Whit Stillman
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Connections, in both directions
It doesn't quite match the 20-year stretch when Terrence Malick sat out cinema (between 1978's Days of Heaven and 1998's The Thin Red Line), but until Damsels in Distress, writer-director-producer Whit Stillman hadn't made a movie in 14 years — and that's something akin to a tragedy.
We first meet Des when he is assuaging the pain of his break-up with Nina (Jennifer Beals, wasted as nothing more than a cheeky reference to her own Flashdance-born disco credibility) by confessing to her his recently-acknowledged homosexuality.
The initial conceit is a beaut: to upend Heathers and Mean Girls by turning the central trio of insouciant alpha-hotties into do-gooders who march into dorms, pull students off their suicidal ledges, and put them in tap shoes to sing and dance.
If you can imagine what Mean Girls would have been like had it been directed by Jim Jarmusch, you're on the right track.
What results is something of a highbrow Mean Girls , in which the introduction of a fourth wheel shakes up the group dynamic, and the new girl finds her own identity outside of it.
In admittedly reductive terms, Damsels in Distress — the first film from writer-director Whit Stillman since 1998’s The Last Days of Disco — is Mean Girls or Heathers transplanted to an Ivy League-like institution of higher learning where everything’s aglow and to which co-ed living is a fairly new concept.
Along the way, they end up in a series of romantic entanglements, silly subplots, and sanity checks that fall somewhere between Heathers and Mean Girls.
This time, he plays with the type of college comedy tropes we've seen in so many movies over the years and delivers one of his most inventive scripts to date in trying to create a movie that feels like "Mean Girls" by way of "Mystery Team."
Bachelorette (2012)
Directed by Leslye Headland
influenced by The Last Days of Disco (1998)
Characters
Headland is clearly trying to channel the spirit of John Hughes (perhaps a coked-up and promiscuous John Hughes), but her discursive, self-involved, shamelessly New Yorky characters also suggest the films of Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan” and “The Last Days of Disco”).
Unlike the characters in " Saturday Night Fever ," who were basically just looking for a good time, these upwardly mobile characters are alert to the markers of social status.
The true story is bizarre enough, yet it's clear from the outset that director David O Russell's primary touchstones are cinematic, most notably, Scorsese's Goodfellas as seen through the refractive prism of Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights , with a smidgen of Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco sprinkled in as seasoning.
It also loosely recalls Whit Stillman's wonderful '90s films "Metropolitan," "Barcelona," and "The Last Days of Disco," linked by Chris Eigeman's superb seriocomic performances in all three.
During the golden days of Hollywood's big studio system, directors such as Michael Curtiz and John Ford made three or four films a year, hoping that perhaps every couple of years a Stagecoach or a Casablanca would survive.
Tadpole (2002)
Directed by Gary Winick
influenced by Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998)
Characters Themes
Like Stillman's " Metropolitan ," " Barcelona " and " The Last Days of Disco ," it gives us a hero who is articulate, multi-lingual, sophisticated beyond his years, and awesomely self-confident.
There’s no doubt that Winick has spent a lot of time reading the Woody Allen Guide To Angst-Ridden New York Comedy and his film also owes something to Whit Stillman’s films about equally pretentious prep school types (Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco).
Like Stillman's " Metropolitan ," " Barcelona " and " The Last Days of Disco ," it gives us a hero who is articulate, multi-lingual, sophisticated beyond his years, and awesomely self-confident.
There’s no doubt that Winick has spent a lot of time reading the Woody Allen Guide To Angst-Ridden New York Comedy and his film also owes something to Whit Stillman’s films about equally pretentious prep school types (Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco).
Like Stillman's " Metropolitan ," " Barcelona " and " The Last Days of Disco ," it gives us a hero who is articulate, multi-lingual, sophisticated beyond his years, and awesomely self-confident.
Lady and the Tramp (1955)
Directed by Clyde Geronimi
influenced The Last Days of Disco (1998)
Dialogue Themes
So many times there are scenes in which characters say things that feel rehearsed, lines that they've cooked up and saved for the group, like in one diatribe about Disney's Lady and the Tramp.
