Damsels In Distress Movie Review

Posted by Charmaine Blake on Apr 11th, 2012 in Comedy | 0 comments

Damsels In Distress Movie Review

Damsels In Distress is a comedy film that came to theaters last April 6th 2012. Directed by Whit Stilman, Damsels In Distress is a story about three beautiful girls that are out to bring a new experience at a grungy American university. Violet Wister, Rose and Heather go all out to bring a new theme to their lives in college. This comedy movie definitely garnered great reviews from critics all over the country. Let’s take a look at the latest movie review on Damsels In Distress by Richard Brody:

“ Damsels In Distress: A Great Movie By Whit Stilman

Upon hearing that Greta Gerwig would star in Whit Stillman’s new feature, “Damsels in Distress,” my first question was how she’d do with what would surely be its meticulously crafted dialogue. The movie is here, and the answer is: brilliantly. Stillman’s dialogue is even more confected than ever, and Gerwig’s rapid-fire delivery spins it audaciously, like plates on sticks, with her reliably surprising personal inflections and expressions. The director found the actress’s inner Katharine Hepburn; and that very fact is, in effect, the movie’s subject.

Fourteen years separate the release of “Damsels in Distress,” from that of Stillman’s previous one, “The Last Days of Disco.” In the meantime, the world has changed, and so has he. His first three features were all set in specific places and times; “Damsels in Distress,” though it is obliquely set in the present day (there’s a reference to most communication being electronic), the technical and cultural attributes of contemporary life aren’t on view. The movie, which takes place at a rustic New England college, is set deep in Stillman’s mind; it’s a manifesto with which he makes the case for the renewed, perhaps even increased, relevance of his worldview to the world he’s been too long absent from.

Gerwig got her start in the films of Joe Swanberg, acting in situations that depended on her improvisations—a gift she displayed elsewhere, too (as in Mary Bronstein’s “Yeast”). It brings no shame to such wonderful movies to characterize them as mumblecore films; if there’s one thing they have in common, it’s their filmmakers’ distinctive approach to performance. Some write full scripts, some rely heavily on improvisation, but all look to their actors not to provide theatrical incarnations of characters but to appear close to the way they are in life and to make their onscreen characters arise from their offscreen presences. Though style usually is taken to mean artifice, the mumblecore directors are the Bill Cunninghams of independent filmmaking, documenting the personal styles of the people they meet, recruit, and film—and revealing the integrity, spontaneity, and ingenuousness of their styles.

And “style” is the apt word; it’s where these films and their performers overlap with Stillman’s films and, especially, his latest. The performances in his films aren’t models of naturalistic psychology but of gestural and vocal idiosyncrasy. In casting Gerwig, Stillman found a true stylist and pushed her skills to new extremes. But style is a paradoxical word. It suggests artifice, a distance between seeming and being. Stillman has another view of the matter: through an apt application of seeming, one can transform one’s very being. His lifelong subject is order—the social order, the economic order, the political order, and each of these subjects dependence on orderliness.”

The rest of the article can be read at The New Yorker

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Charmaine Blake loves movies, musical theater listening to music and taking pictures of anything that she finds interesting. She is a voracious reader and writer, and enjoys her time writing for New Movie Launches. Charmaine loves spending time with her pets and currently has a Siberian Husky, a toy poodle and a cat.