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:

?

 
Lovely silent film gem from 1896:

Early filmmakers loved dancers.  I can’t locate the source of this film, but iterations of the Serpentine Dance were particular favorites of both Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers.  Inspired by dancer Loie Fuller’s famed skirt dances, in which colored lights projected onto her billowing garments, this film (and others like it) was hand-tinted to achieve similar affects.  Fuller’s solo was mesmerizing, and her copycat film subjects no less so.

(Via Ubu)

Many people who have come by the dubious charms of bizarro cult movie Death Bed: The Bed that Eats (1977) got there by way of Patton Oswalt’s classic stand-up routine about the film. You hear him rant about it and you just have to see it. I mean, you pretty much know from the title if you’re going to enjoy this or not, don’t you?

Cribbed from its Wikipedia entry:

A large, black, four-poster bed, possessed by a demon, is passed from owner to owner. The Demon was a tree, who became a breeze and seemingly fell in love with a woman he blew past. The demon then took human form and conjured up a bed. While he was making love with the woman she died and his eyes bled onto the bed, causing it to become possessed. Those who come into contact with the bed are frequently consumed by it (victims are pulled into what is apparently a large chamber of digestive fluids beneath the sheets). The bed demonstrates a malevolent intelligence as well as some psychokinetic and limited telepathic abilities to manipulate dreams.

A running commentary or chorus is supplied by the ghost ?

 
Gus Van Sant‘s experiment from ‘99 where he essentially served up a Xerox of Hitchcock’s Psycho has nothing on the ongoing cinematic “homaging” going down in Turkey.  Cinefamily goes so far as to declare the country,

the wild, wild Middle East of mondo macabro.  Here you find the outlying reaches of world exploitation, where the heroes are macho men who can beat you up with just their moustaches, and the copyright infringement flows as freely as the currents of the Bosphorus River.  From the wholesale plundering of battle footage from American sci-fi smash hits (with which to mash into their own space operas), to the endless cavalcade of scene-for-scene, shot-for-shot, unauthorized remakes (Turkish Exorcist, Turkish Death Wish, Turkish Young Frankenstein)—the bandits of Turkish cinema were unstoppable.  These films were lawless, shameless, and hilarious.  Infinite ambition and infinitesimal budgets lead to cheap remakes that resemble a high school theater version of Apocalypse Now; to make up for their poverty, these filmmakers upped the sadism, mayhem, and titillation to their tastes and our delight.

Well, thanks to YouTube, you can now watch Seytan—The Turkish Exorcist—in 14 soup-spewing installments.  I’m pretty sure they’re all posted, but if you can’t find ‘em all, even casual fans of William Friedkin’s Exorcist will have no trouble spotting the devil in Ms. G?ɬ

Susan Tyrrell is one of the great scene stealers of American cinema. It doesn’t matter who she’s (supposedly) sharing the screen with, all eyes will be on Tyrrell. Susan Tyrrell possesses a unique charisma, let’s just say, and if I had to pick my favorite actress, I might have to say it’s her (maybe tied with Ruth Gordon). She’s great in Andy Warhol’s Bad, Big Top Pee-wee and Crybaby. Her role as Oma the sad barfly in John Huston’s Fat City saw her nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and who could forget her as tough as nails lesbian, Solly Mosler, the den-mother to a group of transvestite prostitutes in the Angel movies? No one plays a tough, psychotic bitch better than Tyrell and I mean no one.

But if you want to see Susan Tyrrell really cut loose and at her most, well, Susan Tyrrellish, you have to see her in her greatest role, as jealous Queen Mona in Richard Elfman’s cult classic, Forbidden Zone. Here she is in her berserk performance of “Witches Egg,” a song she also wrote (I always put this on mixed CDs):

Sadly due to a rare blood clotting disease,Tyrrell had to have both of her legs amputated. She’s still acting, playing a fortune teller in Bob Dylan and Larry Charles’ surreal Armed and Dangerous and producing amusing primitivist paintings which you can see on her official website.

Susan Tyrrell.com

My So-Called Rotten Life by Paul Cullum

 
Despite its Jason Pierce score and Werner Herzog subplot, Mister Lonely, Harmony Korine‘s feature film from ‘07 left me bored and disappointed.  Its opening moments had a sense of poetry and provocation (see here), but all that was quickly squandered as Korine, striving to broaden his film’s appeal I’m guessing, attempted the distinctly non-Gummo feat of “establishing his characters.”

Korine’s new film, Trash Humpers, premiered this week in Toronto and, fortunately, it looks like he’s left very far behind him the burdens of character development.  The trailer follows below, but I’m finding even more intriguing this Variety review which opens thusly:

Pity the festival-going fool who stumbles unawares into Harmony Korine’s patently abrasive, deliberately cruddy-looking mock-documentary “Trash Humpers.”  All others—that is, those familiar with Korine’s anti-bourgeois oeuvre and know what they’re in for—will have a glorious time.

Named for a band of cretinous vandals in old-folks masks who favor gyrating against garbage cans (and worse), “Trash Humpers” is a pre-fab underground manifesto to rank beside John Waters’ legendarily crass “Pink Flamingos.”  Theatrical distribution is virtually inconceivable—though, in part for this reason, any fest devoted to maintaining its rep among cult-film completists will simply beg for it.

 
In Daily Variety: Trash Humpers

Trash Humpers @ The Toronto Film Festival