Little White Lies November - December 2016

We’ll never truly know whether Felicity Jones possesses strong memories of the 2001 film Albatross. Unless we ask her, that is. In it, she starred as a self-hating and stifled desk clerk at a novelty hotel on the Isle of Man. She harboured pent-up desires to defy her lowly lot and attend Oxford University. It’s a sweet film, but were she to create a CV which demanded she place her strongest screen credits closer to the top of the page, this one would likely rank mid-table at best. Back then she was still habitually being referred to as an “upand-comer” or “one to watch”. She was the chalet girl from Chalet Girl, someone who would go on to better, brighter things (side note: Chalet Girl is actually quite lovely). There’s…

CHERISHED CHILDHOOD MEMORIES ARE APPARENTLY BEING LAID TO WASTE AS A RESULT OF A NEW SPATE OF MOVIES WHICH FEATURE FEMALE CHARACTERS WITH STRENGTH, AGENCY AND A DRIVE TO TAKE ACTION. THE QUESTION ARISES: WHAT TOOK THEM SO DAMN LONG? OR, HAVE THEY BEEN RIGHT THERE, UNDER OUR NOSES, THE ENTIRE TIME? Outrage from a burgeoning goon squad of men’s rights activists against major cinema releases that have dared to introduce strong, central women characters into previously dude-centric cult franchises has become so ubiquitous that it’s now an assumed part of contemporary film discourse. Mad Max: Fury Road, Ghostbusters, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and now Rogue One: A Star Wars Story have all to varying degrees sent shockwaves through these vocal communities, prompting much banging of symbolic saucepan lids…

As one of the most pervasive pop cultural icons of the past one hundred years, Star Wars has offered up ripe material for all kinds of mockery. One of those, inevitably, was the time-honoured porn parody. The first wave of parody pornography arrived in the 1970s when American obscenity laws had softened to the point where major cities were able to screen feature length erotica such as Deep Throat, Debbie Does Dallas and The Devil in Miss Jones. The landscape of pornography, which was once hidden away behind closed doors, was suddenly out in the open. While the majority of audiences were still wary to be associated with an industry tied to the counterculture and, often, the Mafia, those sitting on the fence appeared to find pornography wrapped up in…

Star Babe RELEASED: 1977 Set in 2080, Star Babe was released the same year as A New Hope. In the film, three sparkle covered Star Babes are sent to Planet Phallus where they need to recover some secret plans and prevent an alien takeover of planet earth. Very tangentially a parody of Star Wars, the movie does feature a Darth Vader costume, a stormtrooper mask and a cantina scene. Neither funny nor particularly sexy. It’s certainly an oddity in the annuls of cheaply made pornography of the 1970s. Extreme close-ups that completely abstract the body parts and actions they portray seem like a bizarre relic of the avant-garde rather than an erotic impulse. Disembodied genitals peek out of cheap Halloween costumes (including a gorilla, a werewolf, and Nixon) and are…

Let’s get the love-in out of the way early – British effects whiz-turned-expert blockbuster builder Gareth Edwards is one of our favourites. Everything was right there in his 2010 debut feature, Monsters, which fuses together a roughhewn, semi-improvised realism with gorgeous, computer generated, hovering glow-in-thedark squids. It was a low-budget labour of love which looked like it cost at least 50 times its minuscule $500,000 budget. Hollywood was watching, and it wasn’t long before Evans was over at Warner Brothers and handed the keys to a Godzilla reboot. The result remains one of the most majestic, awe-inspiring blockbusters of the modern age, an exemplary fusion of the classical disaster movie conventions with action sequences which often take on a near-experimental quality. Here was a director with the ability to personalise…

First things first, blockbusters take a long time to make. But, all movies tend to have the same kind of problems. You never have enough time and you never have enough money whether you’re shooting 90 days or 25 days. The biggest difference between making a small movie and a movie this size – a Marvel movie – is the number of creative things that you have to juggle simultaneously. The challenge is to take all of those things – especially the technical and visual effects – and remain focussed on storytelling. It’s very easy to lose sight of the story, to lose sight of the centrality of the performances and actors. Because, in the end, the audience are really watching the same thing as in a low-budget movie: how…