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WARREN ELLIS LTD

WARREN ELLIS LTD

WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.

THE MENU (2022)

Warren Ellisfilm

Directed attractively by Mark Mylod, whose name I recognise from SUCCESSION, and written with energy and wit by Will Tracy and Seth Reiss, with a very nice score by Colin Stetson. Inspired by Tracy’s visit to a restaurant in Bergen, apparently in much the same way that FAWLTY TOWERS was inspired by John Cleese’s visit to a hotel in Torquay.

I have a passing interest in food innovation and art. I have read the Noma and Faviken books in much the same way I read science fiction or futurism. (Redzepi and Nilsson have the advantage of being good writers, and all their books are a pleasure to read.) One of my favourite episodes of Bourdain was his final visit to El Bulli, home of the mad scientist Ferran Adria. I’ve never eaten at that sort of place and will never get to, but the thinking and the level of invention is fascinating to read about. Hawthorne, the restaurant alone on an island in THE MENU, is that sort of place. And, like Bourdain at El Bulli, it is Hawthorn’s final night of service. But the twelve people who just paid two grand to eat there don’t know that. Yet.

Anya Taylor-Joy has become the kind of actor who can rivet the attention just by visibly thinking. There’s a moment where she sits and processes, extrapolates, tests and decides, that is completely convincing. Ralph Fiennes starts of as something of a caricature of the genius celebrity chef, and has fun as he descends into full movie villain. The script depends on him being able to pull off a tricky transition in the third act. This is why screenplays are part of a collaborative art, right? When you need exactly the right actor to pull off what the script requires in its crucial moment. Which is a real high-wire hold-your-breath moment. And Fiennes changes gears within the shape of the character as established to produce a human shift so delicate and gentle that it’s quite wonderful to watch.

THE MENU compares interestingly with GLASS ONION, another recent film about a group of people trapped on an island with death. THE MENU is earthier and nastier, and all its laughs are deep dark ones. The laughs are there, don’t get me wrong – it ends on two gags, too, one over the top and the other marvellously understated –but THE MENU is more strongly scorched by anger, regret and loathing. Its satire, sad and furious, is a bit of a sawn-off shotgun compares to GLASS ONION. But then, everyone’s a target.

THE MENU is a fable. A fable about stories and storytelling. And it operates like a fairy tale, which gives it a freedom to operate outside reality, but inside the truth of stories.

THE MENU – DVD and Blu-Ray released 17 January 2023.

It’s Okay To Smile: My Personal History With Depression And My Father

Warren Ellisjotter

I wrote this for my newsletter, several weeks ago. I received many responses asking me to put the piece on a permanent web page. So here it is.

The other week, I ended with the sign-off: ” So do the thing that makes you smile, look after yourself, and I’ll see you next week.” Someone replied to me with: “Sadly, right now nothing makes me smile.”

I know a bit about that.

A while ago, someone else recommended to me a book about depression in men. It was the wrong time of year for me to want to pick up that book right then. I want to talk about that a bit, and to talk about the thing that makes you smile.

(ADDITION: per many requests, I add here the name of the book: MALE DEPRESSION by Terry Real.)

My dad worked on the factory floor for much of his life, but there was a period where he worked as a buyer for a timber firm. What we didn’t know at the time was that it was too much work – he was doing several peoples’ jobs at once. At home he was angry, stressed and distant, and I didn’t know why.

It was the habit to meet him at the door when he came home from work. For some reason, that day, I went to the front door alone, to open it when he got out of the car.

He didn’t get out of the car.

After what seemed like an age, I went out to the car to see what was going on. Inside the car, my dad was slumped over the steering wheel, half-conscious and crying hysterically. I got the car door open, and he didn’t even register I was there. I called for help and nobody came. I tried to pull him out of the car myself. I was eight, maybe nine years old.

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Books And Comets

Warren Ellismorning computer

A chart of the basic options and paths to getting a book published in 2023.

A newly discovered comet could be visible to the naked eye as it shoots past Earth and the Sun in the coming weeks for the first time in 50,000 years, astronomers have said.

A Wikipedia stub: comets in fiction.

“Young stars burst forth from a nebula, like seeds spreading through the galaxy. Just as seeds grow flowers that make more seeds, nebulae form stars that eventually form new nebulae. Cosmic cycles of life and death are apparent at all scales.

This painting was the inspiration for the dandelion motif that runs through the TV series COSMOS. Carl Sagan did not want his “spaceship of the imagination” to have a realistic, technological feel, and this painting brought forth the idea that the spaceship, when seen from outside, resembled a seed, blowing through the cosmos.”