Yet, Stillman's direction and dialogue here seem looser, more hip than in his previous outings: Two suitors vying for the same woman engage in a pointed deconstruction of Lady and the Tramp; an impromptu, after-hours dance of flirtation slyly moves from the living room to the bedroom.
They'll argue anything, as evidenced by a psychoanalytical quarrel over "Lady and the Tramp," in which one character opines that the movie encourages women to invest romantically in parolees and bad boys.
When they're not shaking their booties on the dance floor, the trendy friends can be found engaging in idle chatter about everything from the psycho-social ramifications of "Lady and the Tramp" to post-modern reinterpretations of Shakespearean tragedies, occasionally taking time out to vent the romantic and professional insecurities that have become a hallmark of Stillman characters.
(“ Before Rome, before Babylon, before the pyramids … ”) Though totally different in tenor and style, it actually reminded me of the opening moments of Whit Stillman’s 2016 period comedy Love & Friendship , which delivered such a rapid-fire stream of character information that it liberated the viewer from feeling like they needed to pay attention to any of it; they could just sit back and enjoy the ride.
The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced by Metropolitan (1990), The Last Days of Disco (1998)
Themes
Along with Whit Stillman ( Metropolitan , The Last Days of Disco ), Baumbach mined his post-collegiate ennui, best exemplified by Kicking and Screaming but also apparent in 1998s underrated Mr. Jealousy , for barbed laughs and emasculated male pathos in a way that came to define the decade, or at least its independent film movement.
Along with Whit Stillman ( Metropolitan , The Last Days of Disco ), Baumbach mined his post-collegiate ennui, best exemplified by Kicking and Screaming but also apparent in 1998s underrated Mr. Jealousy , for barbed laughs and emasculated male pathos in a way that came to define the decade, or at least its independent film movement.
Parise shines here, with his simple-mindedness and broad, expressive facial expressions, which remind me of the dimwitted frat boys from Whit Stillman’s charming Damsels in Distress.
Of course, “real” people don’t talk like the characters in Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), or Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015), to pluck but three examples of stylized screenwriting out of the ether, and you could argue that the artifice of Sorrentino’s dialogue is encouraged by the fact that he’s dealing with show people and artists, and that the world of this hotel is a stage for once-and-current performers of one type or another (“Men, artists, animals, plants . . .
Think of it as Whit Stillman's innocent "Metropolitan" as reinvented by a pervert with a bad attitude, to say nothing of heartburn.
Alice ( Chloe Sevigny , from " Kids ") is the smartest member of the crowd, and definitely the nicest.
The character with the best chance of moving on to living a good, happy and meaningful life is Alice, played by the always surprising Chloe Sevigny ( "Kids,"…
A strong ensemble piece, it features Chloe Sevigny ("Kids," "Palmetto" ) and Kate Beckinsale ( "Cold Comfort Farm," "Shooting Fish" ) as two recent Hampshire College grads who have moved to Manhattan and into a life of sleepy publishing house day jobs and late nights at their favorite disco haunts.
Sevigny, a talented newcomer first seen in a tragic role in 1995's Kids, is the only flesh-and-blood character amid the cardboard.
Subplots running through the film concern Halley's dad's 'elopement' with his blonde bimbo producer and Halley's sister Ashley's (Mary Catherine Garrison, "Moonlight Mile") wedding to Lewis (Mackenzie Astin, "The Last Days of Disco"), a presumably anal-retentive type who is awfully free-wheeling with wedding plans.
This kaleidoscopic, relentlessly downbeat film plays a little like "The Royal Tenenbaums" as envisaged by Whit Stillman ("Metropolitan," "The Last Days of Disco"), a talky, cryptic, often times witty but ultimately overripe look at wealthy, dysfunctional Manhattanites and the problems they're forced to endure.
Shoplifters of the World (2021)
Directed by Stephen Kijak
influenced by The Last Days of Disco (1998)
Sheila’s criticism of Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink ranks with Whit Stillman’s Lady and the Tramp disquisition in The Last Days of Disco .
That same period has fueled at least two decades of self-reflexive storytelling, from Whit Stillman ’s “Metropolitan” to Lena Dunham’s “Girls” (to name two New York examples), and here brings a revitalized Baumbach back to his snappy “Kicking and Screaming” roots.