The Holy Mountain (1973)

Forget about the war on drugs and the war on terror! It's about time someone declare a war on pretentiousness!

The emperor has no clothes, people! Some pretentious eggheads shout down from their lofty perches, telling the masses that this is the movie for the "in crowd", for the intellectual, for the enlightened, and you all jump on the bandwagon! Nobody wants to be left behind.

Surrealist imagery without a real plot is but a trick by the untalented to steal your money without having to write a real screenplay or tell a real story. It makes people wonder if they're "too dumb to get it", so they fill in the holes themselves, all so they can be smart too.

In reality Holy Mountain and it's predecessor Fando & Lis are just silly garbage from a silly, so called director. The only thing that separates him from other bad directors is his shamelessness when it comes to using the moving image as a grift.

In other words, if you try to make a good movie and fail (like Ed Wood), then you're a hack. Sling a bunch of silly "surrealist" images together without trying, then you're considered a genius by a bunch of sheep.

Jodorowsky is a con man who should return the money he stole from unsuspecting movie-watchers.

Fmovies: This has to be one of the most disappointing films ever made. The beginning promises well with some low-grade Bunuel rip-offs, but quickly descends into exploitative pseudo-meaningful porn with some deliberately sensationalist sequences that undermine the quality of the stream of random set-pieces with which it begins.

The film takes a massive downturn when the director cops out and introduces speech, which makes it appear that he has run out of ideas and cannot sustain the momentum. The dialogue that ensues is pretentious and insubstantial, which makes it appear as though the director is so unhappy with having had to introduce a narrative that he has attempted to mask the comparatively tedious action with it.

This film is definitely of its time and indebted to the 60s notion of free love that in actual fact meant free love for men who exploited women in the process. The imagery towards the end of the film becomes repetitious and most of the acting is appallingly bad and at times laughable. If this film perhaps did not take itself too seriously then we might have had a half-decent curio, but as it is, it becomes a self-indulgent piece of tawdry exploitation.

Unsophisticated drivel.

Alejandro Jodorowsky's sprawling, psychedelic opus almost defies interpretation in any conventional sense. Steeped in symbolism and spirituality it is a piece of art that attempts to redefine the psyche and the human condition through a celebration of the surreal, the grotesque and the beautiful. Its inner meaning is deliberately vague, allowing personal interpretation to take the place of empty preaching and contrived moral messaging. Simply breathtaking.

The Holy Mountain fmovies. There is probably nothing on earth that can prepare for Alejandro Jodorowsky's masterpiece, holy mountain.

The synopsis, as bizarre as it sounds doesn't even come close to describing this amazing film. The film introduces the viewer to an array of characters and freaks unlike any seen on the cinema screen. The Holy Mountain is in turns hilarious, confounding, disturbing and perplexing but this Jodorowsky's love letter to the art is never less than entertaining. Filled with alchemical illusions, tarot symbols, existential ideas, explicit gore and violence, gratuitous nudity, sacrilegious imagery, and perverse beauty, this movie will make you live an unusual experience.

MUST SEE!

The Holy Mountain is an epic exploration of religious experience and global socio-political trends. A scathing indictment of the abuse of power by both first and third-world nations, while simultaneously a wonderfully clever fantasy that exposes art and religion as hilarious tools of mass-mind-control. It is a truly sweeping masterpiece full of amazing imagery and even more impressive thought. And it also has one of the best endings you are likely to see -ever. Too bad it is almost impossible to find.

How does one start describing writer/director/star/master-of-ceremonies Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain? Sensational, outrageous, in-your-face, (the much overused phrase) one-of-a-kind, hilarious, self-indulgent, dangerous, and enlightening could be some words, and there could be more. But these are just symbolic of what one goes into seeing the movie. And what is it to see a movie, to experience it, Jodorowsky, I think anyway, is essentially asking? What about faith, or belief that there can be a way to surpass mortality and live forever? Is there truly any basis to become more than just flesh and bones and organs and love and hate and desire and greed? Perhaps, in the end, it might just be art itself. The Holy Mountain is one (bleeping) crazy art-house picture experience, where the filmmaker asks it's audience to either go on the journey and be open to whatever he's liable to let out of the floodgates of his consciousness, or if to be closed off then to might as well leave. So as it goes, really, with organized religion, which his own character Jodorowsky plays- the Alchemist- could be identifiable as.

As I left the theater I kept on thinking about what it is to put total trust and confidence in a "master", someone who seems to have all the knowledge and experience to take people to higher planes. At the core, is what the Alchemist can do for the nine "planet" representatives any different than what a priest or a rabbi or a monk can promise? There is a level of intellectual stimulation, aside from the obvious emotional connection to the immense level of surrealism, that keeps one from thinking that this becomes all weird for its own sake. Unlike El Topo, however, Jodorowsky this time is much more in control of his own delirious dreamscapes and, in a sense, the genuine consciousness he creates in his Holy Mountain. He gives us, at the start, something a little much akin to El Topo with piling on Christian symbolism and imagery like its got to get into our heads right away. This part, actually, might be somewhat weaker in comparison with the rest of the film, if only because one wonders where the hell this is all going; a Jesus-figure, who comes into a village loaded with circus 'freaks' and gawkers at such 'freaks', and is put into plaster-casting to make more Jesus figures, which he demolishes except for one which he carries with him for a little while.

There's more than just this, but for the first twenty minutes, which is practically silent and without dialog, we get immensely rich but sort of free-form symbolism, some that is great (the scene with the frogs in the representation of the Spanish conquistadors is absolutely uproarious), and some that isn't, like a strange scene in a church. But soon Jodorowsky moves it along to 'Jesus' entering the realm of the Alchemist, and going under his tutelage (and learning how, mayhap, gold can be the end result of literal excrement), learns about who the other members to go on the journey to the holy mountain will be. It's here that Jodorowsky digs deep into the nature of the period he was filming in and how fascinating and perverse human beings can be. These other members are all shown in vignettes to be "manufacturers", for the most part, of weapons, clothing, architecture, political espionage, and as a police force of a sort. More than ever Jodorowsky throws out the outrageousness to eat up, and really it actually never shows (and maybe it's just me as a jaded 21st century guy) to