Whatever happened to Whit Stillman?

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.

my sister said she thought it was more like a bunch of short stories than a full narrative.

oh for sure, and not a problen.

so worth seeing? it was playing at the local theater here for like 5 days and by the time i convinced myself to go despite the poor reviews it was replaced by some jason seigel comedy

The reviews weren't exactly "poor." A little divided, which non-cookiecutter style will draw.

Had no problem w/ the guy playing Frank btw. From Miriam Bale's Slant review:

As noted in the press notes, this is the first film for Ryan Metcalf, who plays Violet's idiotic former beau. ("Do you mind if I try a version that's a little broad?" Stillman remembers Metcalf saying of the moment when the role clicked.) Stillman doesn't get a Chris Eigeman-type to play dumb because that would have been condescending. But the amateur playing broad comedy opens up some breathing room in Stillman's highly enunciated, dense comedy. The clash of styles in this film is bewildering and then disarming.

Yeah, I'm pretty fond of this one in fits and starts.

i didnt think he was bad, but i just felt like he was flailing around in his scenes, which were mostly unfunny

i think thats the directors fault btw.

sorry, I lol'd at him and other stuff

maybe it was more the movie's timing that i was responding to, i dunno

I remembered that 'golden oldie' too! Memorably atrocious even for a dance hit.

Stillman said that the "golden oldie" was going to be Cher's "Believe," but it was too expensive to license.

Would've made for a hysterically incongruous frat party soundtrack, tho.

I had forgotten what a hilarious monster Kate Beckinsale is in Disco. Also maybe the funniest and most pathetic Eigeman character.

Many of the club scenes were shot in the Loews movie palace in Jersey City, which I've been to several times now.

damsels in distress was super!

it's easy to do!

...

do the cha cha cha for two step.

and so on.

ah...cha-cha

<3 A Conversation With Whit Stillman About The Script Of 'Metropolitan'

Just last week listened to the Treatment interview with Stillman--good stuff.

One of the criticisms I get of the film is that all its energy goes out once Nick Smith leaves. I can see how people react that way, because you're getting a lot of the fun and comedy from Nick. A lot of these things, frankly, I did not catch as the writer of the script. People had to bring it to my attention.

I loved DID. Adam Brody fit perfectly in this world.

as did gerwig i thought! my liberal pc self might've blanched at brody on homosexuality if i hadn't heard the same thing for years from some of my older queer friends (see also paris hilton on grinder for that matter). was so happy to see dookie from the wire pop up in this, in some part of my brain it means 'he got out' like w/ michael on 90210 or randy on suburgatory.

and Wallace faked his own death and turned into a high school football star!

haha! as long as that little shit kenard doesn't pop up in anything.

DiD made me laugh a lot more than I thought it would. Pretty uneven, yes, but I think "the clash of styles in this film is bewildering and then disarming" pretty much sums up how I eventually felt. I want to watch it again, too, which is odd for this kind of movie.

The last twenty minutes are bewildering.

I'm not even sure why but i quite liked it too. It's oddly charming

I need to watch again to remember. Iirc it did lose its way and fumbled towards a resolution (which it didn't even really need). I was surprised the musical numbers weren't as effective as I thought they'd be.

Yes "oddly charming" was about how I was going to describe it, too. That, or charmingly surreal.