-Artist Jon Lomberg

(via 70s Sci Fi Art)

MONSTROUS: The Buddha In The Pit

Warren Ellistv

MONSTROUS is a six-part Korean tv show. It concerns the excavation, in a small Korean town, of an ancient statue of the Buddha that has a curse locked inside it. This was of particular interest to me, because it’s a classic English folk horror set-up – digging up something that was buried for a reason and everything goes to shit. It has everything the English version typically has – the archaeologist, the genius expert who sees patterns, the idiot politician, the local young psychopath. Even the “mad monk” – in this case, amusingly, a monk who pissed off the head of his order by doing interviews about supernatural folklore for shitty cable. It is quite European in some of its details – I especially note the painting that weeps blood — although these things could prove to me more international than I’m aware of.

The whole thing is, in fact, structurally and materially very reminiscent of QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. The ending could even be read as a specific reference to that story. As is the release of a curse that reverts the victims back to a state of atavistic, uncontrolled fear, grief and anger. This gives the writers, Yeon Sang-ho and Ryoo Yong-jae, license to have some fun with zombie-like activity in the style of Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows’ CROSSED (and my own minor work BLACKGAS with Max Fiumara). It does get pleasingly violent, and it is very nicely shot. It occasionally gets a bit too twisty and reversal-happy for its own good, but it is generally well paced — and each episode is about a half-hour long, just like the original QUATERMASS tv series. Six half hour episodes really does make me think they knew what they were about. An impressive fusion.

I watched it on Sky Sci-Fi. Doubtless it’s on cable or streaming somewhere else.

6jan23

Warren Ellisstatus

I was going to spend Saturday in the garden, but the weather forecast just flipped. So today is my full day doing garden work, and I’ll be writing through the weekend instead. Picking up messages after 5pm. I have had nowhere near enough sleep for this. But I do have an axe now. So it will all be okay. Probably. If I don’t sleepily chop my own leg off.

Filtered For: Tools

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks

Vertical-Scroll Mobile-First Comics Tools

LTD Development -“Position three: evolve the tools. Now, Matt Webb recently posted his tools for making his weblog.”

Working From Home Every Day Carry: Housebound WFH EDC Pack May 2022

Computer Channel – “the digital tool that fills in the few gaps I have remaining in a life of knowledge work and personal record. Here’s where I am today and here’s what I think it looks like. These are the things I can see and hear. These are the books I want to remember because culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten. Also photos of chickens.”

When I Nearly Cut My Fingers Off With A Spade

Kim Stanley Robinson On Building Books

Decision Razors

Going Analogue, Returning To Digital

Ice Age Data Writing

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks

A primitive writing system used by ice age hunter-gatherers appears to have been uncovered by an amateur archaeologist, who concluded that the 20,000-year-old markings were a form of lunar calendar.

The research suggests cave drawings were not only a form of artistic expression but also used to record sophisticated information about the timing of animals’ reproductive cycles.

Ben Bacon spent countless hours trying to decode the “proto-writing” system, which is believed to predate other equivalent record-keeping systems by at least 10,000 years.

So much to unpack here. “Proto-writing.” European Ice Age informational markings.

I glanced at the title of a book the other day: something about a history of magic from the Ice Age to the present day. I wonder how this folds in with that.

The Garden Blog

Warren Ellisjotter

I am resisting opening a new category for garden notes. But I kind of want to. At the top of June 2022, I showed the state of the garden to my partner, who said it looked like a “dark mysterious glade,” so in my head the garden is The Glade now.

It’s not a big garden. When my daughter left for university – nearly ten years, now! – we stopped maintaining it beyond keeping the lawn down and controlling the edges a bit. And then, one morning in early June, I stopped on my way back from feeding the chickens and actually looked around for the first time in years. And realised it was a death forest. A handful of plants performing Darwinian murder on everything around them, and empty beds with morbid soil. That past Xmas, I’d been bought a countertop hydroponic propagator because I’d been bemoaning a lack of fresh herbs for the kitchen. Nine years earlier, I’d bought a plastic mini greenhouse after a health scare but had never assembled the bloody thing.

So I went out with secateurs and trowels and old kitchen shears and a rusty saw, and went to work on clearing the garden, raising plants in the propagator and potting them in the mini greenhouse.

Pictured is the lilac tree that finally dropped its foliage, which will make it easier to cut back. The garden is largely black and green right now.

Gardening is an art. It’s inherently a creative act, that supports my other creative acts. It’s also, for me, a horticultural therapy practise. A living notebook. For me, it entirely fits within the ambit of this site. And now, it’s the start of my first full year of including the garden in my creative work. (Because, previously, the garden was included in the life of parenting, which is a related but very different thing.) So notes on the garden will appear here too, being folded into the stream of my creative life. There will be complaints about snails.

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