Some strange doin’s. I have no idea what to make of this film that I stumbled across. The trailer is … weird… and intriguing…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D3b94aooE4
Valley of the Gods contrasts abundance and poverty through three separate storylines, featuring a middle-class writer, an eccentric trillionaire, and a struggling Navajo community. Post-divorce, copywriter John Ecas undertakes the biography of the richest man on earth, who is dead-set on mining sacred lands for uranium. When modern advance runs afoul of long-dormant guardians from ancient legend, even the most unimaginable wealth may soon meet its match.
A thoughtful and articulate review in Elements of Madness offers a decidedly mixed impression:
Feeling like a cross between Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and pick a David Lynch project, Valley of the Gods is an exploration of love, wealth, faith, loneliness, and consumerism told primarily through the lens of Navajo legends across 10 chapters and a prologue. The end result is something fantastical and wondrous, yet leaves the audience absolutely disoriented due to a lack of clear focus and structure.
I feel that I must watch this , regardless, because I sense that the universe has thrown it up in my path as I research Kit Carson and the Long Walk of the Navajo for the first series in the Frontier Partisans Podcast. Y’all know I have a finely-tuned sense of synchronicity. And besides, this is the time of year, when the light begins to presage autumn, that my taste for weird tales rises to a hunger. Perhaps Marilyn will fix us a batch of pumpkin spice tacos and we’ll dig on in…
Matthew says
This could be brilliant or horrible depending on various factors. I generally like weird stuff, but sometimes these films are just incoherent messes.
Synchronicity is really something.
Quixotic Mainer says
Looks like good stuff, and all welcome distractions! When the shadows lengthen, the leaves turn color, and the wind gets that northerly persuasion I always reread Savage Tales of Solomon Kane. It’s become my prose fall anthem.
JimC says
It’s good to have such rituals.
David Wrolson says
Good time to give you a little October weirdness from. possibly, the best of the Private Mcauslin short stories by George MacDonald Fraser “Bo Geesty” -they are garrisoning a “haunted” fort at the edge of the Sahara in post-war Libya. Will somebody please read these short stories so I have somebody to discuss them with-LOL.
>>>”and only my imagination could turn the silhouette of a bonneted Highlander into a helmeted Roman leaning on his hasta, or a burnoused mercenary out of Carthage, or a straight-nosed Greek dreaming of the olive groves under Delphi, or a long-haired savage from the North wrapping his cloak about him against the night air. They had all been here, and they were all long gone – perhaps. And if you smile at the perhaps, wait until you have stood on the wall of a Sahara fort at sundown, watching the shadows lengthen and the silence creep across the sand invisible in the twilight. Then smile.”<<<
Fraser, George MacDonald. The Complete McAuslan (p. 210). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.