Skip to content →

Tag: film

King Skellig Mor – 2jun24

Published June 2, 2024 by Warren Ellis

I feel like it’s okay to live in your own head, because it’s not like you didn’t pay for all the fucking furniture

TODAY:

Sam Rodriguez.

FILM:

One Comment

Farsighted Invention – 28may24

Published May 28, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Above: Kaspar Müller, Juan Antonio Olivares

From the introduction to Giorgio de Maria’s 1975 novel THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN (UK) (US):

Perhaps De Maria’s most farsighted invention is a Church-run charitable enterprise called the “Library,” created in a door-to-door appeal by a mysterious group of smiling teens. It consists of a reading room where citizens can donate their private diaries or browse the written thoughts of others.

The Library’s supposed goal is to help shy individuals find friends with similar interests and connect in “dialogues across the ether” after paying a nominal fee to learn the diarist’s identity. Read today, in a world driven by blogging and social media, much of this sounds too familiar…

Without ever mentioning computers, De Maria has predicted the Internet’s evolution better than many cyberpunk novels from the eighties and nineties. Tellingly enough, the Library’s patrons turn out to be “people with no desire at all for ‘regular human communication.’ ” The institution becomes a colossal storehouse of memoirs by perverts and maniacs, taboo fantasies and even whole diaries devoted to bullying…

“It had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.”

Worse, rather than helping its users connect, the Library consumes their privacy in a “web of mutual espionage . . . malicious and futile.”

And though the Library’s initial form, housed in one location, is destroyed, it later reappears in a distributed network that covertly spans the whole city, as ineradicable as the Internet in real life.

  • David Lynch says there will be a new project announcement on June 5
  • new blu-ray of TERROR IN SPACE (aka PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES) with screenshots
  • on French-Canadian thriller RED ROOMS: “The phenomenon of serial-killer groupies—and specifically the condition of hybristophilia, a sexual attraction to those who commit violent crimes—is at the heart of Plante’s judiciously observed narrative.”

Comments closed

17may24

Published May 17, 2024 by Warren Ellis

OPERATIONS: script, trailer notes round 2, tv doc, newsletter, development, eyestrain. Offline until I get hold of this.
READING: BEYOND THE LIGHT HORIZON, Ken MacLeod (UK) (US+) 
ORBITAL:


MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Forthcoming 2024: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, DESOLATON JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM.

Comments closed

14may24

Published May 14, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Screenshot from the new MEGALOPOLIS trailer.

Also:

The last one is right in the zone of other stuff I’ve been looking at and thinking about right now.

I know I’ll never get to see this film on a big screen, but I’m looking forward to getting a copy to pick apart at home one day.

OPERATIONS: Marking up the boards, adding in producer Zoom calls later today, getting into some scripting, need to confirm some format stuff with a publisher, confer with the office, send out some status check emails, adjust calendar
READING: FUTURE DAYS: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany, David Stubbs (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: MUSIK VON HARMONIA, Harmonia

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Forthcoming 2024: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, DESOLATON JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM.

Comments closed

Michael Wood · A Little Bit of Real Life: Writing with Godard

Published May 13, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Michael Wood · A Little Bit of Real Life: Writing with Godard

“Proust and Godard, in Anna Shechtman’s words, become ‘the memory-writers of their respective generations’. Paul Valéry, to Ludovic Cortade, seems to have been eavesdropping on conversations in the Cahiers office when he asks (in 1928): ‘What should we be without the help of that which does not exist?’ And we may all be writing along with Godard when he asks Anne-Marie Miéville to read the following phrases from Charles Péguy’s Clio, evoked for us by Daniel Fairfax and subtitled ‘dialogue between history and the pagan soul’:

‘I need a day to write the history of a second. I need a year to write the history of a minute. I need a lifetime to write the history of an hour. I need an eternity to write the history of a day. One can do everything, except the history of what one does.’”

May 13, 2024 at 06:16PM

Comments closed

12may24

Published May 12, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Apparently there was a solar storm everywhere but my back garden. My run of not seeing the Northern Lights continues unbroken.

