Starring Jena von Brücker, the film tells the story of Georgie, a teenager who is forced to run away from home after coming out to her parents, and the homeless queer youth and other people she meets on the streets.
Synopsis
G. B. Jones’ The Lollipop Generation is a film about runaway queer kids, a gang of lollipop-eating social misfits let loose on the streets of Toronto. They stumble into drugs, danger, and prostitution, and inhabit an underground culture infused with a pervasive yet innocent kind of sleaze. Seasoned with a bottom-up punk aesthetic and a good handful of homemade porn, the film presents an altogether refreshing critique of the stultifying norms of convention.[2]
The film was made over a period of 15 years, "one Super-8 reel at a time",[3] whenever the director could afford to buy another cartridge of film. In the end, the Toronto band Kids on TV organized a benefit so that G.B. Jones could finish it.[4]
When asked if the film belonged to the "queer experimental" genre, G. B. Jones replied, "No, no, no. I mean, I think some people don't really get what we're doing, so they try to stick a label on us, to try to define and limit us. Some people call it experimental film, some people call it documentary filmmaking, other people call it “New Queer Cinema.” But we're going beyond the borders they're trying to impose on us. It is an experiment."[5]
Filming
The film was shot on location across Canada and the United States, and features scenes at sites that have since been demolished, such as the Metro Theatre; Riverdale Hospital by architects Howard Chapman and Len Hurst; Adventure playground in Toronto; and Retail Slut in Los Angeles, California.
Reception
The Lollipop Generation was described by the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema as, "...a trip through epileptic shots of documentary ugliness that go right to the origins and essence of sexually anarchic cinema...".
[6] However, Peter Keough of The Boston Phoenix insists, "There's a fine line between the trash of early John Waters and just plain garbage. G.B. Jones, perhaps to her credit, ignores it completely."[7] Using Canadian pop culture reference points, Toronto's Eye Weekly called it, "Scrappy as hell, yet often charming, it's a lost Degrassi High episode remade as an amateur porn flick and sometimes as sweet as all that candy."[8]
Time Out described the film as serving "a diaristic function, documenting the people the director has met and the cities she travelled to, capturing an entire generation of underground performers."[3] The 23rd Annual London L & G Film Festival catalogue says, "Shot on Super 8 and video, The Lollipop Generation harnesses these tools of the traditional home movie and uses them to make a fucked up family film."[9]
