Word: bunuel
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Jodorowsky borrows heavily from many other directors--notably Bunuel, Fellini, Peckinpah, and Leone. In trying to outdo his forebears with greater bloodshed, deformity and perversion, he fails to realize anything more subtle, anything transcending what he shocks you with. El Topo is intensity for the sake of intensity. Jodorowsky's attempts at anything but horror are sad failures: a scene of Mara discovering the world outside of her monastic confinement looks like a bad Tampax...
...premise that nevertheless makes for some nice, subdued thrills. That is exactly the sort of thing that Willard sorely lacks. It is a movie with a good idea-a young man who uses rats to avenge the oppressions of his elders-but it would have needed a combination of Bunuel and Hitchcock to carry it off. Instead it has Daniel Mann (I'll Cry Tomorrow), who manages, despite a good performance by Bruce Davison, to make the movie look like something disinterred from the cellar of TV's Twilight Zone...
Stylistic Reminders. Cluttered almost to the point of chaos, El Topo often flounders in a deluge of religious and pseudoreligious symbolism, of parables, epigrams and jokes. There are plentiful stylistic reminders of other film makers, notably Bunuel, Welles and Sergio Leone. One of the film's more vigorous fans wrote that Jodorowsky's library has "thousands of volumes covering every imaginable subject." El Topo almost appears to contain at least a fragment from each, so that it has the look at times of a richly illustrated concordance. But many of the references -like much of the symbolism...
...paralyzed right hand for right-wing ideology). Like Bosch's fifteenth century painting from which Saura takes his title, the film tries to step inside the allegory it sets up and give itself to a wide-eyed fascination with the workings of vice. Saura has learned from Bunuel, whom he openly imitates at times, how to use sensual indulgences to make an intellectual point. His method is to instruct by allowing participation- in a drowning fantasy, a hunting sequence, or in the grotesque rituals of over-acted sexuality...
...pace and pulse of Citizen are reminiscent of Costa-Gavras' magnificent Z. Its nearly surrealistic aspects-as in a fantasy in which his inspection-department cronies refuse to allow him to plead guilty-are rather shaky recalls of Bunuel. Indeed, the film's fundamental drawback is that Director Petri is intent on political statement: the terrors of police fascism. The inspector cries: "Repression is civilization," and such crude political commentary detracts from solid psychological drama...