Damsels in Distress. At long last, Whit Stillman is back, this time with a poignant little low-budget romcom about college life whose protagonists, a band of invincibly innocent young women led by Greta Gerwig, endeavor to socialize and redeem the young men they love by starting an international dance craze. (Well, sort of.) Fey, whimsical, talky, and quintessentially Stillmanesque, Damsels in Distress proves that the writer-director of Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco didn’t lose his feather-light touch by taking a twelve-year-long vacation (TT)
Archives for April 10, 2012
BOOK
Charlie Louvin with Benjamin Whitner, Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers (Igniter/HarperCollins, $22.99). A hair-raisingly frank memoir by half of the greatest vocal duet in the history of country music. Ira Louvin was the hell-raiser with the sky-high tenor voice who got all the ink, but it was his brother Charlie who lived to tell the tale of how the Louvin Brothers went from picking cotton in Georgia to singing on the Opry–and how Ira cracked up along the way. Satan Is Real may be ghostwritten, but it sounds completely authentic, and every page will hold your attention (TT).
TT: Lookback
From 2004:
Reformers, like saints, can be awfully awkward people. Their singlemindedness is no small part of what makes them effective, as well as uncomfortable to be with. I’ve known a few, but I’ve never tried to get close to them. No matter how friendly they may seem, I always get the feeling that they’d be perfectly happy to have me guillotined if they thought it necessary….
Read the whole thing here.
TT: Almanac
“Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.”
Francis Bacon, Apophthegms