Damsels in Distress: Carrie MacLemore and Billy Magnussen

Stillman never condescends to any of his characters, even the types whom most people prefer to see as unlikable. Hence my suspicion that what Stillman is up to with Thor is not just broad comedy. Rather, Thor’s inability to distinguish primary colors is symbolic of today’s glaring lack of decorous relations between young men and women, whether in the form of dancing or courtship. I think most critics miss this symbolic dimension (which, in Thor’s instance, would amount to a cultural reclamation of the more quotidian “rainbow” symbolism), even though it is undeniably present (arguably as a deliberate product of Stillman’s literary sensitivities). But they miss it because Stillman steadfastly refuses to engage in conventional moralizing when it comes to his characters. Instead, in the most gentle of ways, Stillman makes his comically positive suggestions about how our culture could aspire to so much more.

Thanks to Steve Malone for spotting that.

Cape Cod Times has a brief interview with Stillman and a review of the film, both by Tim Miller. In the interview he talks about the challenge that remains after a film is finished:

“It’s a little bit hard to get people to see the point of the film,” he says, adding that he’s “really surprised that it’s such a hard sell.”

There’s word of mouth, but, as he points out, “The question these days is: Can you be on screen long enough for people to come see it?”

Another challenge, he adds, is getting people to appreciate a film with an emphasis on character development and comedy, and not necessarily on plot.

“I’m a little against plot,” he says. “I don’t want to read a book just to see how it will come out.”

At Uptown, Kenton Smith seems to feel sorry for the movie’s characters:

It’s not that these young women lack intelligence. Rather, it’s that they misuse their intelligence, torturously overthinking everything to remain confident of their intelligence. They’re funny, but underneath we see the agonizing self-doubt that perpetually tunnels away at the back of their minds.

…

And it’s also finally unclear what Stillman thinks about his characters, which come from the same stock as those of previous films including Metropolitan (1990) and The Last Days of Disco (1998). As the movie progresses, it almost seems that in the end, he regards these young people as lovable innocents, when we can see they are fundamentally unhappy youth hopefully destined for therapy.

Finally, Natalie Elliott at Oxford American takes a long look at “the best female characters to be found in Whit Stillman’s body of work as we know it”. Her picks, which come with clips, are: Metropolitan’s Audrey Rouget; Barcelona’s Montserrat; The Last Days of Disco’s Alice Kinnon and Charlotte Pingress; and, of course, Damsels’ Violet Wister.

Damsels in Distress: Carrie MacLemore and Ryan Metcalf

I found myself sitting heavy-lidded after those first 45 minutes when it’s clear that Stillman and his kids are comically oh-so-tastefully dressed up with no place in the plot to go. A lot of marking time is done here. …

I wouldn’t have missed Stillman’s extended set-up to his extended gag. I do think, though, the punch line needed work.

Jeremy Kibler at CultureMob had similar feelings:

Dialogue extraordinaire Whit Stillman was the Diablo Cody of the ’90s and continues here writing sparkling, arch dialogue that can feel “written” and self-conscious. The filmmaker goes for a retro, affectedly odd vibe with his idiosyncratic characters living inside a heightened reality, a bubble of a campus that isn’t far off from Stepford. It’s fascinatingly ethereal and pretty funny for the first half-hour, until it’s just off-putting and goes a long way.

But Josef Woodard at the Santa Barbara Independent is more all-round positive:

Depending on your perspective and particular sense of humor, Whit Stillman’s brilliant and dryly funny new film may inspire uproarious laughter, gentle sniggers, bemused smirks, yawns of apathy, or, well, all of the above. For this filmgoer, the responses included everything but apathy, and an awakening sense of rediscovery of one of America’s brightest and least productive directors, this being only Stillman’s fourth feature since he debuted with Metropolitan in 1990. We need much more of this kind of smart, subtle artistry in American film.

Finally, Whit Stillman is interviewed by Haden Guest in the latest issue of Film Comment, although the article isn’t available online unfortunately. I thought I’d pull out a paragraph in which Stillman expands on the idea of “flit lit”, referenced in Damsels, but which I don’t think he’s elaborated on at such length elsewhere:

[Harvard professor Walter Jackson] Bate described a trend in criticism in touch with 18th-century traditions. In Damsels we talk about the dandy tradition, the “flit lit” tradition—that is deprecating college slang for something that is important — this tradition that comes down from Johnson to Laurence Sterne to Jonathan Swift, and then to the Oscar Wilde era and eventually Evelyn Waugh, and separately Jane Austen. But Austen is in a sense a female fictional flowering of Dr. Johnson. And then for us the other huge impact was J.D. Salinger and mostly his short stories, like Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and those in the Franny and Zooey collection. When Salinger wrote about his influences, he evoked this great train of dandy literature going right back. I would just add Salinger to this list. Because it’s the people you hysterically admire that really influence you.

