By Aaron Hillis
Posted October 10th, 2006, 6 P.M. EST

Mafioso PREVIOUS UPDATE: Watching What We Eat NYFF Update #4, 10.4.2006: The Journals of Knud Rasmussen and Our Daily Bread

Budding buffs can earn a DIY film-school education from all the Kurosawa, Renoir, Ophüls, and Dreyer masterworks filling out the "50 Years of Janus Films" sidebar, but two more retro landmarks deserve inclusion in the same unwritten canon. Rarely screened since it won the Golden Seashell at the 1963 San Sebastián International Film Festival, Mafioso isn't a straight black satire of Sicilian culture so much as a suspenseful near-tragedy leavened by the zesty, irreverent wit that helped define the golden age of Italian comedies. Directed by the late Albert Lattuda (largely unknown on these shores beyond his fought-for credit as codirector on Fellini's first feature, Variety Lights), this is the story of happy-go-lucky Antonio (an impeccable Alberto Sordi), an auto plant foreman in Milan who has brought his family on vacation for "12 days in the home country." Still in postwar recovery, the rural Sicily where he was raised has the intimate small-town despair of a neorealist classic, and it's unquestionably clear from the family's arrival by taxi (an absurd chat out the window reveals a funeral-in-progress for a murdered man) that Antonio's life in the prosperous North is the direct inverse to that of this pitiable South that time forgot. The alienation between the two regions hits its comic stride when, in the tradition of meet-the-parents embarrassment, Antonio's blond bombshell wife (Norma Bengell) instantly offends his salt-of-the-earth clan (moustachioed sister, one-handed father, and the toothless rest) with her smoking and metropolitan pride. The film takes a somewhat darker turn as Antonio pays his respects to Don Vincenzo (Ugo Attanasio) as a picciotto d'onore ("child of honor") who owes much of his success to the aging godfather. The weeklong sizing up of Antonio to make sure he's fit to fulfill a favor for the don leads to a most unanticipated shift during the climax, which distributor Rialto Pictures has asked critics not to disclose. A film this uproariously delightful couldn't be ruined by revealing its ending (it ain't no rug-pulling Shyamalan surprise), though let's just say it's a solid whopper.

The Holy Mountain

Welcomed with "whistles, catcalls, and cheers" at its Cannes premiere in 1973, The Holy Mountain is Chilean-born auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky's greatest and most ambitious midnight movie, a wickedly outrageous masterpiece that towers over its better-known precursor El Topo (also screening here). Where other cinematic surrealists have traversed the sociopolitical (Luis Buñuel), psychological (David Lynch), and anthropological (Jan Svankmajer) in their singular visions, Jodorowsky's transgressive universe trafficks in mystical pretentions, literally in this primal journey of a messianic thief (Horácio Salinas, put through the ringer for the sake of art). Found in the desert with a face full of bees, Salinas survives crucifixion by way of a limbless dwarf, then smashes a room full of Christ statues in Mexico City that were molded from his image, all before climbing a stories-high chimney to reach the rainbow-striped domain of The Alchemist (Jodorowsky himself, as a prankish guru). Together, along with the sage's bald nymphette assistant, they attempt to reach the titular mound to usurp secrets of immortality from the gods who currently reside on its summit, all with the help of six planetary masters whose special skills are revealed in segments told from each of their viewpoints. To a space prog-meets-didgeridoo score that sounds like Ennio Morricone playing free jazz in the fifth dimension, the film unveils such backstories as that of "Klen, he whose planet is Jupiter," the mansion millionaire with a taste for cocaine in his ears and the most impressive sex appliance since Sleeper's futuristic Orgasmatron, and of peglegged "Isla, she whose planet is Mars," who manufactures automatic weapons out of menorahs and guitars. What have we gotten ourselves into? Nonsensical, yes, but this transcendental epic of hypersexualized avatars, tarot spiritualism, and platform-shoed kitsch is linear enough to comfortably absorb and not question its gonzo narrative, even with a roughly 40-minute segment without dialogue. As its director once famously said, "I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs," but to dismiss The Holy Mountain as merely trippy is to deny how revolutionary it is after three decades. This is an ingeniously overstimulated film that could never be replicated today, one in which casts of hundreds gather and massive set pieces are built for mere seconds of screen time; actors endure tubes up their nose, tarantulas on their naked bodies, and death-defying stunts they perform themselves; and toads are dressed up in ornate costumes to perform a meticulous reenactment of the bloody "conquest of Mexico." PETA and conservative watchdog groups would probably have a field day, but nobody else need feel any shame for laughing along with Jodorowsky when he breaks free of the film to command his final shot onscreen: "Camera! Zoom back!"