Film Recommendation

For our new members, here’s a link to join the Club LWLies Discord server! (Si apre in una nuova finestra)

Preaching to the converted is one way of describing the fact that we’re recommending you, our movie-savvy members, a vintage Wes Anderson movie. Yet today is a special day, for it is exactly 20 years on from the official timestamp printed on the inside cover of Little White Lies issue one, which itself was dedicated to Anderson’s expansive fourth feature, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as well as setting the conceptual template for a culture magazine chiefly inspired by a single film each issue.

As a little anniversary gift, we invite you to download a PDF of Issue 1 (Si apre in una nuova finestra)so you can take your own deep dive into the crystalline waters of The Life Aquatic, as well as being able to chart the course of the good ship LWLies across two glorious decades.

At the end of 2003, I was a speccy nard just trying to make my way in the arid badlands of film journalism, when the tutor on my college course sent us an email saying that a new film magazine was currently in production, and the team were on the lookout for speccy nards. I instantly started to harass the guy on the other end of the email, assuring him that I was available for anything and everything, and at short notice too. My first assignment was to cover the Ondi Timoner documentary Dig! about The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, which I went along to with an hour’s warning. I went to see Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, and also Bill Condon’s Kinsey, both for review.

You can see the results of my adventures inside the issue (Si apre in una nuova finestra), though frankly I’m too embarrassed to revisit my early work.

I didn’t get to write on The Life Aquatic, so I’ll make up for it by writing a little note on it now. Within the Wes canon, I’m now aware that it’s perhaps not the most widely-loved of his early works, even though it created some of the most florid and memorably visual iconography of the new century through its characters, costumes and production design. It’s inspired by the marine biology documentaries made by beanie-hatted French explorer Jacques Cousteau, and Bill Murray steps into the role of haphazard captain of the Belafonte who is dragging his rag-tag crew into stormy waters on a bizarre revenge mission.

It’s a film which teems with idiosyncratic ambition, and perhaps remains the most strident document of Anderson’s love for culture, and how that can feed directly into telling stories.

Happy viewing, happy reading, and happy birthday (to us!)

– David Jenkins