Thanks to Jesper Larsson for that tip.

And that’s us all caught up. Have a good weekend!

The movie has been steadily increasing the number of theatres each week and, as of 6 May, it’s pulled in $621,389 across the country:

It looks like there was a downturn in the most recent week, with takings down 26.9% despite an increase in theaters. But looking at the results for weekends we can see that the following weekend, things picked up hugely thanks to much wider distribution:

So, takings per screen have been dropping each weekend, but have been more than made up for as the number of theaters has multiplied. I’m guessing this is a pretty standard pattern for reasonably slow-growing movies.

The only figures for other countries are for the UK, where Damsels had pulled in $138,159 as of 6th May. I’m not sure how it’s doing over here, although in London it’s been in fewer cinemas each week. On the third weekend, Google Movies is only listing it in three cinemas in the city. It would be interesting to see how it goes in other countries.

Time Out Chicago have confirmed that it’s Stillman and he explains why he uses so many seemingly un-Stillman-like abbreviations:

“It’s helped me follow the whole Juicegate controversy in all its fascinating details.” As for his use of words like “2nite”: “I have been meaning to ask whether using txt abbreviations in tweets is bad form. I like concision & find it a fun game; as I was in Europe when sms took over — years before it did in the States — I became v used to that and grew to love it.”

“Juicegate”? Michael Wolff (Vanity Fair contributing editor and author of a Rupert Murdoch biography) took a carton of juice into a screening of Damsels and the police were called. Many column inches were subsequently filled with varieties of outrage. It looks like Stillman has successfully taken Wolff to a subsequent screening. I’m sure we’re all relieved.

Damsels in Distress: Greta Gerwig and Analeigh Tipton

Slight to the point of banality, Damsels in Distress is a fey stab at screwball that comes off as mind-numbingly precious and dull as dirt. Is this really the movie a 60-year-old preppy who should be playing golf decides to entertain himself with after a 13-year hiatus? Clearly still convinced that his college days were the best years of his life, Stillman traffics in the same stunted, adolescent imagination as the Gidget movies and offers the unpleasant, deeply unflattering sight of a grown man moony over the springtime loveliness of girls less than half his age. It’s like a creepy uncle rubbernecking on the activities of kids.

Well, everyone sees something different I guess. Eric Hynes in the Riverfront Times is more upbeat, and open to the ambiguities in the film:

Four features in, Whit Stillman’s cinematic sensibility is both plain as day and hard to pin down. In a Stillman film, a lost gentility is regularly romanticized but rarely ever properly defined, let alone reacquired. Rules are fetishized for the implication, if not the realization, of order. And in this, his most plainly satirical film that is also arguably his least cynical, a bunch of aspiring conformists reliably do the most abnormal of things — sniff bars of soap, conjugate the plural of doofus, choreograph the sambola. Dancing breaks out in all of Stillman’s films and usually just because. All the cardigans and brass-buttoned blazers in the world can’t cloak that kind of eccentricity.

In the Morning Sentinel, J.P. Devine (“a former stage and screen actor”) has an idea for what could be next:

Stillman’s dialogue is smart and sassy, but poorly delivered by a generation of young actors who think no one else is listening. The film takes too much time to get going, and beneath the snappy funny lines, there is an undertow of darkness that flows around Violet, and even in the finale when she channels Ginger Rogers, we wonder what post-college life holds for her.

That’s a movie I’d like to see.

At Indy Week David Fellerath draws an interesting distinction between being concerned with race and, maybe, class, in a broad sense:

…like [Woody] Allen, [Stillman's] not above dropping sight gags and one-liners for the sake of a guffaw. But with this film, we see an important difference: Allen’s movie world is notorious for its lack of non-white people. Black characters are conspicuous throughout Damsels in Distress. Stillman’s use of black actors, laudable in itself, also pre-empts a common misreading of his work as a fetishizing of rich Caucasians. Instead, his real concern is with sensibility and taste, of refinement in manner and intellect; the full name of his heroine, Violet Wister, suggests delicacy and nostalgic yearning. We may live in a fallen world, but the return of Whit Stillman to movie theaters gives us cause for hope.

