Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress is about to get some additional international mileage thanks to the release of the official video for Victoria Aitken’s “Weekend Lover.” The video for the song — whic hit No. 10 on the U.K. dance charts and is now catching fire in Germany — is composed entirely of scenes from Stillman’s movie about a group of trend-setting women (led by Greta Gerwig ) at a boorish East-coast college whose romantic entanglements upend their friendship and their lives. (“Weekend Lover” is featured on the soundtrack of Damsels in Distress , which was released on DVD at the end of July.) “It’s weird how the story I tell in my song fits his film almost exactly,” Aitken told Movieline . “My song is about me as a damsel in distress.” The singer/songwriter, who is the daughter of former Conservative British Parliament member Jonathan Aitken, wrote the track after a phone call with “You’re Beautiful” singer James Blunt during which she complained about the state of her love life. “I told him, ‘It’s a disaster. I don’t want to be a weekend lover,'” Aitken said. “And then I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s great.'” Aitken, said that the video was put together by “Whit’s team and editors at my label, Black Hole Records,” which is also the home of superstart DJ Tiesto. The Londoner is also about to release “Wasting Away,” a collaboration with reggae artist Spragga Benz that, she said was written in commemoration of the partying in London and Jamaica that took place after Usain Bolt’s Olympics 100-meter gold-medal win. No stranger to tabloid attention, Aitken also told us that she has the perfect song should Prince Harry’s nude Las Vegas pictures scandal inspire a comedy movie, or even a music video: her single “Queen of the House.” “It’s how anyone can be queen or king of the dance floor,” she said. “Harry was king of the house in Vegas,” Aitken said. “He looks great naked, and I can’t understand why the media is saying he embarrassed the royal family. If anything, he’s glamorized them.” I’m inclined to agree. I mean, didn’t I just see photos of Queen Elizabeth in a hoodie? Check out the video for “Weekend Lover” below. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
This just in from CheapOair , offering travel deals to the Charlotte, NC area that played host to the Hunger Games production. “Visit the DuPont State Recreational Forest (also known as the arena in the movie) where you can find a dramatic landscape of waterfalls, hideaway lakes, streams and pines, as well as the spot where Peeta camouflaged himself in the movie, and traces of the pyrotechnics from the fireball sequence.” While you’re at it, how’s about a lovely spring picnic on the site where children lost their lives fighting to the death in the movie? Sign me up! But wait, there’s more! “Next on your itinerary you can make a night out of Charlotte’s NoDa neighborhood which is home to artsy galleries, bars and restaurants, as well as the spots where the Hunger Games cast spent their nights out. Barnardsville also hosts a Navitat Canopy Tour, which is home to one of the many ziplines in Western North Carolina. Close by this stop, pre-game scenes with Katniss and Gale were filmed in Pisgah National Forest.” Ah, yes. For just a few hundred dollars you can sit in the woods where Katniss and Peeta pondered their escape from the living fascist nightmare that is the Capitol on Reaping Day! Unfortunately, the CheapO deals seem to offer hotel and airfare only ($717 for 4 nights from NYC! $561 for 3 nights from LA!) and aren’t a part of a coordinated Hunger Games tour, which of course do exist. Pure Vida Adventures offers a day-long Hunger Games Survival School for just $150 that “focuses primarily on the nonviolent survival skills including fire and shelter building, knot tying, snares, off trail travel, and navigation.” And for a more immersive experience, you can pay $389 to Hunger Games Fan Tours to spend the weekend divided into “districts,” get trained in archery, sling-shots, camouflaging, and sling-shots, and zip line through the trees at night to feel just like Katniss and Rue before testing your skills against the other tributes. (Sans battle royale, I’m assuming.) It’s only a matter of time before some enterprising hotelier in North Carolina gets the idea to open a Hunger Games -themed establishment, a la Twilight . Perhaps decorated in the sparse, coal-mining shanty chic of the Everdeen home?
