ENDLESS POETRY

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The second installment in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s promised five picture cycle of filmic memoirs harmonizes with the theatrically heightened tone and style of “The Dance of Reality” (2013).

This succession of films marks Jodorowsky’s return to filmmaking after a 23 year hiatus after his 1990 film “The Rainbow Thief,” a film he disowned due to conflicts with the film's British producers. 

“Endless Poetry” continues the narrative line of “The Dance of Reality.” A pubescent Alejandro (Jeremias Herskovits) is growing up with his parents in Santiago, Chile.

While the mother Sara (Pamela Flores) operatically sings all her lines, Alejandro’s brutish father Jaime (Brontis Jodorowsky) accuses his poetry-obsessed son of being gay when he discovers him reading aloud from Federico García Lorca’s poem “For the Love of Green.”

You'd be hard pressed to find a more lovely poem. The die is cast that Alejandro must escape the clutches of his parents if he is to follow his dream of becoming a poet.

The casting seamlessly shifts to a twenty-something Alejandro (played by Jodorowsky’s younger son Adan) fearlessly taking a running start at his chosen profession of words by following his red-wigged muse Stella Diaz (also played by Pamela Flores in dual roles).

Stella insists on holding Alejandro’s crotch whenever they go out in public, but not allowing “penetrative sex” because she is awaiting an unknown mystic to descend from a mountain to part with her dubious virginity. Rejection and suffering are to be celebrated.

The episodic narrative tears a page from John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” when Alejandro and his latest poet friend go on an adventure walking across town in a straight line that takes them through people’s homes. The effect is an operatic trail of personal growth informed by visits from Jodorowsky himself where he advises his younger incarnations about the big picture of life. “I’ve sold my devil to the soul.”

"Life does not have meaning, you have to live it!”

Such is the pragmatic nature of Jodorowsky's nurturing, if poetically expressed, ideologies. Pedantic perhaps, but filled with undeniable passion. 

Alejandro Jodorowsky is the most euphoric filmmaker of our time. His transgressive artistic sensibilities form a focal point of pure artistic intentionality that the viewer can either accept or reject, embrace or shed. Either decision will lead the viewer to a personal place of artistically directed balance. You don’t get that from watching the latest “Spider-Man” movie.

Not Rated. 128 mins. 

MISS BALA

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Treating dramatic convention like it was industrial garbage director/co-writer Gerardo Naranjo's attempt at agitprop cinema is a frustrating mess.

While "Miss Bala" may have some effect of reducing tourism to Mexico's Baja region, where the story takes place, it comes off as an exploitation film made to fan the egos of its filmmakers.

Newcomer Stephanie Sigman plays Laura Guerrero, a homely peasant girl from Tijuana with an unreasonable dream of competing in the local Miss Baja beauty pageant — no telling why the film isn't titled "Miss Baja." Laura stumbles into a party full of American DEA agents to meet up with her best friend just as a local mob of hit men attack the fiesta to wipe out everyone present.

The filmmaker's attempt at making the shoot 'em up violence entertaining with tricks of light has the opposite effect. Laura miraculously survives but makes the time-honored mistake of putting her trust in a corrupt police officer who simply hands her over to the men responsible for the previous night's bloodletting. Mob-leader Lino (Noe Hernandez) hatches a hair-brained scheme to leverage Laura into the fraudulent Miss Baja Beauty Pageant so she can get next to a local General Lino wants to assassinate.

Talk about hackneyed storytelling. There isn't much story here, and what little there is is barely enough to keep a fully caffeinated viewer awake. It's confounding why so much critical praise has been lavished on "Miss Bala" during its tour of film festivals. Here is a low-budget fiasco that should have gone straight to DVD.

Rated R. 113 mins.

NORA'S WILL

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Mariana Chenillo's feature debut walks a fine line between black comedy and drama.

Fernando Luján carries the film as José, the cantankerous ex-husband to the title character who lives across the street from José in a Mexico City high-rise apartment. José and Nora still keep an eye on one another with binoculars after 20-years of marriage. Sadly, José discovers Nora in bed after her long-predicted suicide, by pills.

Little does José realize that Nora has planned carefully for the necessary five-day Jewish morning period during Passover before her body can be buried. José wastes no time offending the visiting rabbi with things like a ham pizza and Christian funerary decorations. He's an atheist concerned primarily with snooping though Nora's locked desk for clues about the man she had an affair with while they were married.

"Nora's Will" will hold more meaning for mature audiences in tune with the range of emotions that José attempts to repress while coming to peace with letting go of the woman who consumed his every attention in life.

Not Rated. 92 mins.