Little White Lies May - June 2016

EXCLUSIVE! WHAT GUYS REALLY THINK ABOUT GIRLS FEEL CUTE AND CONFIDENT NICOLAS WINDING REFN ON The 16-YEAR-OLD GIRL INSIDE HIM ARE YOU BEAUTY OBSESSED? NEW! Elle’s RUNWAY TIPS PLUS THE HOTTEST SUMMER LOOKS! NICOLAS WINDING REFN’S ADVICE TO YOU! Nic’s Hot Line Is Nicolas Winding Refn a feminist? However you define that increasingly ambiguous term, it’s not an ideology that’s synonymous with the Danish writer/director/provocateur. Which is understandable, given that he tends to make visceral, fetishistic films about violent men. And yet the signs are all right there in his work. Take Valhalla Rising, which pits Mads Mikkelsen’s one-eyed Viking warrior against pagan crusaders in a primordial world conspicuously devoid of women. Or his best known film to date, Drive, where Ryan Gosling’s strong-silent antihero rescues Carey Mulligan’s abused single…

Pusher 1996 Location: The mean streets of Copenhagen. Main character: Hapless small-time drug peddler, Frank (Kim Bodina). Most violent scene: Man (Frank) walks into a bar and… pulverises ex-associate Tonny’s head with an aluminium baseball bat, redecorating the room in claret. Gore rating: Mild for Frank, but you should see the other guy. Bleeder 1999 Location: Gritty suburb of Copenhagen. Main character: Father-to-be. with a furious temperament, Leo (Kim Bodnia). Most violent scene: Leo shoots girlfriend Louise in the stomach with recently acquired gun. He then blows his hand apart with said weapon and trickles his HIV-infected blood on her face and gaping stomach wound. Gore rating: Harsh and unrelenting. Both parties are dealt a fatal blow. Fear X 2003 Location: The cold, austere city of Winnipeg, Canada Main character:…

Flip over the vinyl version of Kraftwerk’s seminal 1978 album, ‘The Man-Machine’, and easing us into the churning, metronomic nine-minute symphony of ‘Neon Lights’ is the track which would become the band’s most iconic: ‘The Model’. To this day the song feels wholly unique, mixing a buoyant lightness in the way the lyrics are delivered with a seedy darkness in its study of the piercing male gaze. But where did ‘The Model’ come from? In the early ’60s, the first synthesizers were being developed. By 1970, they had blasted through the realms of the experimental, but were still mainly used for sound research rather than composition. In East Germany, Ralph Hütter and Florian Schneider formed the snappily named band Organisation for the Realization of Common Music Concepts, who would later…

How could this be? Director Nicolas Winding Refn is Denmark’s dark lord of cinematic transgression, trading on skin-flailing violence, booming soundtracks and bruised machismo. How could he be making a film with Elle Fanning, a beaming byword for quaint femininity? Their disparate worlds collide in The Neon Demon, a surreal body horror set in the fashion industry in which Fanning stars as an up-an-coming model who is violently victimised by a jealous clique of rivals. She secured her first screen credit at the tender age of three in Sean Penn-starring tearjerker, I Am Sam, from 2001, and from then worked consistently across TV and film since. She stole Super 8 from under the snotty noses of its predominantly male pre-teen cast and its celebrity showman director, JJ Abrams, while later…

How many books make you reach for the bottle, your bible and a bucket all at the same time? Leave you with your loins tingling, your hands shaking, an acrid licorice scurf around the back of your tongue? Make you think that heaven may not reside beyond the stars, but way down there, through the hellish, flinty muck that cakes up around your boots? When was the last time you read a book that made you feel like you’d walked through the wrong door in the wrong neighbourhood, grateful just to escape with your life? Hubert Selby Jr’s 1964 debut novel ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ is a desolation row of savagery, ugliness and depravity. It is the end of hope. It is an impoverished jungleland of hip queers, boiling-point pederasts,…

Exhibit A: Factory Girl (2006) Directed by George Hickenlooper This was supposed to be the film that launched Sienna Miller into the stratosphere. Instead, it courted damning reviews and a couple of lawsuits. It’s the story of Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol ‘Superstar’ who, for an intense period in the mid-’60s, became the focal point for the world’s cameras, before fame took its toll and drug addiction sent her to an early grave. LWLies: Factory Girl is about the life of Warhol ‘Superstar’ Edie Sedgwick. Was she a model? Manuela Lazic: She was more of a muse, and the type of work she was doing with Warhol was very experimental. It relied on her muse-ness and her fame. Elena Lazic: Factory Girl is pretty terrible, but interesting as a film about…