Saturday, October 12, 2002

Pregnant Elongated Jodorowsky Bio-Pic

I am in the living room of a simply furnished, small suburban house.

There is someone in the room that I know. But they are not there in a physical form. I only hear their voice.

They invite me to look over their DVD collection.

I walk over to a corner of the room and there are shelves of DVD's sitting next to a large screen HDTV.

A highlight of the collection is a complete set consisting of what looked like fifty or sixty discs containing the complete Looney Tunes cartoons. I am amazed that someone actually released them and fondly recalled some of my favorites.

The person in the room asks if I knew that CBS was broadcasting a bio-pic TV movie about the life of director Alejandro Jodowrowsky.

I am surprised.

“Would you like to see it? It’s playing now,” the voice says.

“Yes, of course.”

The HDTV comes on. The movie is already in progress.

There is some kind of scene going on where Jodorowsky (played by his son, who is the lead in his film, Sante Sangre) is talking to another man. They are both dressed in 19th century clothing, sitting at a table in a saloon.

The scene shifts to Jodorowsky and his wife in their 19th century home.

They are having an argument -- Jodorowsky has been having an affair with another woman and his wife is upset.

The other woman comes into the room. It is the man Jodorowsky was sitting at the bar with in the previous scene.

The man, who has a beard, is dressed in 19th century women's clothes. His lips are painted red and he has eye shadow on.

The man is also very pregnant.

Jodorowsky and his wife keep arguing.

The “other woman” tries to get their attention. He/she falls to the floor and goes into labor, screaming hysterically and thrashing about. Jodorowsky leaves the room.

Jodorowsky, dressed in a dark suit and top hat, walks on a wooden sidewalk in a 19th century Western town. There is dirt in the street; horses and wagons pass by.

Everything in the frame is distorted, like a Salvador Dali painting come to life.

As Jodorowsky walks, his figure is stretched and elongated; some other people on the street appear normal, while others have enormous heads, feet, or hands. Some look like a beach ball and just roll along.

A horse, standing on its two hind legs, leans against a post, watching people go by with a toothpick in his mouth.

Wagons pass on the street with strange elongated or half-broken wheels that don't seem to affect their operation.

Jodorowsky passes a dead tree planted in the middle of the street. It begins sprouting leaves as he passes by.

A sign in front of a bank has an old style clock. It is melting.

As Jodorowsky walks along on the sidewalk, there are people on the other side of the street dressed in winter clothes, trying to walk in a snowstorm, while his side of the street is sunny.

A man throws a cigarette into some kind of sewage drain on the edge of the street. There's a giant explosion -- nobody flinches or even notices.

I sit there amazed by all of this, thinking that no one had before thought of using digital effects in this way. It’s a true surrealist film, brought to life in vivid high definition.

Suddenly, the picture fritzes out on the tv. It goes black.

There is a small bang and the tube cracks. Some smoke pours from the front of the tv. I hear a hissing sound.

I feel very disappointed.

"It appears that it exceeded the expected surrealist quotient of the current equipment,” the voice in the room says.

Then I woke up.