Damsels In Distress
Cast: Greta Gerwig, Analeigh Tipton, Adam Brody, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Carrie MacLemore
Director: Whit Stillman
Running time: 99 mins
Running time: 99 mins
As this tiresome nonsense opened up, an insidious discomfort began to build in my mind…. a sense of dread…am I really going to have to spend the next ninety or so minutes with these tedious individuals? The whole experience continued like being at a dreadful party you’d been roped into going to, but couldn’t wait to leave.
Damsels in Distress is the first film in fourteen years from Whit Stillman, who last tortured us back in the 90s with three indie comedies – “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona” and “The Last Days of Disco” – then, as now, about shallow, useless US ‘preppies’. Stillman’s obvious inspirations are the dozy musicals of the 1930s, as four modern “co-eds” (they even call themselves that) try to do the right thing, win over boys and start a new dance craze. (This drivel even climaxes with a Gershwin number.)
Greta Gerwig is supposed to be adorable as Violet, the campus queen bee who thinks it’s a good deed to date your “inferiors”. She also hands out doughnuts and tap-dance lessons at a suicide-prevention centre. If she’s the reason not to top yourself, I think I’ll pre-book in now at Dignitas. She’s not, however, nearly as annoying as some of her projects, the boys at the nearby fraternity whom she cheerfully refers to as “morons.” Which, while politically incorrect, is actually true. (One tosser doesn’t even know the colour of his own eyes. His best friend doesn’t know the names of the colours, period.)
Gerwig is deadpan throughout, and her band of anti-Heathers are equally astonishingly off the beam, especially Analeigh Tipton, as someone not quite under Violet’s spell, and Megalyn Echikunwoke, who witheringly tags every remotely friendly fellow as “an operator.” Stillman’s delusion that Gerwig is sweetly wacky – she has a fondness for scented soap, dance fads and clothes that seem to have been raided from your auntie’s wardrobe – is just dull.
“Damsels in Distress” wants to be stuffed full of whimsy, however, I’m afraid it’s full of something else.
Damsels in Distress is the first film in fourteen years from Whit Stillman, who last tortured us back in the 90s with three indie comedies – “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona” and “The Last Days of Disco” – then, as now, about shallow, useless US ‘preppies’. Stillman’s obvious inspirations are the dozy musicals of the 1930s, as four modern “co-eds” (they even call themselves that) try to do the right thing, win over boys and start a new dance craze. (This drivel even climaxes with a Gershwin number.)
Greta Gerwig is supposed to be adorable as Violet, the campus queen bee who thinks it’s a good deed to date your “inferiors”. She also hands out doughnuts and tap-dance lessons at a suicide-prevention centre. If she’s the reason not to top yourself, I think I’ll pre-book in now at Dignitas. She’s not, however, nearly as annoying as some of her projects, the boys at the nearby fraternity whom she cheerfully refers to as “morons.” Which, while politically incorrect, is actually true. (One tosser doesn’t even know the colour of his own eyes. His best friend doesn’t know the names of the colours, period.)
Gerwig is deadpan throughout, and her band of anti-Heathers are equally astonishingly off the beam, especially Analeigh Tipton, as someone not quite under Violet’s spell, and Megalyn Echikunwoke, who witheringly tags every remotely friendly fellow as “an operator.” Stillman’s delusion that Gerwig is sweetly wacky – she has a fondness for scented soap, dance fads and clothes that seem to have been raided from your auntie’s wardrobe – is just dull.
“Damsels in Distress” wants to be stuffed full of whimsy, however, I’m afraid it’s full of something else.
Safe
Cast: Jason Statham, Catherine Chan, Robert
John Burke, James Hong, Anson Mount, Chris Sarandon, Sandor Tescy, Joseph
Sikora
Director: Boaz Yakin
Running Time: 1 hr. 34 min
Director: Boaz Yakin
Running Time: 1 hr. 34 min
“Safe” just about manages to fulfill all
the expectations of modern thrillers with its breakneck pacing, excessively
over-the-top violence, and explosive action sequences. Despite numerous
location changes over the opening few minutes, there’s a scarcity of lengthy
introductions and complex motives as the relentless mayhem speeds up and rarely
subsides until the final frame.
Some of the brutal combat verges on the monotonous, and you’ll likely guess who wins each round of warfare but there are a few clever moments of pandemonium and self-reflective humour arising from the maelstrom to reveal the film’s slightly more insightful mindset on cathartic thrills. Then, as always, we quickly revert to Jason Statham shoving a fork in someone’s throat.
Big Jase will never trouble the decision-makers for an Academy best actor award, but he gets the work, his CV is rapidly building with a stack of similar roles in numerous thump whack and shoot cinematic outings. Here in his latest, 11-year-old Mei (Catherine Chan) is abducted and forced to work for some ruthless Chinese gangsters due to her extraordinary skills in photographic memory and mathematics (or “math” as those tiresome American types seem determined to abbreviate it).
When Mei is given a numerical code to a safe containing 30 million dollars, the Triad, the Russian mafia, and corrupt New York officials all want her – dead or alive. Luckily for her, disgraced former cop Luke Wright (our Jason) happens upon the fleeing girl and rescues her. Determined to protect Mei, Wright launches a full-scale war against the criminal leaders and their vast armies of merciless killers.
Blah-de-blah, I'm sure you can work out the rest!
Some of the brutal combat verges on the monotonous, and you’ll likely guess who wins each round of warfare but there are a few clever moments of pandemonium and self-reflective humour arising from the maelstrom to reveal the film’s slightly more insightful mindset on cathartic thrills. Then, as always, we quickly revert to Jason Statham shoving a fork in someone’s throat.
Big Jase will never trouble the decision-makers for an Academy best actor award, but he gets the work, his CV is rapidly building with a stack of similar roles in numerous thump whack and shoot cinematic outings. Here in his latest, 11-year-old Mei (Catherine Chan) is abducted and forced to work for some ruthless Chinese gangsters due to her extraordinary skills in photographic memory and mathematics (or “math” as those tiresome American types seem determined to abbreviate it).
When Mei is given a numerical code to a safe containing 30 million dollars, the Triad, the Russian mafia, and corrupt New York officials all want her – dead or alive. Luckily for her, disgraced former cop Luke Wright (our Jason) happens upon the fleeing girl and rescues her. Determined to protect Mei, Wright launches a full-scale war against the criminal leaders and their vast armies of merciless killers.
Blah-de-blah, I'm sure you can work out the rest!