Stephen Cooke at the Chronicle Herald briefly interviews Stillman, who outlines one of the themes that interests him, but which, I fear, is lost on most reviewers:

“Some people have been so incredibly square about the film, like they can’t enjoy the comedy because the subject matter sounds dumb when they read it on the page. To say that someone doesn’t know all the colours when they get to college sounds dumb is irrelevant, because it’s what happens to the subject matter that’s important.

“What’s cool is how the colour theme just grows, and you get into all of these things, like people who are really just unbelievably stupid, but do well because they’re scholarly and dedicated academically.

“Frankly, I ran into that quite a bit, people who are deadly serious about academics, but didn’t have a clue about the world.”

At We Are Movie Geeks, Barbie Snitzer has a lengthy article about Damsels. A self-confessed “snob (not a cynic)”, who manages to come across as relentlessly cynical. She seems confused by the movie, particularly by the lack of cell phones and computers. She paints Stillman as a deluded old man who thinks he has something to say because he was once a successful director. I just don’t know.

Finally, we have a post from Jason Busch at Spend Matters who sees some lessons for the workplace in Stillman’s movies, and particularly the verbose manner in which his characters speak:

[Stillman] can take the seemingly trivial and weave an extremely compelling exchange around it. And he does it, again and again and again, such that the broader plot matters almost less than the individual stories that push it along.

When modern conversations are shrinking into increasingly brief tweets, we should take our time to explain things properly:

I believe good dialogue matters when it comes to everything around us. But increasingly, it’s a rarity. Perhaps we can all do our small part to change that, not being afraid to foster an environment and workspaces where depth and exploration is valued over the dumbing down of ideas, not for the sake of simplicity alone, but because of an intellectually laziness that feels more and more common in an age of information and analysis where we consume more than ever but rarely take the time to digest at the level we should — or argue back with the right zinger just for the sake of putting our colleagues into an intellectual pickle from which they must untangle to prove their worth (and the worth of their ideas).

And that’s all for now. Have a good week!

Whit Stillman wanted to helm an adaptation of Anchee Min’s Maoist memoir, Red Azalea, as his next project after his 1998 film, The Last Days of Disco. But, he told us, he was pushed out of the project when Oliver Stone wanted in. Stillman says he was ready to extend an option to the book for $140,000, but the deal mysteriously collapsed when Stone showed interest. Stillman’s option lapsed, and Stone wound up dropping the film when he realized it couldn’t be shot in China.

I don’t think we’d previously heard that Oliver Stone was the reason Stillman dropped Red Azalea.

We’ll start off with this six minute video of a pin-striped Stillman being interviewed on Bloomberg Television by Tom Keene (who admits he knows nothing about films, but has been well briefed):

Stillman reveals that the movie, including post-production, cost around $1.5 million, which I think is new to us, and that it’s gradually opening up on to more screens and is likely to keep screening over the summer.

At the Montreal Gazette, Jeff Heinrich interviews Stillman, although Heinrich doesn’t seem to think much of the intellect of the potential audience:

There are a lot of big words in his movies that some people might not understand, I tell Stillman. Like what, he asks? I check the notes I made while watching the film: “foreboding,” “incumbent upon,” “immutable,” “incalculable.” As the list goes on, Stillman looks a bit out. “Those aren’t big words to me,” he finally says.

Well, quite. The Gazette also has a page of quotes from Stillman’s movies if you want some light relief.

PJ Media have an audio interview with Stillman by Ed Driscoll. I haven’t listened to the whole ten minutes, but he does say that Criterion are talking to Warners about making Barcelona available for release on DVD or Blu-Ray.

Paul Byrne has a good, and fairly long, interview with Stillman in Ireland for Movies.ie, which is worth a read. They talk about Stillman’s failed attempts to make movies out of a couple of books and Stillman says:

But I’m staying away from books now. Original stories all the way. I’m also thinking about not accept script commissions anymore. Try to write the script myself, don’t sell it.

At the Telegraph in the UK, David Gritten interviews Stillman although by this point I don’t think there’s anything here that we haven’t read before. The same goes for Charles Ealy’s interview at Austin360 and Miles Fielder’s at The List.

