Tuesday, June 3:
Jodorowsky’s Dune at Sundance Cinemas, 9:15pm»
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Update: The kind folks at Sundance Cinemas have offered us a pair of tickets for our Movie Tuesday event this week, Jodorowsky’s Dune on June 3 at 9:15pm. To be eligible for the tickets, simply “join” the event at our Facebook event page, and we will announce a winner at Noon on Tuesday.
The Madison Film Forum wants you to stream one great film every week, attend at least one great film every month, and meet people doing the same. We don’t sponsor these screenings, we just support them by showing up.
In 1974, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose films EL TOPO and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN launched and ultimately defined the midnight movie phenomenon, began work on his most ambitious project yet. Starring his own 12 year old son Brontis alongside Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, David Carradine and Salvador Dali, featuring music by Pink Floyd and art by some of the most provocative talents of the era, including H.R. Giger and Jean ‘Mœbius’ Giraud, Jodorowsky’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel DUNE was poised to change cinema forever.
For two years, Jodo and his team of “spiritual warriors” worked night and day on the massive task of creating the fabulous world of DUNE: over 3,000 storyboards, numerous paintings, incredible costumes, and an outrageous, moving and powerful script.
In the words of Jodorowsky’s producer, Michel Seydoux, “It should have been enough. But it wasn’t.”
Through interviews with legends and luminaries including H.R. Giger (artist, ALIEN), Gary Kurtz (producer, STAR WARS) and Nicolas Winding Refn (director, DRIVE and ONLY GOD FORGIVES), and an intimate and honest conversation with Jodorowsky filmed over the course of three years, director Pavich’s film – featuring never-before-seen realizations of Jodo’s mind-blowing psychedelic space opera (animated by Emmy Award nominated Syd Garon) – finally unearths the full saga of ‘The Greatest Movie Never Made’. –Jodorowsky’s Dune press kit.
We’ve aggregated many reviews of Jodorowsky’s Dune at our Madison Film Forum Flipboard Magazine.
Here’s Richard Brody’s New Yorker capsule review:
A fascinating and depressing documentary about a visionary director and his impossible dream. Alejandro Jodorowsky, who more or less invented the cinematic head trip with the early-seventies classics “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain,” decided to adapt Frank Herbert’s “Dune” as his first studio film. Backed by the French producer Michel Seydoux, he put together his dream team—a cast that included his teen-age son Brontis (whom he put through two years of full-time martial-arts training), Salvador Dali, and Orson Welles and a design staff that included Dan O’Bannon (“Dark Star”), the illustrator Chris Foss, and the painter H. R. Giger. But Hollywood producers, while impressed by the detailed plans, were put off by the freewheeling director himself, and the project went unrealized. The documentary, by Frank Pavich, is an engaging and poignant portrait of Jodorowsky, now eighty-five, whose exuberant, cantankerous, and philosophical presence sets the tone. But the great reveal—the peculiarly potent influence that Jodorowsky’s unmade film seems to have had on the Hollywood mainstream—makes the intricate tale of might-have-beens all the more infuriating. Nostalgia for the golden seventies takes another blow.