Sunday, May 20, 2012

damsels in distress

Big Whit Stillman fan. So how is it that I completely missed DAMSELS IN DISTRESS when it played Vancouver, after so long a wait since THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO? And not a video store or second run movie house in sight. Alas. It's a fallen world.

"It may be that, as a follower of Whit Stillman, you would like your man to branch out a little, and to direct a 3-D spectacular about ectoplasmic aliens waging nuclear vendettas against the U.S. Marine Corps on the naked streets of Detroit. If so, you must wait a little longer. His new film, like its predecessors, contents itself with a closed and rarefied world - in this case, the campus of Seven Oaks college, home to a bunch of floral friends. There is Violet, heather, Rose, and Lily, and they look down with fond despair on the rest of mankind, especially the male of the species. Not much happens: lovers are acquired and dropped, aromatic soaps are sniffed, and students give voice to complete sentences of a kind scarcely heard in modern cinema. Stillman has not lost the power to bewitch; in the confident reach of his artifice, in the unembarrassed hues of his decor, and in his willingness to enroll his dweebish characters in old-style song and dance, he has delivered his most ludic and peculiar project to date." The New Yorker

ludic | playful in an aimless way: the ludic behavior of kittens 
(I didn't know either)

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