Little White Lies July - August 2015

Unless the name on your business card reads ‘Commander Chris Hadfield,’ chances are your office isn’t half as cool as that of the 1,200 or so employees at Pixar Animation Studios. Nestled among the workshops and warehouses that make up the industrial sector of Emeryville, California, the birthplace of Woody, Buzz and co is a leafy, state-of-the-art campus that features an outdoor swimming pool, basketball court, on-site gym facilities and a free all-you-can-eat cereal bar. A 22-acre plot of prime commercial real estate that was once the site of the Del Monte fruit canning factory, nowadays 1200 Park Avenue is famous for producing something even sweeter. Yet while it’s easy to be seduced by the sights and smells that greet you upon entering the grounds of this pristine dream factory…

Released 24 JULY 4 ANTICIPATION. It’s Pixar, so obviously looking forward to all the fun-time larks. 4 ENJOYMENT. Blimey. Fun-time larks, and a serious exploration of child psychology. 5 IN RETROSPECT. So clever, so witty, so true. This one instantly drops into the Pixar top tier. Have you ever wondered what scenes might unfold if your brain functions were anthropomorphised? What if instead of biological synapses controlling your state of mind, emotions – voiced by popular US actors – were constantly negotiating with each for dominance over your feelings? Which of your emotions would be the most vocal? What philosophical reasoning would it use to justify taking control? Which one would wear glasses? In Pixar’s growing pains drama, an 11-yearold girl’s mind is animated with the same visual floridity as seen…

Released 1 JULY 5 ANTICIPATION. Critics recently voted this the greatest documentary of all-time. No pressure then. 5 ENJOYMENT. Fascinating enough as a social document, but genuinely thrilling in how its multifarious technical trickery whips up an ecstatically cinematic delirium. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Wow! Now you can see what the fuss was all about – and it feels good. Check out that bra clasp! As a young woman prepares herself for the day, she hooks together the most decoratively embroidered fasteners, bringing that extra bit of beauty to everyday functionality. Even in 1929, Russian avant-gardist Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman knew that when you pointed a camera at something, people regarded the subject with heightened interest and concentration. So his hand-cranked equipment goes everywhere – on top of buildings, attached to trams and…

Released 10 JULY 4 ANTICIPATION. A crowdfunding darling that promises to put race front and centre with humour and attitude. 4 ENJOYMENT. Empathetic, witty, socially aware and visually bright variation on a theme. 3 IN RETROSPECT. As enjoyable and refreshing as it is, there’s a certain bite lacking in the delivery. So long as American white people tiptoe around appropriating black people swagger, and blacks grit their teeth at insensitive microaggressions, so will the gravity of an unequal society be undermined by an implication that the black experience is a minstrelsy sideshow. And so will there be an audience wanting a release valve in the form of a movie like Dear White People, which set off an Indiegogo firestorm with its blithe, pointed concept trailer. “Dear white people,” its radio DJ…

Released 28 AUGUST 4 ANTICIPATION. Will Andrew Haigh give older folks the naturalistic relationship drama they deserve?. 4 ENJOYMENT. Feels like a story that was whirring long before the film began. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Dense with insight and caution on how to live a long life with love. Andrew Haigh burst into the film world in 2011 with Weekend, a naturalistic chronicle of two twenty-something men whose one-night stand morphs into a meaningful connection. His follow up, adapted from ‘In Another Country’, a short story by David Constantine, is a deep-rooted depiction of intimacy that follows the everyday mechanics of love, laying bare its side-effect of vulnerability. This time the couple are, respectively, in their late sixties and seventies, creating the extra thematic layer of how the passing of time –…

LWLIES: 45 YEARS SEEMS TO SUGGEST THAT THE DRAMA IS NEVER OVER BETWEEN COUPLES, LIKE YOU CAN GROW OLD TOGETHER AND RETIRE TO A BEAUTIFUL COTTAGE IN A REMOTE LOCATION, BUT PEACE AND HAPPINESS AREN’T REALLY A LONGTERM PLAN, EVEN IN A LOVING, LONGTERM RELATIONSHIP. WOULD YOU AGREE OR DISAGREE WITH THAT? Haigh: Such a negative opinion! That is part of it but it’s more like you can never truly know someone in a relationship. It’s always really hard to truly know someone. Relationships kind of get forged in their beginning period. You grow as a person and you change as a person but you’re not always honest with who you are as you’re developing within that relationship. For these two people, at this time in their life, they’ve stopped…