OPERATIONS: I should be scripting, but I have a couple of complex projects getting started and I want to figure them out, as well as a consult doc to finish and a doc for a tv company that needs a re-draft, so I’m still very much up in the clouds rather than on the ground constructing things. Newsletter went out this morning. Waiting on an EQ’d and underscored trailer build, marking up the boards and writing a schedule for the rest of the (rapidly evaporating) month.
READING: FUTURE DAYS: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany, David Stubbs (UK) (US+)

LISTENING: DOCUMENTS 1975, Harmonia
LAST WATCHED: THESE HILLS ARE SACRED, 2017
ORBITAL:

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Forthcoming 2024: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, DESOLATON JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM.

Comments closed

marks 19apr24

Published April 29, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Importantly, these cursus monuments are clearly aligned with burial monuments in the landscape, as well as the rising and setting sun during major solar events such as the solstice.

According to Dr. O’Driscoll, “This may have symbolized the ascent of the dead into the heavens and their perceived rebirth, with the cursus physically setting out the final route of the dead, where they left the land of the living and joined the ancestors beyond the visible horizon.”

Well, the time is never found, quoth Ms Cameron; it can only be made. But it is also the case that habits must be broken or (re)built one at a time…

When you are sitting there looking at an individual tweet, watching youtube video, or looking at an Instagram post, ask yourself: “What About This Excites Me?“.

The question I’m finding, serves as good jumping off point to becoming more conscious of about the engagement with the media I’m consuming. This question helps me immediately identify whether my engagement is driven by genuine interest or merely habitual scrolling.

The epic may go to the origins: the archetypes of thought, emotion and spiritual desire, and dissolve them in the present. The sensuous, contemporary life, seen from the perspectives of both past and future: film. Like music, the cinema is experienced as a continuous, live process of energies. It is conceived and best remembered in a flash, a composite whole.

—Kumar Shahani, Film as a Contemporary Art

Comments closed

David Lynch Looking to Make Animated Film ‘Snootworld,’ Pitch Rejected by Netflix

Published April 28, 2024 by Warren Ellis

David Lynch Looking to Make Animated Film ‘Snootworld,’ Pitch Rejected by Netflix

David Lynch has come out of hiding and is telling Deadline that he’s hoping to find backers for an animated project titled “Snootworld,” even if Netflix recently “rejected” his “fairytale” pitch.

Apparently, in recent months, Lynch has been “quietly” trying to find backers to finance the project which he’s co-scripted alongside Caroline Thompson (“Edward Scissorhands”).

April 28, 2024 at 11:03PM

One Comment

Spirits Of Film 22apr24

Published April 22, 2024 by Warren Ellis

SPIRIT EMULSION on MUBI.

Made in 1987 a long time after the studio’s heyday this is an affectionate look at the golden years of Hammer Film Productions – the later TV work is ignored.  

Gazing across a river at the human world from which she came, Chihiro turns translucent and almost disappears altogether: as if by losing one’s sense of place, one also loses any sense of self.
Comments closed

Bad Dreams

Published April 17, 2024 by Warren Ellis

On the Films of Wojciech Has:

Has’s understanding of cinema as an oneiric canvas is apparent from the very beginning, and his sense that its narratives were meant to trip over themselves through elisions, reversals, and collapses reinforced itself throughout his career. His films are frequently in a state of mutation and his characters always on introspective journeys; objects are the only constant, as their material weight exhibits more solidity than his stories’ whims or his characters’ souls. All the while, Has’s camera acts like an accordion, playing in its own time, starting wide and pushing in to follow his characters’ reveries deep into the frame.

“Don’t touch it, it’s a very important work of art”: The story of Rocking Machine – the phallic sculpture in A Clockwork Orange:

There are many sexual references in the film and perhaps these set decoration pieces were chosen to represent breasts or bulbous phalluses. In fact there are many film props used in a Clockwork Orange that protrude or extrude: Alex’s mask, the droogs’ cod pieces, the bulb lamps, Alex’s pointy bedspread, and so on. The largest and most obvious bulbous object however, is the Rocking Machine sculpture by Herman Makkink, which sits proudly on Catlady’s antique wooden console.

Comments closed