At the Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez talks to Stillman and makes a point of saying what a nice chap he is:

Despite the tony airs and sophisticated palette of his pictures, Stillman remains a thoroughly accessible, friendly and chatty fellow, completely devoid of any airs or pretension. “I find arrogance so offensive,” he says. “There’s a filmmaker who made a film last year that I loved. I saw him at one of these luncheons where they’re trying to get people votes for the Oscars. I went up to him and said hi, and he was so rude and full of himself. I was going to vote for his movie after the lunch, and then I thought ‘You know? He’s such a stuck-up guy, and he’s going to get nominated anyway. I just won’t bother.’ And I didn’t.

Caitlin Moore has a fairly good interview at Austinist and Stillman hints at the actors for future projects:

Moore: You’ve used a lot of the same actors in some of your movies. Do you feel like there are any from Damsels that you’ll use again?

Stillman: I love them. Absolutely. A whole bunch from this film. There’s many actors in this film I’d like to work with again. I’m already trying to think of shaping this script that I have where they could work — because, and that’s one of the exciting things — when you’re still working on a script, you can still shape it for performers. And I really like to do that. So Greta and Adam would be the leads and then there are other people that I would like to bring back.

Moore: So that’s a technique that you’ve used a lot?

Stillman: It helped me with Barcelona because I already had the idea for Barcelona before I started working on the script about the two cousins in Barcelona, and then I met Taylor Nichols and Chris Eigeman shooting Metropolitan, and saw how well they got on together and that became the basis of Barcelona.

Stillman also reveals that a couple of imposters on Twitter were removed:

Moore: Do you use Twitter or anything like that?

Stillman: I don’t use Twitter. I’ve had to take down two imposters who weren’t good imposters. If they’d been funny it would have been ok, but they weren’t funny at all. And so I still won’t do Twitter so that I’m not imposted.

Finally, the Economist’s Prospero blog interviews Stillman and, among other things, they discuss the tone of his new film:

Economist: The little love story in Damsels between Violet (Greta Gerwig) and Charlie (Adam Brody) could almost be from one of your earlier films, except for the daffy way Violet talks… Then we meet the bunch of troglodytic frat boys she wants to save from being thrown off the campus…

Stillman: The first two-thirds of this film is in the mode of my other films; the last third is a cartoon. All the people who played those parts—the dumb frat boys—knew exactly how to play them when they came in and read. Ryan Metcalf, who plays Frank, said, “I’m thinking of something that’s rather broad. Do you want to see it?” I said, “Yeah, show me ‘rather broad.’” And he knocked it out of the park. Then Billy Magnessun, who ended up playing Thor, came in, and he was bouncing off the walls.

That’s all the interviews for the moment.

Damsels in Distress: Greta Gerwig and Ryan Metcalf

Throughout, Stillman’s satire is softer [than in his previous films], and the overall tone is much gentler than one would expect. It also, at times, strays almost too closely to — whisper it — kookiness. Whereas before his characters could be unwittingly twattish, this time around his damsels and dudes are far too gloriously dumb, or deliriously gormless. It must be said, though, that this lighter tone is rather fetching.

Jeff Heinrich at the Montreal Gazette seems to have problems following non-North American accents but is otherwise upbeat:

It’s a situation rom-com, an action movie for Scrabble players, a musical comedy for fans of Fred Astaire, as the kids spell out their futures, dance and sing and grow up.

At the Kansas City Star, Rene Rodriguez continues the near-universal praise for Greta Gerwig’s performance and is generally pleased about everything else too:

Damsels in Distress is light and frothy by design — it’s an inconsequential bauble — but I laughed out loud in nearly every scene, and there are lines in the movie that still make me chuckle. This is the work of a singular voice in American cinema, except this time, everyone can be in on the jokes.

Canada’s National Post assembles a panel of three to review the film. Like most conversations, it doesn’t actually reach a conclusion, but they all seemed to enjoy it.

At Examiner.com, Brian Zitzelman is also upbeat about this “terrifically entertaining and absurd story”:

Stillman manages to ground them in this un-reality, especially Violet. He gives the story a light touch, kind of a fluffy cupcake of a movie, with Gerwig’s head-nodding lead a genuine center. Her dialogue and mannerisms might be unnatural, but Violet’s motivations and heart are true.

Over in the UK, Philip French in the Observer has what I guess is a review of the film, but in around 1000 words he manages to avoid giving much of a clue as to whether he likes the film, or thinks it any good.

