WARREN ELLIS LTD
a writer's notebook

WARREN ELLIS LTD

Tag: film

WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.

morning computer 12sep23

Warren Ellismorning computer

More a note to self: Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU is about to go into test screenings. So details will leak. I’m interested in this, because NOSFERATU is a brave and crazy thing to attempt, and I like that.

I’ve seen trailers, and, I think, a clip or teaser, for Timm Kroger’s THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, and here’s a review, in which this caught my eye:

It’s like Carol Reed shooting the best Philip K. Dick/Agatha Christie collaboration.

Speaking of PKD, the prologue – the German TV interview – also seems indirectly inspired by an incident in the writer’s career. While attending a conference in which Dick was to receive the critical attention for which he had yearned for so many years, he blew it all by claiming his books were inspired by interstellar communications. Whether this was a sincerely held belief is open to interpretation, but it does show the danger of playing with reality (and amphetamines, in legendary doses).

I’m hoping that MUBI gets it.

The Norwegian series THE ARCHITECT sounds great, and here’s a piece on its design choices. This image gave me strong WORLD ON A WIRE vibes for some reason.

The trailer is terrific.

marks 1aug23

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks
For a certain kind of movie fan, Anderson’s movies are a Rorschach test of how we look at film, not just whether we value story or character or spectacle, but how we even define these core elements of the art form.

On Very Early Cinema In Spain

Warren Ellisquotes

In addition to the traditional piano player, each (film) theatre in Saragossa was equipped with its explicador, or narrator, who stood next to the screen and “explained” the action to the audience. “Count Hugo sees his wife go by on the arm of another man,” he would declaim. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see how he opens the drawer of his desk and takes out a revolver to assassinate his unfaithful wife!” It’s hard to imagine today, but when the cinema was in its infancy, it was such a new and unusual narrative form that most spectators had difficulty understanding what was happening. Now we’re so used to film language, to the elements of montage, to both simultaneous and successive action, to flashbacks, that our comprehension is automatic; but in the early years, the public had a hard time deciphering this new pictorial grammar. They needed an explicador to guide them from scene to scene.

MY LAST BREATH, Luis Bunuel

Warren Ellisstatus

Moving slow today. And it wasn’t 21 – the weather station two roads away had it at 24, and it’s now touching 25. There is no rain. The garden is not well.

ON DECK: scripting all day, and then I have a phone conference on bloody Zoom
INBOX: 72.
LISTENING: right now, just Night Tracks. I have listened through everything in my Bandcamp email folder. Anything I like the look of gets added to my Bandcamp wishlist folder, which I use as a bookmarking system. But right now I just want curated music radio while I try and get my brain spun up.
READING: TLS and LRB.
LAST WATCHED: some of OCEAN’S THIRTEEN, which I like for its visual style. There are some wacky shots in there, and some entertainingly nuts editing, especially with overlays employed. I need to go back again and take some screenshots of the latter, for consideration in terms of visual information density. There’s a bit where Soderbergh floats biohazard symbols over a scene…


OUTSIDE: OUR EXPERIENCE AS SLAVES TO THE EVERYTHING MACHINE CAN BE CHANGED

random notes 10jul23

Warren Ellisjotter
  • the ooh.directory recently updated blogs list is what I have instead of social media if I’m in the mood to “waste” time on my phone
  • found a blu-ray of TENET on Amazon for three quid. Perhaps this will goad me into transcribing my idiot notion that it is in fact the best Christopher Nolan film. Although I do want to see OPPENHEIMER, as apparently it does some interesting stuff with form.
  • NATURAL BORN KILLERS did a lot of formal game-playing, but I think Oliver Stone couldn’t have gotten there without JFK, whose more measured games with form make it an aesthetically preferred film for me – and, I suspect, it ages better than the day-glo full-tilt three-thousand-cut complete-Nineties of NATURAL BORN KILLERS
  • but you do kinda miss people fucking around with form to get actual narrative-first effects. Not the meta for meta’s sake so much. (Which I probably did a lot of myself, but we’re allowed to play the instruments if people just leave them laying around, for the simple curiosity of finding out what they sound like. Just maybe don’t devote years of your life to the vintage kazoo you found stuck in a condemned building’s drainpipe one time)

10jul23

Warren Ellisstatus

Rain, you bastard! Rain!

Half-arsed newsletter went out yesterday. Not happy with it.

ON DECK: More of the same, generally.
INBOX: 70. Still some overdue responses.
LAST WATCHED: THE HITMAN’S BODYGUARD, for no good reason, while I was writing on the ultralight laptop on the sofa. Kind of a throwback film, to the days where action-comedies ruled the world. Samuel Jackson and Salma Hayek appear to enjoy themselves immensely, Gary Oldman does about three days’ work for a laugh, and the direction is an amusing compendium of the last 25 years of action movie-making with some nice tricks – the guy knows how to keep the energy up. It does nothing new, but some of the action set pieces are worth study, and I’ll give credit to anything using practical effects and real actors (fun cameo from Richard E Grant, additional case in point).
OUTSIDE: no time for the outside world today!

Directors, Company

Warren Ellismorning computer

A new Cronenberg film is on the way:

‘Shrouds’ was part of an aborted Netflix project. Supposedly, the streaming giant got cold feet after reading the second episode.

I’d forgotten about this version of the 2001 poster. Via 70;s Sci-Fi Art. Also on Kubrick:

“Originally, Harvey Keitel was in Eyes Wide Shut,” Oldman revealed, “He was playing Sydney [Pollack’s role]. He was doing the scene, and they were just walking through a door, and after the 68th take of this, just walking through a door, Harvey Keitel just said, ‘I’m out of here, you’re fucking crazy.’ He just said, ‘You’re fucking out of your mind’, and left.”

In a separate interview, Keitel referred to Kubrick as a “genius” but admitted that he decided to quit Eyes Wide Shut because the director “did some things I objected to”. Although Keitel didn’t delve into the details about the clash that took place between him and Kubrick on set, the actor admitted that he “didn’t like” several things about Kubrick’s demeanour which he found “disrespectful.” Keitel elaborated, “I won’t be disrespected by him or anybody… If any actor can help it, they should help it. You don’t want to be fired.”

© 2022 WARREN ELLIS LTD.
Amazon Affiliates links used to defray running costs on this site

Sliding Sidebar

Categories

Tags

archaeology architecture art artists Beckett Berlin COVERS crime design drugs festivals film folk horror food garden ghosts history hotels Hungary judex Kafka Krasznahorkai LA LAX los angeles Lyon music notebooks nyc Paris photography publishing reading routine sculpture slowness space theory time tv VERSAILLES war watches writers writing