d be cool. Fucking cool. The only sane response would be to stammer, “what the fuck was up with that?” after they got off the screen. There’d be no Ewok hating if Jodorowsky came up with them.

So. Yeah. Every five minutes of El Topo is like that.

This is a fucked up, brilliant, mindfuck of a film. Brains are bubbling over all over the planet after having seen this film. Mine started to dribble out my ear 🙂

And that’s probably all the review I can muster, to be honest. It’s just too much for one mortal to handle. If I tried to get down into the nitty gritty of the plot I’d come right up against the fact that I’m just not smart enough to craft the matrix needed to keep track off all the plotlines, cracked out visuals and intellectual underpinnings holding the whole thing together. I hate feeling dumb. A list of the sights and sounds might do the film justice, but then I’d risk spoiling the surprise and we wouldn’t want that. Being gobsmacked the whole time is part of the charm.

I will mention at least one thing- the single crudest, yet non-pornographic scene I’ve ever seen on screen is presented in this movie. It happens towards the end of the first half, where a half naked female gunslinger with the voice of a man is (presumably) trying to seduce the character Mara and she uses a piece of fruit as a prop in a demonstration of a pair of particular sex acts. It’s brilliant in its directness.

Some time soon I’ll be watching both Holy Mountain and Fando Y Lis. The latter of which provoked a riot when it premiered at the Acapulco film festival for its “corrupting” content.

Yes.

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