Though never fully focused or explicit, Damsels in Distress seems to be a metaphor for a society that has constantly been in need of authority and responsible leadership, and where since frontier days women have seen it as their duty to set standards and improve rebellious males.

Also in the UK, the Independent’s Jonathan Romney exhibits more of an opinion, and he appears very much pleased by “a film that’s a crazy, exuberant objet, a glimmering bauble fashioned for the sheer delight of it”:

The film is gorgeously shot by Doug Emmett, who puts a summery gleam on the marble frontages, and scored by Mark Suozzo and Adam Schlesinger with echoes of breezily vacant 1950s pop. This is a feelgood film, if you must — but not in any way you’ll recognise. You’ll gape at the sheer improbability of Damsels In Distress, but go with it, and you may find it lifts your soul even as it makes your jaw drop.

And that’s a good place to end this batch of reviews.

Damsels in Distress: Whit Stillman on set

During the making of Damsels, Stillman put himself under more pressure by taking on extra writing — something he regrets. “I made a huge mistake in this film where, to make money, I also had an HBO writing assignment. I did a draft before we shot the film and right after. That was a mistake — particularly the draft beforehand. Afterwards maybe it’s a good to take off from the film for a few weeks but both were very bad ideas and I think we recovered from it but it took me a while.”

Anderson has also posted the full transcript of his (February) interview with Stillman at Click, which is a nice touch and gives us plenty more interesting material to read:

WS: Everything [about making a film] can be bad! I think there is… I used to find the editing phase the best. But even that can be bad if things aren’t quite working. I find starting out… the idea of the script is normally a happy thing then getting started is very difficult. Then there’s a point when things are going well with the script and everything’s exciting. I think probably everything has its downsides. So yes the casting thing is great because you’ve finished the script and people want to make it — that’s kind of cool. But then there’s also the terror that you won’t find anyone to play some parts. We had a very hard time finding the males for Damsels. The French actor Hugo Becker we didn’t get his visa until the last three days of the shoot. And everyone thought I was crazy hanging on for this actor, they wanted me to recast.

DA: So you had to do all of his stuff in the last three days?

WS: The last three days of the shoot.

Next, Ellin Stein interviews Stillman at the Arts Desk (don’t miss the easy-to-miss “next page” link at the bottom of the article):

Even Stillman’s ability to keep costs down didn’t help. “I remember talking to a producer about how inexpensively I could make a movie and logically that should be good,” he recalls. “If you can make a movie for 1.5 million that will return 3 million, that’s fantastic. But that’s not the psychology people have. They say, ‘The film has to cost five million so I can charge my $250,000 producer fee.’ My best friend, who was also an investor in Metropolitan, said, ‘People talk in the film business the way the gang about to knock over a bank talk, except in the film business they divide up the loot before they do the job.’”

I didn’t even know at the time that Whit Stillman was in London (where I live) recently, but Michael Leader interviewed him here for Den of Geek. Stillman tells us about film-making on a tight budget:

Leader: As the director and producer, how did you keep costs down?

Stillman: You don’t do things the industry way. I was a little too maniacal about it, because I am such a cheapskate emotionally that I would get out of control where any expenditure upset me. But I felt we were a very comfortable production, because we could have a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee run twice a day. There’s one in the afternoon, too. So I felt that was quite luxurious. Having good coffee on set was quite a treat.

He also discusses shooting the film on digital RED cameras, which I don’t think I’ve seen him talk about before:

Leader: The film does have a very striking look. Those backlit shots, with the sunlight cutting through the frame, are beautiful. And I don’t think many cinematographers would do that.

Stillman: It’s amazing. Some people really criticise that. I think it’s fantastic. It’s transformative. I think that digital photography, by people who know how to use it, has gotten far superior to film. Far superior. I love it. I mean, I saw a famous RED film last night on TV. It was one of the first big-budget films made on a RED. I don’t know what they did wrong, but it looks so god-awful. And I think the RED wasn’t very good when it started. And, also, I think on post-production, if people don’t colour time it properly… You have to have proper people working at every stage.

Interesting that for such a film-maker who many think of as somehow old-fashioned, he’s so keen on the latest shooting technology, when plenty of directors are stubbornly holding on to celluloid for as long as possible.

And that’s all the interview action for the time being.

Thomas Hibbs’s (dean of the Honors College at Baylor University) review at National Review Online is a little more thoughtful than most, although much of it consists of (amusing) quotes from the film.

