Little White Lies Issue 96: November/December

Released 23 NOVEMBER There was a time when being called a “disruptor” was not a nice thing. If you talked too much in class, played your music too loud, or drunkenly tipped over cows while they slept, this was old school disruption of the unequivocally malign variety. Around the turn of the millennium, the term evolved into a beloved corporate buzzword and its core definition changed. Suddenly, it was no longer about simply making other people uncomfortable, it was about harnessing discomfort as a weapon, and shaking people out of stale habits – whether they liked it or not. Disruption became about enforced change, and was not only beneficial, but apparently a vital tenet in the apparatus of capitalism. Yet, if we look back at the modern “disruptor” personalities – you…

It’s approaching two decades since Rian Johnson announced himself as one of genre cinema’s most intriguing young talents. His debut feature, Brick, a high-stakes high school noir with a clockwork plot and killer script, set the tone for what was to come – not least its opening shot of a dead body lying face down in the dirt. Aside from a sojourn in a galaxy far, far away, Johnson’s film career has remained grounded in murder and mystery ever since, from the swizzling exploits of The Brothers Bloom, to the time-skipping thrills of Looper, to the yarn-spinning larks of Knives Out. Never one to repeat the same trick twice, Johnson is back with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, another slickly constructed whodunit that expands the world of his previous…

Daniel Craig is no stranger to playing a super sleuth. Before Knives Out, he got to the heart of a chilling Scandi story in David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and even his tenure as 007 saw plenty of mysteries solved by Bond and his crack cadre of intelligence operatives. Yet his collaboration with Rian Johnson on Knives Out is widely considered the first occasion that Craig – generally known for his taciturn, intense roles – was able to truly flex his comedic acting muscles. His turn as the gentleman detective Benoit Blanc was widely praised, and proved enjoyable enough that Craig and Johnson quickly reteamed for a sequel. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery continues Blanc’s adventures, as he jets off to Greece to muscle in on…

THE PLAYERS: Bob Ducsay has been Rian Johnson’s editor on every film since 2012’s Looper. He has been instrumental in bringing logic and momentum to Johnson’s kinetic, twist-heavy films. Jenny Eagan is one of the rising stars of costume design, and has been instrumental in creating the specific, old/new look on both Knives Out and Glass Onion. Rick Heinrichs is one of Hollywood’s premiere production designers, and though his CV mainly revolves around fantasy cinema, he has transposed his gifts and eye to the challenge of building the Glass Onion. Steve Yedlin is one of Rian Johnson’s oldest and most trusted collaborators, a cinematographer with a stripped-back style and an eye for crisp clarity. 1. THE EARLY YEARS Steve Yedlin: I was a senior in high school, and he [Rian…

FIRST FILMS! FIRST FILMS! FIRST FILMS! FAMOUS DIRECTORS! Rian Johnson is a filmmaker whose career adhered to the classic arc: film school; shorts; indie features; Star Wars. To focus on the shorts for a moment, it’s fascinating to look back on some of Johnson’s formative doodles and being able to see the creative primordial ooze of a man who now has Hollywood in the palm of his hand. With the assistance of various, popular online streaming platforms, we went in search of some early short films from a clutch of famous filmmakers – Lars von Trier, Barry Jenkins, Claire Denis, Guillermo del Toro – to see if we could guess where they were going to head. Has Richard Linklater always been interested in time, nostalgia and cultural artifacts? Did Edgar Wright…

I have found, over the last few years, that my ability to read has declined. Not, I should explain, my ability to understand text, but my capacity to follow a narrative thread, exacerbated by non-sleeping infants, post-Covid brain fog. In addition to unconventional working hours, all of this ability has degraded to the extent that I would put a novel down, not manage to pick it up again for a week, and then have no knowledge of what I’d previously read. In the search of something my fried brain could still enjoy, I picked up a slim paperback from a pile of Oxfam finds: a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon, featuring Parisian detective Jules Maigret. Opening it, a leaflet fluttered to the ground, featuring a checklist of all…