Damsels in Distress is Whit Stillman’s first film in 14 years: For those keeping track at home, that’s the equivalent of three four-year stints at an Ivy League college, plus one year of graduate school, plus one year of aimless backpacking around Europe bankrolled by daddy. How much you enjoy Damsels will depend on your tolerance for Stillman’s particular brand of duct-taped Sperry Topsider whimsy. It’s a comedy! It’s a musical! It’s a trip down memory lane to revisit the blissful confusion of our — or someone’s — college years! Damsels in Distress is all of those things and yet somehow less, as wayward as a second-semester junior who can’t yet decide on a major. The characters and the movie itself seem lost in time, which is surely part of the point. Greta Gerwig plays Violet, the leader of a snobby three-girl clique at an eminently respectable East Coast college — it goes by the name Seven Oaks, and the campus is a cozy nest of Greek Revival buildings enhanced by a great deal of exquisite, sun-dappled leafiness, the kind of place that inspires nostalgia long before graduation. (The picture was filmed in Snug Harbor, on Staten Island, a clever use of location shooting.) On the first day of the new semester, Violet and her cohorts — the judgmental, upper-crusty Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and the flaky-cute Heather (Carrie MacLemore) — spot a new girl and immediately decide to take her under their wing: Lily (Analeigh Tipton) has just transferred from another school, and though she doesn’t seem particularly lost, she does have a wide-eyed Olive Oyl innocence that inspires protectiveness. And if you’re Violet, you’ll add a soupçon of passive-aggressive condescension. “Lily failed, or was unhappy, at her last school, but we feel she’s going to adapt beautifully,” she says as she introduces Lily around to her coterie of acceptable acquaintances. The rest of Damsels in Distress follows the young women as they go about their college-life routine, which includes manning the campus “suicide center” (Violet is a firm believe that tap-dancing can cure all ills, including suicidal impulses), bat around lofty pseudophilosophical thoughts (“We’re all flawed; must that render us mute to the flaws of others?”), attend dances at the local fraternities (which go by Roman letters, not Greek ones, just to be different, I guess), and, most significantly, become depressed or at least just seriously confused by the guys in their orbit. Those include a grad student named Xavier (Hugo Becker), who sells the sexually innocent Lily one hell of a line of goods; Charlie (Adam Brody), a suave man-about-town who also hopes to put the moves on Lily; Thor (Billy Magnussen), a college student who has yet to learn his colors; and Frank (played, with a great deal of dopey charm, by newcomer Ryan Metcalf), Violet’s boyfriend, who isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed but who is nonetheless possessed of the most startling blue eyes, an attribute he downplays disarmingly. (He deflects a compliment by asserting, with frat-boy earnestness, “I’m not going to go around checking out what color my eyes are!”) Stillman — who also wrote the script — allows the story to flit from here to there, lighting on one comic idea after another like a confused bee, never sticking around long enough to actually pollinate anything. Discrete events and vignettes pile up messily: When Violet becomes deeply depressed over some romantic problems with Frank, the scent of a particular soap brings her back to her senses. The male students are punished by the administration after a Dionysian campus hootenanny gets too rowdy. The editor of the campus newspaper acts like an asshole. Violet practices her tap dancing. And so on. The movie’s pleasures supposedly lie in its casual, disorganized nature, but the effect is a kind of studied dottiness, as if Stillman (whose last film was the 1998 The Last Days of Disco ) were genuinely trying to say something but has simply forgotten what it is. Damsels does look quite pretty — that Snug Harbor location, coupled with DP Doug Emmett’s restrained camera work, sure doesn’t hurt. And Stillman does seem to appreciate Gerwig’s preternaturally honest, questioning face. But he doesn’t know what to do with her gangly-graceful physical and comic timing: She’s like a cartoon ostrich ballerina, yet Stillman doesn’t give her big moments any shape or structure, leaving her to flail hither and thither. Tipton (who played the lovestruck baby-sitter in last year’s Crazy Stupid Love ) is the most appealing of the bunch — her Lily is the right combination of sensible and open-hearted, and she has a radiant tipsy moon of a smile. But the movie’s lackadisical, shuffling feel doesn’t serve her particularly well. By the time Damsels in Distress winds its way toward its closing musical number — a singing, dancing outdoor ensemble rendering of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Things Are Looking Up” — its romantic charms, meager to begin with, have worn thin, like a tweed jacket gone threadbare at the elbows. The thing has the feel of a vanity project, lacking urgency — like the work of a gentleman filmmaker who doesn’t have to work. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . 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Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt is kind of stupid and kind of amazing, a horror movie-fairytale hybrid with an inscrutable plot, some gorgeous images and two brief sections shot in 3-D. This isn’t the great film Coppola’s devotees have been waiting for him to make. But it’s infused with more of Coppola’s spirit, as we know it, than Youth Without Youth and Tetro , both of which were sluggish and self-serious. Twixt is a bit of a mess, but it’s also joyful and wicked, with a great, roly-poly sense of humor about itself. In its imaginative WTF -ness, it reminds me of Bob Dylan’s gloriously whacked-out Masked and Anonymous , just the sort of thing you’d expect a crackpot genius left to his own devices to make.
When Toronto International Film Festival organizers revealed the first chunk of their schedule earlier this week, there were some notable omissions: the highly anticipated Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy and Roman Polanski’s Carnage , for instance. Seems those films were already packing bags for Italy. Both will debut in Venice in September, along with The Ides of March and previously reported Damsels in Distress , which will open and close the festival, respectively. The biggest fall movie not going to Venice or Toronto? Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar , though perhaps that one is earmarked for the New York Film Festival. Click through for the full Venice lineup.
Though the full schedule for the Venice Film Festival comes out Thursday, we already know what will close the gondolier-friendly celebration: Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress , which concerns “young women at an East Coast university, the transfer student that joins their group and the young men they become entangled with.” The comedy — which stars Movieline heroine Greta Gerwig and Adam Brody — premieres Sept. 10, after the awards ceremony. George Clooney’s The Ides of March opens the fest on Aug. 31. [ Deadline ]
