Amends Ere Long
El Topo (1970)
directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Why this cult movie and not another sparked such press upon its re-release last year feels like a bout of novelty run amok. Jodorowsky's mystical self-promotion is most endearingly actualized in the movie's imagery - legless midgets on the shoulders of armless midgets, or a man buried in honeycomb and milk in the desert sand - but just beyond the clever iconography is a beginner's palette of indelicate moviemaking and half-baked intellectual soap-boxing (thank you, John Lennon). Novel locations are one thing, but it takes a Buñuel to show just how good you have to be to get God right.
Canyon Passage (1946)
directed by Jacques Tourneur
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Dave Kehr was right in praising Universal's publication of this "great unsung achievement" of American filmmaking. For me the question now is why Tourneur can't escape his fate as Great Director (with Reservations). When the Val Lewton set was released two years ago, Tourneur's efforts were subverted by producer Lewton's overriding vision of horror. Out of the Past, too, is always talked about as great noir with far less mention of the man calling the shots (as if great movies just make themselves!). When you've mastered westerns, noir, and horror within the studio systems that invented the genres, you deserve to be great unconditionally.
One last hosanna: Hoagy Carmichael, more than just a "lunar figure," is, in "Canyon Passage," as close to the spirit of midsummer's trickster as movies ever imagined a Puck to be.
directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Why this cult movie and not another sparked such press upon its re-release last year feels like a bout of novelty run amok. Jodorowsky's mystical self-promotion is most endearingly actualized in the movie's imagery - legless midgets on the shoulders of armless midgets, or a man buried in honeycomb and milk in the desert sand - but just beyond the clever iconography is a beginner's palette of indelicate moviemaking and half-baked intellectual soap-boxing (thank you, John Lennon). Novel locations are one thing, but it takes a Buñuel to show just how good you have to be to get God right.
Canyon Passage (1946)
directed by Jacques Tourneur
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Dave Kehr was right in praising Universal's publication of this "great unsung achievement" of American filmmaking. For me the question now is why Tourneur can't escape his fate as Great Director (with Reservations). When the Val Lewton set was released two years ago, Tourneur's efforts were subverted by producer Lewton's overriding vision of horror. Out of the Past, too, is always talked about as great noir with far less mention of the man calling the shots (as if great movies just make themselves!). When you've mastered westerns, noir, and horror within the studio systems that invented the genres, you deserve to be great unconditionally.
One last hosanna: Hoagy Carmichael, more than just a "lunar figure," is, in "Canyon Passage," as close to the spirit of midsummer's trickster as movies ever imagined a Puck to be.
posted by NPK at 6:26 PM
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