Japanese director Yoshiro Nishimura, who brought you Tokyo Gore Police (won’t the sequel be out soon?) has a new movie, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl. This time round he’s dropped the social commentary and humorous Cronenbergesque touches in favor of unadulterated hydraulic blood splatter and mayhem. Make sure you watch the trailer to the end, it’s got some real jaw-droppers…

Here’s an excerpt from a review on Film School Rejects:

Normally I?

 
Before there were Muppets, there was Jim Henson, experimental film maker:

Time Piece is nine very weird, sort of beatnik minutes of fast-paced, scattered imagery and sounds all set to the beat of a hi-hat.  He makes music out of everyday sounds.  So you get tapping, tick-tocks, footsteps, drumbeats, car zooms, whistles, screeches, pogo sticks, high heels, typewriters, on/off switches, dings, buzzes, bowling balls, elevators, champagne pops, zippers, dogs panting, rocking chairs, beers opening, tea kettles, crackers, coughing, and a shot of Henson painting an elephant pink.  The only word used in the whole thing is ?

 
I couldn’t be a bigger fan of Japanese director, Hiroshi Teshigahara, or recommend more highly his Criterion-collected films from the 60s: Pitfall, Woman In The Dunes, and The Face of Another.  Teshigahara has a wonderful way of capturing landscapes, and, much like Antonioni, uses them to suggest some aspect—usually existential—of the human condition. 

That being said, I find his documentary on Antonio Gaudi, stunning to watch as a tone poem of sorts, but lacking in terms of providing much context for the Catalan architect.  You can check out the complete documentary over at Ubu, titled, simply, Antonio Gaudi, but I just recently stumbled upon a more illuminating point of entry for the architect.

Ken Russell, the British director of such films as Tommy, Women In Love, and Altered States produced his own “film essay” on Gaudi in ‘61.  Sidestepping his usual “lurid” mode, Russell’s doc provides all the historical/biographical context missing from Teshigahara’s.  Not surprisingly, Russell’s short also accompanies the Criterion reissue of Antonio Gaudi.

For Russell’s take on some truly fantastical buildings, Part I of his film essay follows below with a link at the bottom to Part II.

 
Ken Russell’s Antonio Gaudi Part II

I wonder what this movie is all about…

 
Radley Metzger (no relation, although I wish he was!) made super slick “European art house” softcore erotica in the Sixties and early Seventies. His high class skin flicks, he said, were philosophically inspired by Orson Welles and Jorge Luis Borges. Decadent feasts for the eyes, visually they seemed influenced by the camera of Michelangelo Antonioni and featured sumptuous soundtracks by composers like Piero Piccioni, Georges Auric and Oscar-winner Georges Delerue. Never before or since has softcore porn been given such a glossy, lustrous, quality art-directed look and feel.
 

 
The Lickerish Quartet (“an erotic duet in four players”) from 1970 is one of Metzger’s best. Visually dazzling and sophisticated, it looks like something straight out of a Vogue layout. No less of an expert than Andy Warhol called it “an outrageously kinky masterpiece.”
 

 
Beautiful people and beautiful surroundings were key elements in Metzger’s films. The Lickerish Quartet mostly takes place in a lush castle owned by a rich, bored couple. The watch a stag film. Later they go to a carnival and one of the drivers (Silvana Venturelli) in a speed race turns out to be the woman in the movie. They decide to invite her back to their Baroque castle for a party, then humiliate her with the film, except that when they watch it again, she’s not in it. One by one she seduces the father, mother and son. Things are not what they seem.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

The Tenth Victim: Kitsch Klassic

Vampire Lesbians of Hammer

 
As the school’s website touts, it’s not for the fainthearted, but sex-club bouncers might find the admissions process particularly breezy!

The Rogue Film School will be in the form of weekend seminars held by Werner Herzog in person at varying locations and at infrequent intervals.

The number of participants will be limited.

Locations and dates will be announced on this website and Werner Herzog’s website: www.wernerherzog.com approximately 12 weeks in advance.

The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making.  For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.

The Rogue Film School is about a way of life.  It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible.  It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature.

The focus of the seminars will be a dialogue with Werner Herzog, in which the participants will have their voice with their projects, their questions, their aspirations.

Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; they may be shown and discussed as well.  Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film?  How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays).  How do you sensitize an audience?  How is space created and understood by an audience?  How do you produce and edit a film?  How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?

Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking.  Traveling on foot.  The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully.  The athletic side of filmmaking.  The creation of your own shooting permits.  The neutralization of bureaucracy.  Guerrilla tactics.  Self-reliance.

Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list: if possible, read Virgil’s “Georgics,” read “Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber,” The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular the Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo “True History of the Conquest of New Spain”.

Follow your vision.  Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere.  At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.

For more information on becoming a student, see: Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School

I can’t wait to see the surreal new British comedy Bunny and the Bull, from Mighty Boosh director Paul King. Although it keeps getting referred to as “The Mighty Boosh movie” (and looks quite Booshian) it’s not, the Mighty Boosh just happen to be in it.

Here’s the clip:

Bunny and The Bull review

If you happened to read my Boing Boing post on the Trailer Park Boys when I was guest blogging there in the Spring, you know that I loves my Trailer Park Boys and today here in the Dangerous Minds office, we are declaring it a holiday because THE NEW TRAILER PARK BOYS MOVIE WAS RELEASED TODAY.

They say you should never use all caps on the Internet because people think you are shouting, but I AM SHOUTING, DAMN IT, THERE IS A NEW TRAILER PARK BOYS MOVIE OUT TODAY. This marks the “end end” of the Boys as Canada’s greatest comedy franchise finally shuts down for good. I expect they’ll go out on a high note.

The only problem is, the movie is just released in Canada! You Canadian fucks get all the good shit and free health care, too.

If someone from the Alliance Films public relations office or the TPB’s camp wants to send me a review screener—hint, hint—please contact me here.

Thank you Gord Fynes!

In Bollywood films, it’s quite common to see a dance number at the end of the film that has little to do with the plot called an “Item number.” This item number, from a comedy called Chintu Ji, instead of using tribal gibberish—which was apparently the original idea—uses the names of international film directors:

Tarantino, Wilder, Capra
Ozu, Bertolucci, Peckinpah
Fellin,i Visconti, Oshima
Coppola… Coppola

Wyler, Hitchcock, Wajda
Mizoguchi, de Palma
Wyler ,Hitchcock, Wajda
Brian de Palma

Akira Kurosawa, Vittorio de Sica (repeats 4 times)

Bertolucci… Bertolucci, Lumet Aha Lumet
Bertolucci… Bertolucci Oh…
Sergio Leone… Sergio Leone… Truffaut Aha Truffaut
Sergio Leone… Sergio Leone… Oh…

Woody Allen… Woody Allen… B. DeMille C B. DeMille
Woody Allen… Woody Allen… Oh…
Milos Forman… Milos Forman… Godard Aha Godard
Milos Forman… Milos Forman Oh…

Via the Something Like It blog, thanks Partha!

 
In collaboration with Mattel Toys, Universal just announced their plans to build a live-action film around Barbie:

?