The serious point behind the humor is not of course that we ought to take Violet’s prescriptions as normative. Indeed, as is the case in other Stillman films, the reformers and theorists end up in trouble. Their schemes inevitably run afoul of the complexities of the real world. In the press notes for the film, Stillman comments, “It’s hard not to admire the idealists who, not content with the existent world, seek to invent new ones. But the confidence and mastery these future-architects embody often disguise a fragile persona that’s frail, inadaptive, and, finally, easily shattered.” That’s precisely what happens to Violet in Damsels.

At the San Diego City College’s City Times, Tom Andrew is, let’s say, underwhelmed:

The film tries to be comically absurd as most Bill Murray, Farrelly Brothers and some Cohen Brothers films are, but it doesn’t even come close to these films. … Damsels, should not be seen in the theater. In fact, it shouldn’t be seen at all, unless you are prepared to lose 99 minutes of your life and know you’ll never get those minutes back.

I’m not sure that sentence even makes sense. Hans Morgenstern at Independent Ethos is a little more positive and thoughtful but also, ultimately, less than enthusiastic:

Throughout the film, Lily asks the questions but just floats along with it, accepting Violet’s convoluted misinformation for the sake of the mental stability of those surrounding them. It sets Lily up to make a mistake that later proves degrading to herself after Xavier takes advantage of Lily’s own dumbing-down in the bedroom. This is no way for anyone to find education and grow up, and in the end no one does. There lies the inherent problem of the movie: If conflicts are so easily resolved by humoring ignorance, why should we care about these people? It’s funny for a bit, but becomes grating, tiresome and plain pathetic fast.

At Cine Vue, Patrick Gamble gives the movie 4 out of 5 and, while he has reservations, is broadly upbeat:

Gerwig — already perceived as the unofficial queen of indie filmmaking – is, as to be expected, superb. Fuelled by the type of script any actor would love to have presented to them, she positively revels in the pretentious and arrogant characteristics of Violet, expelling an assured egotistical demeanour that recalls Reese Witherspoon’s performance as Tracy Flick in Alexander Payne’s Election (1999) — only far more complex and endearing.

In Baltimore’s City Paper, Bret McCabe has little bad to say:

The plot is fairly inconsequential, as Damsels’ version of undergraduate life is an imaginary utopia. Stillman uses it more as the backdrop for daydreaming young people starting to transition into the reality of adulthood, and he zeroes in on the comic conflicts of imagination colliding with actuality. College becomes that place where who people wish they were gets whittled into an understanding of who they are, and Stillman has the mature restraint not to do it with a serrated cynical blade. He instead mines the comedy of precocious seriousness, and the results are moments of the wonderfully pointless.

Next, Aaron Mesh, a long-term Stillman fan, is entirely positive at Williamette Week:

The movie is so madcap and mannered, and Gerwig’s performance so perfectly balanced on the edge of mania, that people might read it as a satire. But anybody who’s spent time in the cloistered world of a small, hidebound liberal arts school will recognize it as only a slight exaggeration, even down to the creepy French guy who says he prefers anal sex for religious reasons. Stillman is having a laugh at this bizarro world—where the goody two-shoes are heroes, counterculture activists are conceited scoundrels, and frat boys are the hapless, filthy ditwits stuck in between—but he’s also advocating for an ideal of feminine civilization.

Tom Grater at Impact, the University of Nottingham’s (UK) magazine is utterly perplexed. Indeed, it sounds like he’s been watching a different film to most critics, even those who were ambivalent:

The production is thoroughly and perplexingly amateurish; irrelevant shots of the sky are interspersed amongst numerous oddities: loses of focus, sound problems, an over-reliance on a soft focus filter that only furthers the tweeness of it all.

In fact, I’m struggling to unearth any redeeming features. It never moves at a consistent pace, dropping characters from the limelight and then picking them back up in the blink of an eye. It never really has a point either, tangentially exploring one idea and then jettisoning it for something else. It’s frustrating, pretentious and ultimately difficult to watch. Real horror show.

Not really a Stillman fan, I’m guessing. At The Quad, Vijayta Narang had mixed views:

While it does have its moments of cinematic harmony, the film is driven by snappy dialogue as opposed to visuals. The dialogue is a little too dry at times, but effectively delivered. Stillman can be commended on having created a set of characters that are both caricatures and are all flawed in very believable ways.

Let’s hope the next batch of reviews are more consistently positive.