Review: Jodorowsky’s Dune

Jodorowsky's Dune

As a portrait of an artist, Frank Pavich’s film of the visionary auteur Alejandro Jodorosky’s efforts to create a 10 hour film adaptation of “Dune” is fascinating, entertaining and endearing. The 85-year old Jodorosky comes across as an enthusiastic guru, an almost cultish figure who crosses the world discovering fellow artists and dragging them into a mad campaign to create generation-changing works of art. The filmmaker behind “El Topo”, “The Holy Mountain” and “Santa Sangre”, Jodorosky was already a cause célèbre of cult film when, for reasons not really revealed, he managed to acquire the rights to Frank Herbert’s scifi epic “Dune”, at the time a huge bestseller, and determined, without actually having read the book itself, to recreate the story as a movie that would change the minds of young people forever.

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Review: Need for Speed

Need for Speed

When Need For Speed opens next month you may read that one of the selling points is that all of the stunts are practical and not CG. That–to me– seems strange considering it’s an adaptation of the EA driving game series. One would think that fans of the game would have no problem at all with wildly improbable physics and unlikely crash scenarios that might have been less expensive to render in computers than with real cars and stunt drivers but lets give the makers credit: When it comes to cars and driving they deliver.

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