Counting Down The Fourteen Best Films Of 2014
In this totally subjective game of lists, there can only be one winner.
#9: Jodorowsky’s Dune, dir. Frank Pavich
“Could be fantastic, no?” Well, it was. I’m still no closer to figuring out how to pronounce the eccentric Chilean-French auteur’s surname (various talking heads in the film say ‘Jo-do-ROW-ski’, ‘Ho-do-ROF-ski’ and ‘Yo-do-ROV-ski’), but I was utterly charmed by this documentary: the closest thing we’ll ever get to his screen adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
Director Frank Pavich plays it like a heist film, with Jodo as an impish Danny Ocean assembling an unorthodox team of talent from New Hollywood and European counterculture. Jodorowsky’s Dune is gut-bustingly hilarious, and the unfettered imagination on display is exhilarating – only Mark Hartley’s Electric Boogaloo comes close to capturing the same gonzo zest. But it’s also an intelligent meditation on cinema culture’s obsession with ‘lost’ artefacts, and a compelling argument that this film-that-never-was bottled the zeitgeist, influencing a generation of fantasy and science fiction.