Whatever happened to Whit Stillman?

indeed

i dug gerberg

nyt review is mostly positive.

but its not a rave or anything.

still, it makes you want to see it. if you read movie reviews in the nyt.

same w/ new yorker review. loved greenberg, LOVE gerwig. stoked for this.

Once I got accustomed to its...idiosyncracies...I really liked it.

Even though that scene reminds me of Fat Girl and that's weird.

Even though that scene reminds me of Fat Girl and that's weird.

the one where the girl is raped by the guy who kills her mother and sister?

spoiler alert

http://gothamist.com/2012/04/06/wtf_happened_at_that_lena_dunham_wh.php

well i missed something 'scandalous'

luv that pic, looks like LD was about to go full "g"

I enjoyed watching it in the same way I might enjoy watching Mean Girls and reading Myra Breckenridge at the same time. what most excited me though is the hope that stillman might become active again, which I guess means I didn't think it was great. he introduced the film so that was neat (sadly, he is not quite a whit stillman character himself), and It's definitely fun if you don't work too hard trying to resolve the politics of the thing.

nobody told me duquan from the wire was in damsels!!!

gerwig was great and it was really funny. kind of felt unfinished; my sister said she thought it was more like a bunch of short stories than a full narrative.

agree that it felt unfinished. his films have always had an oddly-paced, episodic feel with lots of plot threads left untied, but this didn't quite meld with Damsel's campy, almost bubblegum sheen. like, when you end a movie with consecutive song-and-dance numbers, you expect this is because everything has suddenly become resolved (ala Hairspray lol).

Glenn Kenny has thoughts on The Last Days of Disco, and how Lena Dunham's assessment of it (and her Tiny Furniture) relates:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2012/04/disco-mystic-and-the-dunham-variation.html

yeah it was a funny way to phrase dunham's question, given how horrible charlotte is. but i take it to be a big concern of hers, depictions of female friendship, which i dig. stillman's non-response was pretty annoying tbh but i still love him.

Was just telling NY/Buffalo crowd that I'd never seen a Stillman movie, ended up seeing this at the Landmark Sunshine the following night. At first I thought it was clunky and embarrassing and I wasn't sure what it was aiming for, but then it suddenly took off and became a lot of fun.

what a weird movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UCVmNb05Rw

damsels is ok. its really cute and amusing, but maybe not funny. there were parts where i didnt really understand what he was doing. glad hes making stuff again though

yea i didnt think it was funny really at all. kinda thought it was a waste of time for everyone involved including me watching it

i was lollin

I found it deeply strange but also warm and charming.

I walked out of the theater disappointed that it wasn't a masterpiece like Metropolitan or Last Days of Disco, but a few days later I feel very warmly towards it in retrospect -- it is such a rare thing for a movie to be authentically strange! This one was. I am grateful Stillman is in the world and making movies. Like, I saw the Avengers this week too, which is I guess a "better-made" movie in some sense, but Damsels will stay with me longer, for sure.

"authentically strange" sounds about right to me. Apparently that isn't true about the Cathars. Violet's OCD and depression and ambiguous possible aborted suicide attempt were the most effective bits of the movie for me. Don't know if I enjoyed the movie enough though to watch it again and try to follow Violet's thread a little more closely.

Like, I saw the Avengers this week too, which is I guess a "better-made" movie in some sense, but Damsels will stay with me longer, for sure.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, May 20, 2012 9:54 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

thats funny because i was thinking while watching it that it was going to be one of those movies where x years down the line i will be incapable of remembering if i even saw it

yea i didnt think it was funny really at all. kinda thought it was a waste of time for everyone involved including me watching it

― johnny crunch, Sunday, May 20, 2012 8:00 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this.

i thought it was also kind of poorly made.

like, mistimed reaction shots and awkward framings and actors kind stranded on occasion.

Was the sound mixing bad too or was shit in my theater just going wrong?

'actors stranded' otm - the guy who played frank seemed like he was crying out to be, y'know, directed

i feel that way about his earlier films, too. some great performances but also some ones that are just kind of floating there.

see, and i thought frank was amazing, one of the most note-perfect performances i've seen in any recent movie.

in some ways i think this is stillman's "dazed and confused" (another movie I love much more than most people do) in its commitment to vignettism as a representation of the way it feels to be young and unmoored

I thought most of ILX was cool with D&C.

everyone loves dazed and confused. but yeah, i liked frank and thought damsels was funny. the thing amateurist describes just seems like a stillman movie thing.

all of dude's movies are pretty "poorly made" tbh

or, what everyone else said

i wouldn't go quite that far, but he isn't some filmmaking genius that's for sure. his films have a lot of charm though.

i remember back in the early-mid 1990s when everybody was lumping him in w/ hal hartley (because of... stylized dialogue?) and i was thinking, "um, hal hartley is actually a really really confident and sophisticated filmmaker."

i think he's a total filmmaking genius for sure!

on what level?

i dont know, like i think his movies are perfect. i can see how someone who values different things could see them as lacking but for me he nails everything that counts

i like his movies too, i just don't think he's very accomplished as a visual storyteller or whatever.

yeah i don't know, i guess i don't really know what that means to be accomplished as a visual storyteller. no film is a success when judged by all criteria, but great films succeed on their own terms. whit stillman films aren't visual spectacles and usually look modest, but they are visually appealing (actors & actresses in them are generally attractive, settings are usually nice) enough so as not to distract from the dialogue. i mean, i definitely don't wish that his movies looked more like wes anderson's

I'm with amateurist. I like Manhattan despite missed visual and verbal cues (of which there are plenty). Sometimes his setups are worse than TV.

er, Metropolitan

Ô_o

Metropolitan is really well edited. It moves swiftly toward a fully formed gestalt while remaining more or less plotless until the third act. Christopher Tellefsen pulled off the same thing in Kids, which is otherwise dreadful. (Weird trivia: Tellefsen and Andrew Hafitz, the only other editor Stillman has worked with, have both done two movies with Larry Clark). The visuals are nothing special, but it looks pretty good, the lighting especially, given the constraints. It's hard to argue the formal virtues of Barcelona and Last Days. They're both clunky, but Damsels seems downright incompetent.

He's always had problems with blocking, but I think that most of the performances in the first three are impressive: it's hard to sell all that dialogue in an at least nominally naturalistic fashion. Almost every actor in Damsels seems like they had been directed for different movies.

http://www.salon.com/2012/06/08/trust_me_on_this_abbey_road/

Great article!

“Certainly some things are better than other things, right? And really, yes, I am saying you’re an idiot, that’s true, but it’s for your own good. Cry as much as you like, but you need to know these things.”

Pretty sure this quote could be posted on just about every ilx thread ever.

I hadn't realized from skimming reviews of DiD that its style was magical/neo-Shakespearean comedy, especially all the identity-hiding and switching. The scene like the one where Violet passes the soap around at the diner -- it's almost like A Mid-Semester Night's Dream. In the last third it's a little more strained than funny, though.

This is the most polished Gerwig comedy performance I've seen.

Also Adam Brody's character OTM on homosexuality.