Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky blew people's minds with two of the hippie era's most esoteric movies: "El Topo" (1970) and "The Holy Mountain" (1973). They were midnight-movie megahits, praised to the heavens by the likes of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and it seemed like Jodorowsky was destined for greatness.
Yet after spending several years on an ultimately stillborn adaptation of Frank Herbert's science fiction novel "Dune," (documented in "Jodorowsky's Dune," reviewed in The Japan Times on July 3), the filmmaker hit the wall in the mid-'70s, and worked mostly on graphic novels for the rest of his career.
During the making of "Jodorowky's Dune," the director, now 85 years old, was reunited with his former producer, Michel Seydoux, who was eager to work with Jodorowsky again — much to the director's surprise, since a lot of Seydoux's money (about $2 million) went to naught with "Dune." Yet Seydoux came through, and we now have the first Jodorowsky film in 25 years: "The Dance of Reality," originally released as "La Danza de la Realidad."